The Fierce People

     Napoleon Chagnon. Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968) In 1964 and 1965, Chagnon spent about 13 months with the Yanomamö. A PhD was one result. This Case Study in Cultural Anthropology is another. It’s aimed at students, hence a nice personal tone, with anecdotes about Chagnon's reactions to the people he came to know. He does the standard thing,  describing the people’s “adaptations” to their physical and social environments, their kinship structure, their myths, and their politics, which for the Yanomamö is primary. Their life focuses on gaining respect and power within their villages, trading and allying themselves with neighbouring villages, raiding their enemies, and as often as not betraying their allies.
     Physically and ecologically their life is hard. They build gardens, and must stay near them to protect them. New gardens must be built every four or five years. Their technology relies almost exclusively on the materials the jungle affords them. Villages trade goods with others, but more for political reasons than material need, since everybody can make what they need when they need it. Villages with European contacts have acquired steel and aluminum pots, knives, and other trade goods, which they trade with remote villages.
     But the most important currency is women. Their marriage rules are fairly complicated. Fathers and brothers have the right, individually and as a group, to decide with whom to trade a woman. A husband may trade one of his wives or give her away (usually to a younger brother). Marriage ties are more important than blood ties. Alliances between villages require the exchange of women. Raids are often done to abduct women. A man may be accepted into a village by marrying a local girl: her family become his allies, and he strengthens their group.
     Fierceness determines social and political status. Alliances between villages, created by hosting a feast, determine the political status and relative security of the villages. Fighting for status is expected and encouraged, but the various kinds of fight are carefully regulated to minimise bloodshed. Even so, while Chagnon provides no numbers, the death rate from manslaughter and murder must be evry high. (Other sources indicate that half of all male deaths are by violence).
     The daily routine of a man revolves around gardening and cooking, taking drugs, politics, occasional hunting, and fighting. and occasional raiding For a woman, it's gardening, cooking, childcare, making hammocks, foraging, and serving her husband. Both men and women will play with children, who for the most part are left to amuse themselvesuntil about 6 or 8 years old. Fights, raids, and feasting punctuate this life.
     Chagnon’s description of his life among the Yanomamö is vivid and personal. His technical discussion of their kinship system, and its effects on their politics, is clear. He is at pains to emphasise that marriage ties are more important than blood ties, most of the time. Marriage creates and preserves the lineage, and lineages are politically significant groups.
     Ok, that’s a summary of what I’ve learned, mistakes and all.
     What’s my impression of the Yanomamö? Schoolyard bullies. Boasting, with occasional violence to back up the boasts; anxiety about maintaining one’s reputation; accumulating as much treasure as possible; doing only necessary chores; and lazing about as much as possible: does that sound familiar? About the only thing that’s missing from the schoolyard is the explicit trade in women, but among high school students the charming bully gets the girls, so the difference isn’t as great as it might seem. In short: Yanomamö life is nasty, brutish, and short.
     The Wikipedia article notes disagreements with Chagnon’s take on Yanomamö culture. But the article contains enough reference to documented raids and massacres that the argument that the Yanomamö are basically just as kind and loving as other tribal people sounds like special pleading. I think that Chagnon’s account is plausible. The Yanomamö really are more concerned with their violent notions of male honour than most peoples are. But keep in mind that violence and male honour are linked in every human culture. That suggests that the  Yanomamö are merely an extreme example of a human constant, of species-specific behaviour.
     More thoughts on violence, honour, and the Yanomamö are found on The Art of Manliness.
     Chagnon writes well. The book includes a good selection of photographs and diagrams. **½

Wisdom is more important than IQ.

So you think being smart is what matters? Nope. Wisdom beats intelligence, according to a BBC article on the downsides of a high IQ:

From my experience, being clever tempts you to believe that your notions are better than other people's. After all, you have such excellent clever arguments supporting them!

Beware of trusting your own cleverness.

Figures of Speech (Espy's Garden of Eloquence)

     Willard R. Espy. The Garden of Eloquence (1983) Espy made a name for himself as a language guru. Inspired by a copy of Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577), Espy decided to update and emulate that work, and contrived a fanciful Garden ruled by a Queen who handed out Awards to the various Figures of Speech that appeared before her. The book ends with excerpts from Peacham’s book covering the more strained and exhaustive/ing terms.
     The book’s a nicely produced object, printed on good paper, with witty illustrations by Teresa Peekema Allen. Espy includes asides in boxes, making for a patchwork text, an early version of what HTML was intended to facilitate. His illustrative quotations are apt, the narrative is just whimsical enough not to annoy, and the whole is a worthwhile reference book, if you need to look up and understand some obscure terminology.

     Espy, like Henry Peacham, was a collector, not a classifier, nor an analyst. The Figures are presented in alpha order, with no attempt to group them by function or purpose. Espy’s understanding of grammar is typical of the glossophile, an uncritical acceptance of the muddled terms and concepts learned in middle school. He wrote columns and books about the oddities and felicities of English, delighted in etymology, and collected slang and cliches. He provided many harmless hours of instruction and pleasure for those who look at language as birdwatchers look at birds: those wonderful creatures that make the world a more beautiful place.
     So while I occasionally cringed at Espy’s linguistic errors, I enjoyed the book. It will go on our reference shell. ***

Advice on Aging for Boomers (1975)

     Esquire Magazine, April 1975. How to Get Old and Do it Right.
     Advice for what we now call Boomers, before they began to think of themselves as God's Gift to America.
     “8 Basic Rules” (Stand Up Straight, Learn to Narrate, Acquire a Big Ego, Never Stop Working, etc). “Good Old With Nothing” (Stanley lost his legs when he was ten, is now in his 50s, has been on the road for several decades, meets a lot of people, some of whom put him up in a motel or take him home for a night and a wash, etc. Content with his life).
     “Good Old with Everything” (Samuel Eliot Morrison, historian, professor at Harvard, distant cousin of T. S Eliot, Admiral. Content with his life, and worth reading).
     “Many of Today’s Young will Make Lousy Old” (Mark Spitz, Reggie Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Streisand, etc. Fluff. Some of them have died, John Lennon was murdered. So much for predictions). “Alden Whitman’s Golden Oldies”. (Obit writer, gossipy, not engaging). “Where Old Went Wrong” (Shuffleboard in 1913, ‘senior citizen” in 1930, etc. More fluff).
     “The English do Old Best of All”. (Well, yes, but the writer did not realise that what he sees as eccentric insistence of being oneself was really the bloody-mindedness that would result in the current awful politics). “I’m Waving Tomorrow” (Fiction, about two sisters who ride the El to the cemetery every week to tend the family graves, pick the lettuce they’ve planted between the geraniums, and bicker. On the return journey of this particular day, a stray bullet fired from an idiot vandal gun kills one of them. Depressing but accurate portraits).
     Interesting collection, useful data about that era in American life, now 40 years past and feeling like ancient history. If you can find old Esquire magazine, grab them. Besides the fashion and lifestyle puff pieces, they published some of the best journalism of the time. ** to ****

Railways in Edmonton, Alberta.

     Alan Vanterpool. The Railways of Edmonton (1997) A well-done overview of the development of railways in Edmonton, Alberta. Published by the British Railway Modellers of North America (BRMNA), it consist of photographs with extended captions, a style that compresses a lot of information into a small space. Twenty years ago there were still many lines in place that have since been lifted, so a follow-up book would be in order.
     Vanterpool begins with water and land transport before the railroads, then offers pictures of earliest roads to arrive in Edmonton, and goes on from there. As far as I know, his history is accurate. About the only flaw in this book is that it presents two photos per page, which makes them too small. I suppose the BRMNA’s usual format of one photo per page would have required a second volume. I for one would have been happy to pay the extra cost. Well done, especially considering there are few photos beyond the news and publicity categories. Out of print, but woirth the search for your own copy. ***

Don't Get Too Comfortable (your life's course is changing). Essays by David Rakoff

     David Rakoff. Don’t Get too Comfortable (2005) Rakoff died in 2012. He wrote pieces about culture, mostly about examples of excess, such as the last essay in this book, which reports on cryogenics. (A technology to freeze you so that at some point many centuries hence you can be unfrozen and resume your life. Though why people many centuries hence would want to unfreeze you is a question that apparently never occurs to the believers).
     That parenthetical remark is the kind of thinking Rakoff does, and as often as not triggers in the reader. That makes him a valuable analyst of our times. He was revered as a humourist, but he’s really a satirist. The occasional one-liners and jokes are as on-topic and often as biting as his analytic comments.
     Many of these pieces were written during the Bush years, and some refer back to Reagan. Rakoff was one of the first to recognise that the Republicans were going down a road of self-destruction. As always when a dragon self-destroys, the thrashing of its tail in its death throes causes damage around it. That’s what’s happening now.
     There I go again, thinking like Rakoff.
     He writes about food, fashion, plastic surgery, politics, flying on the Concorde, and many other topics, trivial and significant, mundane and exotic. The title applies to all of them. There’s an undertone of existential panic, a how-did-we-get-here apprehension of unknown and unexpected consequences.  You can see why I recommend this book. ****

Humankind's Most Dangerous Invention: A Short History of Progress (Wright)

   

Pithy quote

 Ronald Wright. A Short Illustrated History of Progress (2006) A paperback version of Wright’s 2004 book, with pictures, and coloured pages with pithy quotes displayed in large type. The book doesn’t need these gimmicks, it’s compulsively readable. Wright’s thesis is that civilisation is a trap. He’s an archeologist/anthropologist. He uses “civilisation” to mean a large complex culture based on the domestication of plants, animals, and human beings. A civilisation is marked by hierarchies, administrative complexity, specialisation of work, politics, etc.
     Almost every civilisation we know of has ended destroying itself. The type example of this process is Easter Island, which hosted a simple civilisation which at its peak fed around 10,000 people, but which collapsed when the people focussed on making gigantic statues. The statues which were supposed to prevent what we would now call ecological collapse. It didn’t work, and when Europeans made contact with Easter Island, there were about 1,000 nearly-starving people and a couple of hundred statues left on a treeless, rapidly eroding hunk of rock. To counter the argument that Easter Island culture wasn’t really a civilisation and so cannot stand as a warning, Wright looks at the first city-based civilisation, Sumer, which did the same damage to its ecology as the Easter Islanders did. It just took them longer. The successors to Sumer pretty well all made the same mistakes: Assyria, Babylon, etc, now exist only in clay tablets and stone statuary.
     Jared Diamond wrote a longer (and gloomier) meditation on the same themes as Wright (whose book began as a series of Ideas programs on CBC). Wright’s book is a much better read,  Diamond’s book provides more data. They both come to the same conclusion: “Civilisation” is humankind’s greatest and most dangerous invention. If we don’t learn from past experiments, we’ll destroy our civilisation, too. Because it’s a world-wide one, the collapse will entangle a larger swath of the ecosystems on which we depend, and which we persist in either ignoring, or see as an obstacle to further progress.
     Recommended. ****