Cannibals and Kings (30 page)

As David Pimentel of Cornell University has shown, in the United States 2,790 calories of energy are now being used to produce and deliver one can of corn containing 270 calories. The production of beef now requires even more prodigious energy deficits: 22,000 calories to produce 100 grams (containing the same 270 calories as in the can of corn). The bubble-like nature of this mode of production can be seen from the fact that if the rest of the world were suddenly to adopt the energy ratios characteristic of U.S. agriculture, all known reserves of petroleum would be exhausted in eleven years. Or, to put it in a slightly different form: the faster the underdeveloped world industrializes, the sooner the industrial world must develop a new mode of production.

Before the fuel revolution, plants and animals were the main source of energy for social life. Scattered about the earth on millions of farms and villages, plants and animals collected the energy of the sun and converted it into forms appropriate for human use and consumption. Other sources of energy, such as the wind and falling water, were no less dispersed. The only way for despots to cut people off from their energy supply was to deny them access to the land or the oceans. This was an extremely difficult task and very costly under most conditions of climate and terrain. Control over water, however, was more readily managed. And where water could be controlled, plants and animals could be controlled. Further, since plants and animals were the main sources of energy, control over water was control over energy. In this sense the despotisms of hydraulic society were energy despotisms—but only in a very indirect and primitive way.

The fuel revolution has opened up the possibility for a more direct form of energy despotism. Energy is now being collected and distributed under the supervision of a small number of bureaus and corporations. It comes from a relatively small number of mines and wells. Hundreds of millions of people can technically be shut off from these mines and wells, starved, frozen, plunged into darkness, rendered immobile by the turn of a few
valves and the flick of a few switches. As if this were not already sufficient cause for alarm, the industrial nations have begun to compensate for the impending exhaustion of coal and oil by converting to nuclear power—a far more concentrated source of energy than the fossil fuels. There already exists the electronic capability for the tracking of individual behavior by centralized networks of surveillance and record-keeping computers. It is highly probable that the conversion to nuclear energy production will provide precisely those basic material conditions most appropriate for using the power of the computer to establish a new and enduring form of despotism. Only by decentralizing our basic mode of energy production—by breaking the cartels that monopolize the present system of energy production and by creating new decentralized forms of energy technology—can we restore the ecological and cultural configuration that led to the emergence of political democracy in Europe.

This raises the question of how we can consciously select improbable alternatives to probable evolutionary trends. Surveying the past in anthropological perspective, I think it is clear that the major transformations of human social life have hitherto never corresponded to the consciously held objectives of the historical participants. Consciousness had little to do with the processes by which infanticide and warfare became the means of regulating band and village populations: women became subordinate to men; those who worked hardest and kept the least became those who worked the least and kept the most; “great providers” became great believers; sacrificial meat became forbidden flesh; animal sacrificers became vegetarians; labor-saving devices became the instruments of drudgery; irrigation agriculture became the trap of hydraulic despotism.

Our ancestors, of course, were no less psychologically conscious than we are in the sense of being alert, of having thoughts and making decisions based on the calculation of the immediate cost/benefits of alternative types of action. To say that their consciousness did not play a role in directing the course of cultural evolution is not to say that they were zombies. I suggest that they were unaware of the influence of modes of production and reproduction on their attitudes and values and that they were wholly ignorant of the long-term cumulative effects of decisions made to maximize short-term cost/benefits. To change the world in a conscious way one must first have a conscious understanding of what the world is like. Lack of such an understanding is a dismal portent

As a cultural determinist, I have sometimes been accused of reducing human values to a mechanical reflex and of portraying individuals as mere puppets. These are doctrines that are alien to my understanding of cultural processes. I insist simply that the thought and behavior of individuals are always channeled by cultural and ecological restraints and opportunities. Successive modes of production and reproduction largely determine the nature of these channels. Where the mode of production calls for “big man” redistributors, ambitious men will grow up to boast about their wealth and give it all away. Where the mode of production calls for “big men entrepreneurs,” ambitious men will grow up to boast about their wealth and keep it all for themselves. I do not pretend to know why Soni became a great feast-giver or why John D. Rockefeller became a great hoarder of wealth. Nor do I know why one individual rather than another
wrote
Hamlet
. I am perfectly willing to let such questions dissolve into perpetual mystery.

Cultural causality is another matter. Many humanists and artists recoil from the proposition that cultural evolution has hitherto been shaped by unconscious impersonal forces. The determined nature of the past fills them with apprehension as to the possibility of an equally determined future. But their fears are misplaced. It is only through an awareness of the determined nature of the past that we can hope to make the future less dependent on unconscious and impersonal forces. In the birth of a science of culture others profess to see the death of moral initiative. For my part, I cannot see how a lack of intelligence concerning the lawful processes that have operated so far can be the platform on which to rear a civilized future. And so in the birth of a science of culture I find the beginning not the end of moral initiative. Let the protectors of historical spontaneity beware: If the processes of cultural evolution are what I have discerned, they are morally negligent to urge others to think and act as if such processes did not exist.

I hold it perniciously false to teach that all cultural forms are equally probable and that by mere force of will an inspired individual can at any moment alter the trajectory of an entire cultural system in a direction convenient to any philosophy. Convergent and parallel trajectories far outnumber divergent trajectories in cultural evolution. Most people are conformists. History repeats itself in countless acts of individual obedience to cultural rule and pattern, and individual wills seldom prevail in matters requiring radical alteration of deeply conditioned beliefs and practices.

At the same time, nothing I have written in this book supports the view that the individual is helpless before
the implacable march of history or that resignation and despair are appropriate responses to the concentration of industrial managerial power. The determinism that has governed cultural evolution has never been the equivalent of the determinism that governs a closed physical system. Rather, it resembles the causal sequences that account for the evolution of plant and animal species. Retrospectively, guided by Darwin’s principle of natural selection, scientists can readily reconstruct the causal chain of adaptations that led from fish to reptiles to birds. But what biologist looking at a primitive shark could have foreseen a pigeon? What biologist looking at a tree shrew could have predicted
Homo sapiens?
The intensification of the industrial mode of production and the technological victory over Malthusian pressures undoubtedly portend an evolution of new cultural forms. I do not know for certain what these will be, nor does anyone else.

Since evolutionary changes are not completely predictable, it is obvious that there is room in the world for what we call free will. Each individual decision to accept, resist, or change the current order alters the probability that a particular evolutionary outcome will occur. While the course of cultural evolution is never free of systemic influence, some moments are probably more “open” than others. The most open moments, it appears to me, are those at which a mode of production reaches its limits of growth and a new mode of production must soon be adopted. We are rapidly moving toward such an opening. When we have passed through it, only then, looking backwards, shall we know why human beings chose one option rather than another. In the meantime, people with deep personal commitments to a particular vision of the future are perfectly justified in struggling
toward their goal, even if the outcome now seems remote and improbable. In life, as in any game whose outcome depends on both luck and skill, the rational response to bad odds is to try harder.

Culture and Nature

I am preparing a more technical volume (Harris, 1979)
^*
to clarify my general philosophical and scientific premises in relationship to alternative paradigms. An earlier work (Harris, 1968) tells the story of the development of cultural materialism up to the 1960’s. The specific theme of this book—the relating of cultural evolution to intensification and depletions—closely resembles the theoretical position of Michael Harner (1970). Other scholars who have preceded me in emphasizing the relationship between intensification and cultural evolution are Ester Boserup (1965), Robert Carneiro (1970), Brian Spooner (1972), Philip Smith (1972), Colin Renfrew (1974), Richard Wilkinson (1973), M.N. Cohen (1975), and Malcolm Webb (1975). Major differences of definition, emphasis, and scope separate my own approach from all of these predecessors. However, if any or all of them see in what I have written an exact duplicate of a theory which they can call their own, I shall be happy to acknowledge their priority in its formulation. For an overview of cultural differences and similarities see my textbook (Harris, 1974).

Murders in Eden

For a description of contemporary hunter-collectors see Lee and De Vore (1968) and Bicchieri (1972). See Steward
(1955) and Service (1968) for surplus above subsistence theory. For the accomplishments of the upper paleolithic see Prideaux (1973) and Marshack (1972). Marshall Sahlins (1972) says hunter-collectors are the “original affluent society.” See Butzer (1971) for the relationship between ice age ecology and culture. On work patterns see Lee (1968, 1969), Johnson (1975), and Edmondson (1976); for the Mehinacu see Gregor (1969). Hunter-collectors’ preadaptation to agriculture is discussed by Cohen (1975, p. 82 ff). For hunter-collector density data see Kroeber (1939), Lee (1968), and David (1973). On stone age demography, disease, and health see Hassan (1973, 1975), Cockburn (1971), Wood (1975), Armelagos and McArdle (1975), Black (1975), Livingstone (1968), Dumond (1975), Boyd (1972), Howell (in press), Birdsell (1968, 1972), and Coale (1974). On abortion and mechanical and chemical contraceptives see Devereux (1955) and Nurge (1975). On geronticide see Hoebel (1954, pp. 76–79) and Warner (1937). For infanticide see Dickeman (1975a), Balikci (1967), Chagnon (1968), and Freeman (1971). On carrying infants see Lee (1972). For lactation method see Frisch and McArthur (1974), Frisch (1975), Kolata (1974), Van Ginneken (1974), and Divale and Harris (1976).

The Origin of Agriculture

Most archaeologists refer to the Levant, Egypt, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia as the Near East. I have used the term “Middle East” to designate this region in keeping with geopolitical usage. On scavenging see Shipman and Phillips-Conroy (1977) and Brain (in press)., See Butzer (1971, 1975) and Flannery (1969) for postglacial changes. For the pleistocene megafauna problem in the New World see MacNeish (in press); the quote is from Mosimann and Martin (1975, p. 308). I am grateful to Richard MacNeish for permitting me to use his manuscript
Energy and Culture in Ancient Tehuacan
. See also MacNeish (1972) and the
reports of the Tehuacán Valley Project of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology. For early Middle Eastern domestication I have relied on Flannery (1973), David Harris (in press), Harlan (in press), Zohary and Hopf (1973), Ducos (1969), and Chaplin (1969). Flannery (1973, p. 284) believes in the mysterious changes. For neolithic rates of population growth see Carneiro and Hilse (1966), Smith and Young (1972), and Butzer (1976). For Andean domestication of animals see Pires-Ferreira et al. (1976). I am aware of the possibility that agriculture involving rice, root crops, and tree crops may have originated independently in Southeast Asia. If so, the specific model I have been using would have to be modified—but not discarded. See Solheim (1970), Vishnu-Mittre (in press), Harlan (in press), David Harris (in press). An independent origin for agriculture seems likely for China, but this would strengthen the model if it is substantiated. See Ping-ti Ho (1975).

The Origin of War

For peaceful cultures see Lesser (1968); on the archaeology of violence see Roper (1969, 1975). For hunter-collector war see Divale (1972). For anthropology of war see Fried et al. (1968) and Nettleship et al. (1975). The Tiwi are described by Hart and Pilling (1960); the Murngin, by Warner (1930); the Dani, by Heider (1972). For the social solidarity function of war see Wright (1965) and Wedgwood (1930). For
war as play
see Lowie (1954). Robert Ardrey is a popular advocate of
war as human nature
. See Montagu (1976) for a thorough review and refutation of this position. For dispersion effects see Vayda (1961, 1971). The quote is from Birdsell (1972, pp. 357–58). See Livingstone (1968) for effects of modern war on population. See Divale and Harris (1976) for evidence on links between war and female infanticide. For the role of women in production see Morren (1974) and Lee (1969).