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symbioid asked me to... Summarize all of world history? Thanks man, I'll try.
So the history of human civilization is one of the central preoccupations of my life. In the time that I've been a student and scholar of history the field itself has developed in interesting ways. Now, there is, in academic corners a lot of profound talk and discussion (and I mean, really, actually profound not sarcastically) about the nature of our civilization and what its real relationship to the past is. A lot of terms are thrown around that I find to be... Well, anachronistic, ahistorical and prima-faciea sort of combative. You have to learn how to bite into and swallow ideas of The Patriarchy, of Performance Theory and so on. They're not natively intuitive as methods of historiography, and they suggest a series of preconceptions that it's better to try and shun when looking at the past. Well, that we are trained it is best to shun.
Historians have a certain expectation of scholarly detachment - and that's very often possible to achieve just because for most of what is considered history we're all relying on a handfull of texts that have been analyzed ad nauseum. Most of the matter that is ripe for historical investigation has been produced in the last 100-200 years, which is Weird. Because the texts and documents and images and etc... (hereafter simply referred to as texts) generated by the dominant world civilization of the last two centuries dwarfs the textual produce of all other time periods combined. In this sense the living finally do outnumber the dead. It's not just that our texts are more prolific, but they bear up well under our contemporary brands of scrutiny - because they have strongly informed those paths of inquiry. We can talk about the nature of the Patriarchy, for example, because the idea of a Patriarchy exists as part of the Patriarchy and so on - all these analytical angles are contextual to the systems they examine and criticize. Marxism provides a lot of critiques to a lot of historical matters but its most powerful critique is against Colonialism - hence its rise in post-colonial regions. There's always an ideological analysis that serves to critique the dominant (usually oppressive) culture that suggests the ideology in the first place.
Now, an ideological dissection of much more ancient structures becomes a problem because it decontextualizes the materials of the past - making the approach to history through Feminism, Marxism, Capitalism or whatever ahistorical - that is, it's laced with value judgements and statements of current belief - which right or wrong - don't really serve to offer learning. That's a tricky thing because Learning requires not just that you dissect these texts but that you acknowledge the people who created them as having some feeling of agency in their lives, and thus some attachment to the ideas and values that they present. I'll return to the idea of a feeling of agency going forward, but for now, it's significant that there is a possibility of infecting your learning of the past with your perceptions of the present. It's very frankly something that I struggle with a great deal. My analytical cues are very much Marxian and that view does in fact help me to do analysis. Rather than divorce myself from this method of critique though - because I can't - I try to rebalance my experience of learning by stating the opposite or intellectually opposed perception. Examples will follow but I want to make it clear that I understand things based on a perspective involving class struggle, and that my rebalancing efforts are based on examining the stakes according to all of the classes.
Lastly, before I get into my summary, I'd like to mention the appearance or feeling of agency. This is an aspect of contemporary scholarship where I think there's a lot of unstated disagreement. A lot of modern criticism and some postmodern criticism holds out this notion of agency - as if historical persons were capable of making decisions other than those that they actually made. And well, I'm a pretty strict determinist and tend to think of the idea of agency as being kind of preposterous on its face. So I refer to a feeling of agency rather than than a description of a person as having actual authority over their decisions. This is something kind of common in historical discussions - I remember a long discussion about one of the early-modern queens of Spain and her 'reputation for piety' - the longhand version of Piety. Since assigning piety is a value judgement - you have to simply comment that the people around her believed that she had it, rather than just saying that she did. It may seem like adding words to hit a page count - but it also organizes your thoughts to make them more soundly expressed.
So, to my summary...
Climatological changes, population pressure and food security all worked together at some point - about 10-8 thousand years ago to drive people into a few river valleys all throughout the global North. Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley and on the 3 big rivers in China - there, you see people congregating into an urban culture - you really have the best, first evidence of all of this in the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent - what's now Southeast Turkey. There you find signs of occassional - semi-permanent habitation, followed up by less and less seasonal population, more perennial and then more permanent. The oldest sites were basically hunting lodges and slaughter-houses. The animal remains that have been found tend to be those of wild species, undomesticated - but then this layer of habitation is supplanted by signs of agricultural production. So you see people who were maybe hedged in by others, forced into a certain location, quickly exhausting the wildlife and turning to plant cultivation.
You see this pattern elsewhere- with different drivers - 10,000 years ago the Sahara, for example, was much less dry, and much, much less large. But as the desert expanded people left the plains and the hunting/gathering in favor of settling near a consistent source of water. Water, Agriculture and irrigation all seem to go together here and you start to see populations begin to stratify. Now how do you detect stratification in society? Generally - you see things like jade work. Jade is a good example because grinding shapes into jade using sand is just incredibly difficult - it's effectively the life's work of a single person to make something out of jade in this way - which you would not see in hunter-gatherers, their tools are easy to make and hard to become very attached to - disposable. And they have to be because they are traveling and they are making do with what's close at hand, and they don't have someone to spare in their group who can simply spend all day grinding jade with sand. So you really need a food surplus to be able to have people that are available for that- and that means you have people who are dedicated - or seasonal farmers. Which is probably what existed for a few dozen generations around the oldest sites in these river valleys. People practicing agriculture and a little seasonal hunting - fishing, that kind of thing - a settled kinband. Now this doesn't immediately translate into a scenario where there are stratifications and social classes, so you have to ask where did these come from.
Again, looking at the piece of carved jade that may take 3-4 years to manufacture, you have to ask - first, who would make it, and second, why would they make it. An artisan makes it, someone who survives on the food surplus and the person who commands it be made is the King. So where did these kings come from? All of a sudden there are kings?
Well - we look at diet here, you have people eating grains, vegetables some meat, once in a while, living in a single place without much in the way of santiation. If there are animals, they're right there next to you - so... Disease, a lot of it, malnourishment - you grow enough food pretty easily to feed yourself for a year, but not to feed yourself that well, and you're wallowing in excrement - you're sickly, weak and small. Human remains here start to look positively miniscule. If you look at the remains of Hunter/Gatherers - they're skeletally more like us, now, they ate a variety of foods and didn't succumb to too many diseases. And what do these hunter/gatherers do? When they encounter people who are all 4-foot-nothing - swimming in grain (and very, probably/possibly most significantly - BEER) - they just go in and take over. Here you've got the gangstery origins of all nobility/hierarchies. They come in, either to offer protection against other bands of larger stronger raiders, or they just come in and straight up dominate - because they can. These guys become a warrior caste within the society - they dominate and protect and rule. This happens in successive waves and soon you've got different bands of people (clans/families/houses - that kind of thing) ruling over the agricultural peasant caste & the artisnal caste, and the other emerging castes. From this, you start to have the rudiments of law forming.
Now- all writing originally has its origin in law - in that the first real writing that's preserved form this place and time is essentially bookkeeping and branding. Bookkeeping and branding gets to be a system of writing because it's useful to keep books and useful to mark possessions. But also, it makes theft less, banditry and stealing fall apart - but now you have to have rules about how you mediate these conflicts.
Conflicts and how they are mediated is a big aspect of all history and civil development. You start with kinbands who mediate their interactions through excluding people from territory - and probably - murdering competing kinbands. Then you get agriculturalists who start to mediate their interaction by placing fieldstones, sealing their vessels with security seals and recording how much they've made. But the transgression here becomes an ongoing problem - so that laws must be established. The ruling classes now have to intervene and they have to set their own limits. An eye for an eye is established - limits to reciprocity are set, rules of engagement and ownership are evolved - so the law becomes an instrument of the ruling classes to mediate relationships. They likewise establish costs and values for professional services and produce. Commerce and Law are the mediating forces for urban interaction.
So now we're into an area that I think about often which is religion. Religion, here, to me, comes about because of the remnants of deposed ruling castes. You have a King and he rules a stretch of river and he's dominant and maybe even here and there benign. But then he's deposed by a stronger band and they govern - well, his retainers and rememberers all still think back on those glory days- they link him to their agricultural calendrical practices and that's religion. The religious castes emerge as sort of an honorary remnant of the earlier ruling caste. And likewise you have out-caste people, the underclass, slaves and untouchables. Slaves are easy - they come from organized conflict- you conquer the neighboring stretch of river and there you go - you've got a bunch of guys. "Hey, free guys," you say, as you steal all of their stuff and take them to have. Then you've got the people you didn't take, the remenants - the wanderers who infest the trash piles and scavenge off of kingdoms - these guys are repurposed and pressed into service, enslaved without being actually enslaved - they're made to be obedient without being valuable or expensive to maintain. They get to do the things nobody wants to do.
So... That's part 1. Part 2 tomorrow, I guess. I have no idea how many parts there will be to this. It's a big question.
symbioid asked me to... Summarize all of world history? Thanks man, I'll try.So the history of human civilization is one of the central preoccupations of my life. In the time that I've been a student and scholar of history the field itself has developed in interesting ways. Now, there is, in academic corners a lot of profound talk and discussion (and I mean, really, actually profound not sarcastically) about the nature of our civilization and what its real relationship to the past is. A lot of terms are thrown around that I find to be... Well, anachronistic, ahistorical and prima-faciea sort of combative. You have to learn how to bite into and swallow ideas of The Patriarchy, of Performance Theory and so on. They're not natively intuitive as methods of historiography, and they suggest a series of preconceptions that it's better to try and shun when looking at the past. Well, that we are trained it is best to shun.
Historians have a certain expectation of scholarly detachment - and that's very often possible to achieve just because for most of what is considered history we're all relying on a handfull of texts that have been analyzed ad nauseum. Most of the matter that is ripe for historical investigation has been produced in the last 100-200 years, which is Weird. Because the texts and documents and images and etc... (hereafter simply referred to as texts) generated by the dominant world civilization of the last two centuries dwarfs the textual produce of all other time periods combined. In this sense the living finally do outnumber the dead. It's not just that our texts are more prolific, but they bear up well under our contemporary brands of scrutiny - because they have strongly informed those paths of inquiry. We can talk about the nature of the Patriarchy, for example, because the idea of a Patriarchy exists as part of the Patriarchy and so on - all these analytical angles are contextual to the systems they examine and criticize. Marxism provides a lot of critiques to a lot of historical matters but its most powerful critique is against Colonialism - hence its rise in post-colonial regions. There's always an ideological analysis that serves to critique the dominant (usually oppressive) culture that suggests the ideology in the first place.
Now, an ideological dissection of much more ancient structures becomes a problem because it decontextualizes the materials of the past - making the approach to history through Feminism, Marxism, Capitalism or whatever ahistorical - that is, it's laced with value judgements and statements of current belief - which right or wrong - don't really serve to offer learning. That's a tricky thing because Learning requires not just that you dissect these texts but that you acknowledge the people who created them as having some feeling of agency in their lives, and thus some attachment to the ideas and values that they present. I'll return to the idea of a feeling of agency going forward, but for now, it's significant that there is a possibility of infecting your learning of the past with your perceptions of the present. It's very frankly something that I struggle with a great deal. My analytical cues are very much Marxian and that view does in fact help me to do analysis. Rather than divorce myself from this method of critique though - because I can't - I try to rebalance my experience of learning by stating the opposite or intellectually opposed perception. Examples will follow but I want to make it clear that I understand things based on a perspective involving class struggle, and that my rebalancing efforts are based on examining the stakes according to all of the classes.
Lastly, before I get into my summary, I'd like to mention the appearance or feeling of agency. This is an aspect of contemporary scholarship where I think there's a lot of unstated disagreement. A lot of modern criticism and some postmodern criticism holds out this notion of agency - as if historical persons were capable of making decisions other than those that they actually made. And well, I'm a pretty strict determinist and tend to think of the idea of agency as being kind of preposterous on its face. So I refer to a feeling of agency rather than than a description of a person as having actual authority over their decisions. This is something kind of common in historical discussions - I remember a long discussion about one of the early-modern queens of Spain and her 'reputation for piety' - the longhand version of Piety. Since assigning piety is a value judgement - you have to simply comment that the people around her believed that she had it, rather than just saying that she did. It may seem like adding words to hit a page count - but it also organizes your thoughts to make them more soundly expressed.
So, to my summary...
Climatological changes, population pressure and food security all worked together at some point - about 10-8 thousand years ago to drive people into a few river valleys all throughout the global North. Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley and on the 3 big rivers in China - there, you see people congregating into an urban culture - you really have the best, first evidence of all of this in the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent - what's now Southeast Turkey. There you find signs of occassional - semi-permanent habitation, followed up by less and less seasonal population, more perennial and then more permanent. The oldest sites were basically hunting lodges and slaughter-houses. The animal remains that have been found tend to be those of wild species, undomesticated - but then this layer of habitation is supplanted by signs of agricultural production. So you see people who were maybe hedged in by others, forced into a certain location, quickly exhausting the wildlife and turning to plant cultivation.
You see this pattern elsewhere- with different drivers - 10,000 years ago the Sahara, for example, was much less dry, and much, much less large. But as the desert expanded people left the plains and the hunting/gathering in favor of settling near a consistent source of water. Water, Agriculture and irrigation all seem to go together here and you start to see populations begin to stratify. Now how do you detect stratification in society? Generally - you see things like jade work. Jade is a good example because grinding shapes into jade using sand is just incredibly difficult - it's effectively the life's work of a single person to make something out of jade in this way - which you would not see in hunter-gatherers, their tools are easy to make and hard to become very attached to - disposable. And they have to be because they are traveling and they are making do with what's close at hand, and they don't have someone to spare in their group who can simply spend all day grinding jade with sand. So you really need a food surplus to be able to have people that are available for that- and that means you have people who are dedicated - or seasonal farmers. Which is probably what existed for a few dozen generations around the oldest sites in these river valleys. People practicing agriculture and a little seasonal hunting - fishing, that kind of thing - a settled kinband. Now this doesn't immediately translate into a scenario where there are stratifications and social classes, so you have to ask where did these come from.
Again, looking at the piece of carved jade that may take 3-4 years to manufacture, you have to ask - first, who would make it, and second, why would they make it. An artisan makes it, someone who survives on the food surplus and the person who commands it be made is the King. So where did these kings come from? All of a sudden there are kings?
Well - we look at diet here, you have people eating grains, vegetables some meat, once in a while, living in a single place without much in the way of santiation. If there are animals, they're right there next to you - so... Disease, a lot of it, malnourishment - you grow enough food pretty easily to feed yourself for a year, but not to feed yourself that well, and you're wallowing in excrement - you're sickly, weak and small. Human remains here start to look positively miniscule. If you look at the remains of Hunter/Gatherers - they're skeletally more like us, now, they ate a variety of foods and didn't succumb to too many diseases. And what do these hunter/gatherers do? When they encounter people who are all 4-foot-nothing - swimming in grain (and very, probably/possibly most significantly - BEER) - they just go in and take over. Here you've got the gangstery origins of all nobility/hierarchies. They come in, either to offer protection against other bands of larger stronger raiders, or they just come in and straight up dominate - because they can. These guys become a warrior caste within the society - they dominate and protect and rule. This happens in successive waves and soon you've got different bands of people (clans/families/houses - that kind of thing) ruling over the agricultural peasant caste & the artisnal caste, and the other emerging castes. From this, you start to have the rudiments of law forming.
Now- all writing originally has its origin in law - in that the first real writing that's preserved form this place and time is essentially bookkeeping and branding. Bookkeeping and branding gets to be a system of writing because it's useful to keep books and useful to mark possessions. But also, it makes theft less, banditry and stealing fall apart - but now you have to have rules about how you mediate these conflicts.
Conflicts and how they are mediated is a big aspect of all history and civil development. You start with kinbands who mediate their interactions through excluding people from territory - and probably - murdering competing kinbands. Then you get agriculturalists who start to mediate their interaction by placing fieldstones, sealing their vessels with security seals and recording how much they've made. But the transgression here becomes an ongoing problem - so that laws must be established. The ruling classes now have to intervene and they have to set their own limits. An eye for an eye is established - limits to reciprocity are set, rules of engagement and ownership are evolved - so the law becomes an instrument of the ruling classes to mediate relationships. They likewise establish costs and values for professional services and produce. Commerce and Law are the mediating forces for urban interaction.
So now we're into an area that I think about often which is religion. Religion, here, to me, comes about because of the remnants of deposed ruling castes. You have a King and he rules a stretch of river and he's dominant and maybe even here and there benign. But then he's deposed by a stronger band and they govern - well, his retainers and rememberers all still think back on those glory days- they link him to their agricultural calendrical practices and that's religion. The religious castes emerge as sort of an honorary remnant of the earlier ruling caste. And likewise you have out-caste people, the underclass, slaves and untouchables. Slaves are easy - they come from organized conflict- you conquer the neighboring stretch of river and there you go - you've got a bunch of guys. "Hey, free guys," you say, as you steal all of their stuff and take them to have. Then you've got the people you didn't take, the remenants - the wanderers who infest the trash piles and scavenge off of kingdoms - these guys are repurposed and pressed into service, enslaved without being actually enslaved - they're made to be obedient without being valuable or expensive to maintain. They get to do the things nobody wants to do.
So... That's part 1. Part 2 tomorrow, I guess. I have no idea how many parts there will be to this. It's a big question.
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Date: 2013-12-12 09:54 pm (UTC)