SubscribeAnthropologists say all the world's cultures fall into two basic groups: those from forests and those from arid lands. Increasingly, the future looks treeless.I've been studying socio-cultural anthropology for 10 years and I have never heard an anthropologist say this. Just to be sure, I went and checked out my Anthropology Theory, and my Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, and re-read the overviews of Cultural Ecology and Neomaterialism (which is the area of theory that Sapolsky is talking about), and ya, there's no mention of the dessert/rain forest divide. There are other divides (which have been critiqued), but not that one.
Other anthropologists explored the ecological roots of violence. In 1982 Melvin Ember of Yale found that certain ecosystems are so stable and benign that families remain intact throughout the year, farming their plot of land or hunting and gathering in the surrounding rich forest. In less forgiving settings, family units often split up for long periods, dividing their herds into smaller groups during dry seasons, for instance, with family members scattered with subflocks on distant pockets of grazing land. In such situations, warrior classes—as one sees among the pastoralist cowherding Masai of East Africa—are more common. There are advantages to having a communal standing army in case enemies appear when many of the men are away finding grass for the cattle.The people I worked with are called the Asante. They formed around 300-350 years ago, in the central rainforests of what is now called Ghana. The name translates literally as "from war", and refers to the fact that the nation was formed as an alliance of families to protect themselves from attack by a neighbouring group. Their alliance was so effective that they soon switched from defensive to offensive, and began a massive expansion into the forests, warring with and colonizing the surrounding peoples until they lost their 6th war with the British in the late 1800's and themselves became a colony.
Begin with religious beliefs. A striking proportion of rain forest dwellers are polytheistic, worshipping an array of spirits and gods. Polytheism is prevalent among tribes in the Amazon basin (the Sherenti, Mundurucu, and Tapirape) and in the rain forests of Africa (the Ndorobo), New Guinea (the Keraki and Ulawans), and Southeast Asia (the Iban of Borneo and the Mnong Gar and Lolo of Vietnam). But desert dwellers—the bedouin of Arabia, the Berbers of the western Sahara, the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, the Nuer and Turkana of the Kenyan/Sudanese desert—are usually monotheistic. Of course, despite allegiances to a single deity, other supernatural beings may be involved, like angels and djinns and Satan. But the hierarchy is notable, with minor deities subservient to the Omnipotent One.Here Saplosky is playing fast and loose with definitions, in a way that actually highlights what is wrong with trying to make such broad correlations. One who knows anything about Asante traditional religious believes is inclined to yell at one's computer "well is it monotheistic or is it not????" But let's look at what he says. A monotheistic can have lots of deities or supernatural beings, but it has a hierarchy. Forest dwellers worship and "array of spirits and gods". How are these different? Presumably hierarchy. Except the Asante traditional beliefs included a strict hierarchy with one omnipotent god and many subservient gods and spirits. In fact, one person once told me that he thinks this is why Christianity has had such success in Ghana (around 90% of Asante now list themselves as "Christian" in surveys such as the national census).
This division makes ecological sense. Deserts teach large, singular lessons, like how tough, spare, and withholding the environment is; the world is reduced to simple, desiccated, furnace-blasted basics.This is a simplistic, armchair rationalization for a religious distinction that is so poorly defined it falls apart at the slightest introduction of ethnographic fact. It is simply not representative of the kind of theorizations that anthropologists studying ecological interactions with culture make.
Moreover, those rain forest dwellers that are monotheistic are much less likely to believe that their god sticks his or her nose into other people’s business by controlling the weather, prompting illness, or the like.A belief that sickness is linked to the supernatural is one of the few near-universals that anthropologists might agree on (we're not big on universals overall). It was certainly the case in Ghana that people believed that both traditional gods and the Christian one play a role in the timing of sickness and death.
"The only scholarly anthropological work on Google Scholar that references this article is a BA thesis (Dreisbach, 2007, Are Arid Climates More Likely to Produce Monotheistic Religions: An Archaeology and Anthropological Perspective, U. Wisconsin). Her conclusion is that the development of monotheism seems more tied to social and political circumstances, rather than environment.I'm not saying this is a good article, barnacle, but isn't that just a tad disingenuous? You're expecting articles in academic journals to cite Discover? Google Scholar lists 128 citations for Textor's A Cross-Cultural Summary, the book this article is ham-handedly adapting.
The fact that the only person to bother even acknowledging this article is an undergrad (and her 31-page thesis isn't bad) just seems to back up my gut feeling: this is a shitty article.
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"Some of the best American thrillers have been set in the desert - The Getaway, The Hitcher, Charley Varrick, Blood Simple. Given that there is no time past and no future, the idea of death and retribution has a doubly threatening force."
-- JG Ballrd, The Atrocity Exhibition, notes to chapter 9.
posted by WPW at 10:42 PM on July 12 [3 favorites]