In
his recent interview on the Colbert Report
to promote his most recent book, Jared Diamond makes some troubling
assertions about “traditional” societies, by which he means “the
societies that were all societies around the world until relatively
recently when population grew and we started to have state
government.”
His
first example of life in “traditional societies” is from the
exotic and untouched locale of rural Montana, where he and his family
vacation. In this traditional society, disagreements between ranchers
are not solved through lawyers or the police, but rather among
themselves, “just as people did traditionally.”
This
seems to conflict with elements of his new book, which reviewers
and Papuan “tribal leaders” have called out his for claims that the “traditional” societies
of Papua New Guinea are better off as a result of the role of the
modern state, mainly because state intervention allows them to stop
using bloody feuding as a dispute resolution mechanism – if Montana
ranchers used those “traditional” methods of settling greivances,
presumably there would be fewer Montana ranchers, and Diamond would
celebrate the state rather than their “pre”-state practices.
Diamond's
statements in this case also demonstrate a lack of awareness of
decades of research on legal pluralism, which anthropologists
understand as the operation of multiple legal practices and
principles within and between social groups, and basic
anthropological ideas about complex political systems.
Diamond
makes a number of entangled errors in his example of interpersonal
dispute resolution among Montana ranchers. First, he presumes that
non-state or non-bureaucratic processes are not just non-modern but
pre-modern, or, in his words, “traditional.” This recalls the
theories of unilinear evolution proposed by some of our illustrious
anthropological ancestors, most notably Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan's
well-known framework for classifying and comparing different
societies was impressive for its time, but it was also flawed, not
least because he presumes deviance from the social institutions of
modern civilization to signify older, lower stages of social
evolution along the road to the present-day pinnacle. Diamond appears
to reproduce this conceptual shortcoming, implying that “traditional”
practices in otherwise modern settings are vestiges of a time before
civilization, not least in the title of his book, The World Before
Yesterday.
But
in what sense are “traditional” practices of non-bureaucratic
dispute resolution – that is, those that operate on an
interpersonal level without involvement of professional specialists
like police, lawyers, or government officials – evolutionarily or
historically prior to the modern, presumably non-traditional
mechanisms that predominate in large-scale, complex, stratified
societies? Perhaps only in that we infer that they were practiced in
their present forms prior to the existence of states because we have
observed them operating in societies often classified by
anthropologists as stateless. This points to Diamond's second error:
implying a clear distinction between “traditional” and modern
practices at work in a single contemporary society, or even between
traditional societies subsumed under but still sufficiently
autonomous from the system of states that covers the vast majority of
the planet.
Here
Diamond's example of traditional practices in contemporary Montana
connect with my own research on land tenure and conflict in Kenya.
One of the issues I have studied, and am in the process of writing
more about, is the way that different principles and practices of
negotiating control and access to resources are entwined in people's
lives. For example, my main field site in rural Kenya has been
undergoing official land registration for more than thirty years, and
unofficial adoption of principles of private property, including
ideas about the sale or lease of land rights, for more than forty. In
practice, there is an official, bureaucratic process for registering
ownership and transactions through title deeds and government
offices, and there is an unofficial set of practices whereby people
make arrangements outside of the official channels, negotiating deals
and resolving disputes by means that Diamond might call
“traditional.”
But
again, what is “traditional” about these practices? Is it simply
that they are not officially sanctioned by government agents? In
fact, many of these interpersonal arrangements make use of modern
concepts like individual private ownership of land, the exchange of
cash or other currencies for temporary or permanent transfer of
rights in land, and the use of written documents, signed by
witnesses, to record these non-sanctioned agreements. Here, then, it
seems that what is “traditional” is simply the avoidance of the
state, regardless of motive.
Whether
people use official or unofficial - “modern” or “traditional”
- means to convey rights in land is a matter of choice, situated in a
multitude of factors and considerations. For some, using official
land conveyance is too expensive, slow, or impersonal and suggestive
of distrust between parties; for others, unofficial channels are too
risky or expensive over the long-term. What is not happening, is the
existence of two historically distinct sets of practices, one
unchanged since time immemorial, and the other new, bureaucratic,
cumbersome, and impersonal.
In
fact, Diamond's reproduction and repackaging of evolutionary
explanations of cultural difference (he does, after all, correct
Colbert by saying that “primitive” is no longer a
politically-correct term, subtly making his concept of “traditional
societies” nothing more than a euphemism) is theoretically weaker
than concepts of legal pluralism that have been around since before
Diamond reimagined himself as an anthropologist. Where Diamond sees
vestiges, I see multiple, co-existing ways of solving fundamental
political and legal problems. Where Diamond places these different
approaches in temporal sequence, I – and many other anthropologists
– understand them as co-evolving elements of complex, dynamic
systems.
One
problematic implication of Diamond's approach is that it risks
relegating those who use “traditional” practices to an inferior
status. Despite his effort to illustrate how traditional societies
often do things better than modern ones, his association of formal,
secular, bureaucratic practices with modernity, and informal,
socially-embedded, face-to-face practices with tradition, reproduces
old, ethnocentric binaries of savage and civilized, primitive and
modern, subject and citizen. Locating the world's remaining
traditional societies in some of the most remote places - “parts of
New Guinea and the Amazon Basin” - Diamond's message remains one of
a disappearing world, from which we must learn before it is too late;
nevermind, of course, that these out-of-the-way places tend to be
home to some of the most marginalized communities on the planet, who
often end up in the way of an expanding modern world system, who are
not untouched or undeveloped, but rather pressured and shaped by
modernity and actively underdeveloped through unequal
political-economic relations. Given Diamond's position, how are we –
the modern – meant to interpret the adoption, appropriation, and
transformation of “modern” practices by “traditional
societies”? If the traditional can be modernized – and presumably
de-natured and destroyed – can the modern be traditionalized, or is
this a one-way street?
Diamond's
ongoing attempt to be the world's best-known cultural anthropologist
fails again – in anthropological eyes – due to his romantic
essentialism and ethnological reasoning (thank you, Jean-Loup Amselle),
by which traditional practices and whole traditional societies are
extracted from complex social fabrics in which traditional and modern
practices and principles are actually articulated and appropriated
by people trying to make sense of and produce order in their lives.
The “traditional” and the “modern” are not two distinct ways
of living, but rather one reductionist way of simplifying complex
social relations into categories that resonate with popular received
wisdom.
Where
Diamond's unilinear evolutionary perspective falls short, more
nuanced interpretations of socio-cultural phenomena – such as those
arrived at with concepts of legal, political, social, institutional
pluralism – can succeed. And yet, there is one area where Diamond
remains more successful than most anthropologists: having his story
packaged into an easily digestible, compelling explanation that
captures the imagination of a wide audience. Anthropologists have
long seen and lamented the things that Jared Diamond gets wrong; what
can we learn from what he does right, and how can we do it better?
