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Jared Diamondin row over claim tribal peoples live in ‘state of constant war’ | Books | The Observer

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A fierce dispute has erupted between Pulitzer prize-winning author Jared Diamond and campaign group Survival International over Diamond’s recently published and highly acclaimed comparison of western and tribal societies, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? The controversy threatens to expose a deep rift in modern anthropology, with each claiming the other has fallen into a delusion that threatens to undermine the chances for survival of the world’s remaining tribal societies. On a book tour of the UK last week, Diamond, 75, was drawn into a dispute with the campaign group after its director, Stephen Corry, condemned Diamond’s book as “completely wrong – both factually and morally – and extremely dangerous” for portraying tribal societies as more violent than western ones. Survival accuses Diamond of applying studies of 39 societies, of which 10 are in his realm of direct experience in New Guinea and neighbouring islands, to advance a thesis that tribal peoples across the world live in a state of near-constant warfare. “It’s a profoundly damaging argument that tribal peoples are more violent than us,” said Survival’s Jonathan Mazower. “It simply isn’t true. If allowed to go unchallenged … it would do tremendous damage to the movement for tribal people’s rights. Diamond has constructed his argument using a small minority of anthropologists and using statistics in a way that is misleading and manipulative.”

Jared Diamondin row over claim tribal peoples live in ‘state of constant war’ | Books | The Observer

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“I’m sure that whoever’s still alive in the Taiwanese Friendship Zone agrees completely. Imagine them nodding furiously while chained to workbenches, assembling sheet computers for the Western market. (Sheets, by the way, are bloody awful for writing on, and I don’t care what anyone else says. I like the sheetphones – I mean, I don’t like that I have to buy a new one every year because the pixels in the crumple zone go dull, but I like the way the memory-plastic spines on sheetphones snap them out into the phone shape, because the shape always reminds me of 1970s Trimphones. But the sheet keyboards are worse than Microsoft Surfaces, and I had to switch to my old tablet and Bluetooth keydeck after the first two paragraphs of this because the wind kept pulling the sheet off the garden table.)

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I’m looking at the allergen count on my phone, from the local coverage. The local coverage, as everyone calls it, is the use we found for drones, the kind that can be loaded with sensors and autopiloted for months at a time. Everyone with access to a screen of some kind can access data from the drones. Weather, traffic, air analysis, alerts, police activity, remote viewing of public places and pretty much anything else you can think of. So long as you have a connected device. And a Facebook.gov account.”

http://vice.com/en_uk/read/in-2022-v10n12
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