Uncivilized Podcast 32---Radical Anthropology

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU2LhhQ6ANI&t=1381s

Description:

Jamie, anarchist and anthropologist joins us to talk the study of past humans through an inherent radical lens.

Thank you to Jamie for lending us the art for the episode!

There are 36 Comments

so i only listened til about the 45 minute mark, but i am having thoughts....

starting with, i do actually agree that immediate return hg modes provide liberty, autonomy & wellbeing. and, for all that it matters, i think extant hg / traditional peoples are to be left to live as they do, as they want, away from civilization, you know, if this can happen in this rapidly toxifying world.

otoh, it is a bit icky to hear an ostensible anarchist talk about the genetic basis for why some of us think primitivism provides the only path to absolute freedom and some of us question this. nice editing in this part of the podcast, btw. has it not become clear that genetic arguments are sus? do you need a reminder as to why?

i too have heard the "but what about modern medicine?" argument as a rebuttal to AP and it occurs to me that just dismissing this out of hand, as if this person making this rebuttal desires capture in civilization, is in bad faith. it seems to me the people making this argument desire their or their loved ones existence, that arguing what they really want is to be unfree in civ. is missing the deep grief that comes with the loss of, say, an infant who needs medical care early on. i, myself, have at least 2 dear people who would not be alive today if not for the intervention of modern medicine in their infancy. and don't get me wrong, this isn't an appeal to have the world be civilized shit just so that my dears can be alive, it is only to trouble the absolute confidence ap's have in the face of others grief and loss.

Jamie says at one point, "'us' doesn't mean 8 billion people" but apparently means "the select people who are willing to make these moves toward this actual material radicalism." which i guess means a "basic needs economy in a bio-region." this supposedly will provide "liberty, autonomy, freedom and optimal Human well-being." but just where is this bioregion? or, before that, what constitutes a bioregion? but where is this place that will be uncontaminated, or pristine enough to support HG lifestyles?

as i said, i don't disagree that traditional life ways are free & healthy (pause to say health is a fraught category too. what is, precisely, meant?). and i am not arguing for civilization when i ask Where are these places to live as you desire? anywhere now is ruins of civilization. or will be soon enough.
the thought occurred to me that figuring out ways to live a sort of gatherer hunter existence will have to be done in the context of capitalist ruins. how do we learn to live ethically in capitalist ruins?

last inchoate thought for now; in the first 45 minutes of this there is a lot of talk about optimal human living, but no mention of the animals and plants and what they might need or want for their optimal living.

BraAah, you not gonna get the most rad primmie to reject a shot of life giving penicillin to their dyin' mom, c'mon brah, get real, love is the most powerful human emotion only rivalled by hatred. PopulatedCiv is here to stay!

anon 17:56 try to say what you mean in a straightforward manner.

BraAah, even diehard primmies gonna use capitalist industrial medicines to save their mom and kids, and that's why JZ's quest for a global Primitivist order mmkay!

,,,,,that's why JZ's quest for a global Primitivist order will never work or become popular mmmkay!

so, i have finished listening to this now. maybe it's just that Jamie irks me for some reason, i don't even know the man, he's probably fine. but where he says certain anthropologist are being "canceled" but doesn't give any details about what that means, (like was an article pulled from a journal? or what?) that is a lot of what i found irksome. assertions but no details, that is dubious.

i also listened to #31 and Jessica is a better interviewee imo.

to me the salient point is death phobia. i just don't think we get past this problem by merely deciding to think otherwise about it, which was part of my point above. it isn't that people don't want to be free, it is also that they want to be alive so that they can be free. and one can't just insist the other think differently. it takes working through much baggage.

another point is that catastrophe has already happened. the bomb of colonialism/ slavery/all-the-horror has detonated even if some of us have not yet experienced the shrapnel and destruction. i don't think we can leave that/this mess for others to clean up. meaning, for myself, to start is to start from here & now in this rapidly growing pile of debris, not pretending there is some "away" to get to to live a "totally free" lifestyle from.

but, bottom line, Artxmis & co. i appreciate you all grappling with this stuff, even though i have criticisms, i don't think we are that far apart in some ways.

Nettle - thanks for your commentary. For clarity, I was not personally promoting a genetic basis for primitivism. I was mentioning John Gowdy’s book “Ultrasocial” where he proposed that a genetic basis might exist for the tendency towards rebellion against mass-society. He wonders if sapiens genetics have even been affected by the extreme social stratification, the physical conditions, and resulting psychologies which emerged inside of mass-civilization.

Here is what he says on page 102:

“after the Spartacus slave revolt in 71 BCE some 6,000 slaves were killed and crucified along the roads to Rome. Michael Harner estimates the number of persons sacrificed in central Mexico in the 15th century to be as high as 250,000 per year. Did these mass killings suppress genes for rebellion and dissent? The systematic slaughter of rebels in ancient China, the Middle East, and Europe certainly repressed descent and may have skewed our genetic makeup toward passivity and acceptance of strong leaders…on the other side successful rulers were astoundingly successful in propagating their genes.”

I’m not myself trying to assert this as reality, but I also don’t see what the problem is with taking such an idea as possible, unless your purpose is more to uphold PC-pro-civ than it is to better understand anarchy?

What’s really behind the often knee-jerk reaction from people who express their offense to the idea of human wildness and who seem generally always willing to go along with the civilizational system? I prefer to assess it as a certain mental disorder called “domestication” which resulted from numerous evolutionary selections and feedbacks. We can put in this category, for example, Graeber and Wengrow (2021) - as it is only persons of a highly domesticated psychological disposition who would attempt to interpret the anthropological and archaeological record in the total pro-mass-civilization way in which they have.

so, you've already decided that push back on the language you are using is about asserting some PC notions, i guess.

" I prefer to assess it as a certain mental disorder called “domestication” "

but, yeah, calling what you don't like a mental disorder is also doing a civilization.

i don't think that's a fair assessment of what's being said there?

why wouldn't it be interesting to frame passivity and acceptance of strong leaders as undesirable genetic predispositions? it's pretty fukin unlikely that somebody who makes that observation is going to seize power and do a eugenics program about it lol

if the phrase "rape culture" is useful in any way, then it's because it draws attention to the way that context is part of rape, that frameworks are set up that are no immediately or necessarily obviously part of any specific event (such as a rape), but that allow for (more or easier or whatever) such events.

both nettle and others here are arguing what seems to me to be more subtle points than what you're acknowledging, lumpy.

or i'm reading into things to make them more interesting for myself.
or both...

SIGH you're both probably right ... spoiling my fun tho! couple of total eugenics killjoys you are!

can't just let us attack an authoritarian strawman of pseudoscience, gotta be all those-are-toxic-ideas about it...

it might be interesting, it probably is not.

in my mind, framing things with the lens of genetics, in our current circumstances, leads to undesirable outcomes. like looking for the genetic basis for homosexuality or autism to then do what? "cure" them, or "cure" people of these "disorders"? people who do genetics seem to be angling for some sort of purity or optimization. i only ask, "to what end?"

On the question of bioregions - this always comes up and I think most people fail to realize that there are select locations where a "basic needs economy in a bio-region” is either generally still in-tact and/or remains possible in the future, especially as the dominant system continues to crumble. There are people actually doing it to a large extent now. I personally participate in a localized system that is food self-reliant to a significant degree. People who are not in those types of positions tend to naysay these efforts and take a pessimistic stance, and it’s true that the prospects are nearly hopeless for the mainstream majorities. But my view is that we should support the people who are trying to break away from civilized dependencies wherever and whenever we can. This goes especially for those who still have the unique ecological opportunity for such, no matter how distant they are from people who are stuck in the landscapes of the dominant economy.

Anarchists need to have solidarity with distantly located rewilders, and not renounce those efforts as impossible just because they themselves might be in positions where they cannot currently enact these physical possibilities. It may be that whatever becomes our most viable future option originates not from any western anarchist community but from distant overlooked people in the most remote regions of the world.

On your topic of optimal human living vs. what is optimal for all other beings - I’ve long said that the AP baseline is the merging of what is most ecocentric and most anthropocentric into one category. You cannot have an authentically anthropocentric lifeways that it also not simultaneously authentically ecocentric. These are in effect one and the same. If humans are to exist at all then there is no way around the fact that non-economically aggrandizing subsistence-based lifeways are the only types of arrangements that can be truly ecologically integrative – most things other than this are extractive intensifications and it is here where our serious troubles originate.

on “modern medicine" – that’s a big topic. Was it discussed in the podcast? In my upcoming book I have an entire chapter on rewilding and human wellbeing. For the moment I will say that yes, perhaps the most positive benefit of civ is modern medicine, but that is of course a massively bi-polar doubled-edged sword, not just in respect to human wellbeing, but the wellbeing of the planet as a whole.

"On your topic of optimal human living vs. what is optimal for all other beings - I’ve long said that the AP baseline is the merging of what is most ecocentric and most anthropocentric into one category. You cannot have an authentically anthropocentric lifeways that it also not simultaneously authentically ecocentric. These are in effect one and the same."

i understand the words you are using but it seems you are using them in a particular idiomatic way that i don't quite know how to parse. as in, why make any distinction between "anthropocentric" and "ecocentric"? and what do you mean by using these particular terms?

what i would say is something like this - the land, the plants, the critters, the air, the water, the people are not the separate things westerners think they are.
these other-than-human people also have desires about living.

maybe you are trying to say something similar?

on medicine- my point here was only to say when someone pushes back on AP discourse by citing their fear of what would have happened if they had not had access to modern medicine, (ie their child dying as an infant, say), it is quite brutal, and brutalizing, to say to that person "oh, you'd rather be trapped in civilization than be free?" there is enough suffering already, why add to it?
and, yes, one of the issues with modernity is a phobia of death, such that we kill ourselves in the attempt to not die. or, more precisely, we make ourselves un-living in order to (un)live as long as possible. to me, this knot is harder to untie than the knot of subsistence living.

Nn fuiockin JZx priommie gonma take aweay my fuikjing Vioaghra miodertn mredixine juist becaise Ime fgucklinf 62 yres ols anharch anm neesd muy fyuvking mmkla!

Sorry you find me "irksome" but it seems as if you are not really paying attention to what was said - I did not say anthropologists are getting cancelled, I said some anthropologists are trying to cancel rewilding/AP/bushcraft etc. and I cited both an article and a book pertaining to this. Plus I’ll soon be releasing an entire book dealing specifically with these issues containing nearly 20 pages of references on the matter.

In respect to your comment about some of us “pretending there is some ‘away’ to get to live a ‘totally free’ lifestyle from” – I’m not pretending. There is much happening that you are probably not aware of. There are legitimate experiences in space and time which can get us closer to actualized autonomy and which can become increasingly self-reinforcing the deeper one goes. Don’t knock it until you’ve known it by trying it yourself.

Why it is that people who are not personally in the position to enact legitimately autonomous modes seem to always not be willing to express solidarity with those of who have put ourselves in such positions? Its seems that the closer one resides to the epicenters of “shrapnel and destruction” the more they prefer to naysay and cutdown people attempting to exist within less destroyed places and who assert possibilities. What might be the psychology behind this?

Those of us who have chosen to pursue rewilding pathways in remote places generally are always happy to express solidarity with people that are engaged in the struggles most proximal to the “rapidly growing pile of debris.” We see that the struggle must exist on all fronts, that diverse actors have diverse roles to play and that most of these have value. Yet from your end the vibe is to accuse us as being nothing but escapists pursuing futile fantasies of getting “away.”

While your cadre seems not willing to offer solidarity to anarchists of western origin pursuing physical wildness, I doubt that you would oppose expressing solidarity with the several indigenous peoples who currently do occupy spaces that are largely “away” from “the shrapnel and destruction” and who continue to be authentically the freest human beings on the planet?

If you’re willing to express solidarity with these people (who are certainly not “pretending” and who do exist) then why are you not willing be supportive of anarchists in North America attempting to establish our own capacities for doing the same? I guess it’s simply your assumption that it’s all just “pretend,” or maybe also somehow the idea is offensive to you or not PC enough for you.

As for your other comments --I'm not those how much those have to do with what we were discussing in the podcast?

i'm going to start at this end of your comments and work my way back.

"I did not say anthropologists are getting cancelled, I said some anthropologists are trying to cancel rewilding/AP/bushcraft etc. and I cited both an article and a book pertaining to this."

okay. i heard this as anthropologists who are not AP are trying to cancel anthropologists who are AP. but here you seem to be saying the AP / rewilding people are *not* anthropologists. and so my question remains, how is this cancelation happening? if this wasn't about an intra-anthro conflict in academia then how is it cancelation? disagreement is not cancelation.

"In respect to your comment about some of us “pretending there is some ‘away’ to get to live a ‘totally free’ lifestyle from” – I’m not pretending."

i am not saying there are no people engaged in rewilding efforts, i am saying there is no "away." even in your reply you say "less destroyed places" and that is my point.

"While your cadre seems not willing to offer solidarity to anarchists of western origin pursuing physical wildness, I doubt that you would oppose expressing solidarity with the several indigenous peoples who currently do occupy spaces that are largely “away” from “the shrapnel and destruction” and who continue to be authentically the freest human beings on the planet?"

are you joking? sadly, indigenous people have been brutalized into trying to live on the most marginalized land, even you said this about the Hadza in your call with Zerzan on his show a while back. Indigenous peoples are literally ground zero in terms of living on disturbed land. from Bikini Atoll to Alaska to Arizona & New Mexico.

and my other comments, if you notice, are about Artxmis' interview of Jessica Carew Kraft.

i went searching for where Jamie talks about the cancelation of ap, etc, alas i could not find the spot in the podcast/ video.

in the comments on yt, though, there is a reply ostensibly from Jamie and it made clear why i find him irksome. it is this, he doesn't just think he knows, he know he knows and leaves no room for disagreement. it turns out i have been more influenced by general semantics than i thought. there is always a gap in knowledge, we can never see the whole all at once, you can't see the back of your head, for instance. So, Jamie may think the archeological & anthropological evidence proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that this or that particular thing IS true, really there are so many missing pieces to that evidence, even before any interpretation, no one now can say anything about that evidence with absolute certainty.

and to think one has visited an ancient people because they went to Africa for a week with the Hadza, no, you visited a contemporary people. They too live in this messy, plasticized modern world, you didn't journey back in time.

which is not to say nothing can be gleaned from anthropological or archeological evidence. or that visiting the Hadza is not worthwhile. it is to say that what can be said about those is limited.

also, to pathologize people who disagree with you by saying they are just clinging to their domestication, this is quite annoying.

i don't know nettle ... you seem to be hammering away on the uncertainty principle with a weird amount of zeal? that's already implied by doing science, nobody credible is saying "I'm 100% certain no matter what evidence emerges"

anthropologists don't literally think hanging out with the hadza is time travel... nobody is saying that. like, wtf?

but theories get put forward, then older theories get trashed by new ones (supported by evidence) and everyone who floats a theory is sure enough to put it out there in the first place. you're just describing what people usually sound like when they speak about their field of study.

correction: i meant more like, epistemological skepticism, not the "uncertainty principle"

i've had a few hard knocks to the head, get mixed up sometimes haha

yeah, more like incompleteness. there is always a bit that we can't know.

(the "lol" was meant to be sympathetic. i, too, have had my share of knocks to the noggin.)

Lolol DON't gEt sEntimEntal wIth tEh aUdiEnce, And I mEAn it, it eXplAins eVerythIng yoU've Ever fReakin' sAId lolol!

all due respect, lumpy, have you listened to the episode? i am hammering away at this because Jaime *does* insist that the evidence *is* settled.

when he called into JZ's show he was talking about his trip to the Hadza as if he were hanging out with ancient people. of course no one thinks they are time traveling, sheesh, but then make that obvious in how you talk about it.

yeeeaaahh...listened to enough of it to get a sense of the tone that you're referring to.

i'm more interested in what i think ... MAYBE, might be part of the disagreement?

which is the classic materialist analysis versus more of a murky post modern thing, that I would argue you're indicating a preference for? unless i'm completely wrong about what you're saying?

materialist analysis tends to speak from a place certainty, with what sounds like arrogance and people find it obnoxious, sometimes for good reason. i prefer it because i find the "solve" here, which is to never quite commit to a perspective or a conclusion, to be worse than the problem of an arrogant tone BUT i recognize this is just a personal preference of mine

"materialist analysis tends to speak from a place certainty, with what sounds like arrogance and people find it obnoxious, sometimes for good reason. i prefer it because i find the "solve" here, which is to never quite commit to a perspective or a conclusion, to be worse than the problem of an arrogant tone BUT i recognize this is just a personal preference of mine"

well stated, though i disagree.
for one thing, it's possible for someone who sounds arrogrant to still back up what they're saying, which jamie doesn't do t any pt. if there's one thing that materialists should be able to do, it's to point to what they're looking at that makes their conclusions make sense. right? there are no quotes here or even specifics from the people he's complaining about, just a lot of "they are afraid"... so not convincing.

fair! I phoned this one in, only listened to like 20 mins so ... i'll show myself out haha

*door slam*

lol, anon said it.

i will add my hidden 3rd option to either adhering to a perspective or never committing to a perspective; committing to a perspective while also realizing the incompleteness of any perspective and being able to take in new information, possibly changing my understanding.

No problems here in offering "room for disagreement" Nettle, but offer something legitimate which can be taken seriously in respect to your "disagreement." You're not offering anything.

The basic anthropological facts surrounding how our species has gotten ourselves into our current predicament, not to mention what the primary mechanisms of hierarchy vs. anarchy are, have been settled for decades. What "particular" piece of "missing evidence" are you looking for exactly?

Or maybe your looking for nothing actually. You're like any other PoMo who just doesn't want it to be settled, you'd prefer to keep meandering around endlessly both saying and doing actually nothing.

I'm aware that's the tact of most so-called "anarchists" who spend mucho time on the internet doing these chats, but i'm sure there are people here who desire to discontinue the meandering PoMo denial of everything that you promote. Solidarity to those folks from me.

Again, i'm not going to write essays to you "proving" how science in fact fully verifies the legitimacy of AP. If you care enough and want to physically do something rather than keep playing with your little digital mental support units you will take the time to verify the fact that it IS "settled" yourselves. I aint trying to be your anthropology instructor. There is a wild world out there - go out and f'n live in it. Get HG and you'll see what actual anarchy is - its not on the internet...fyi

Nettle, you make assumptions about who/what I am in respect to "visiting ancient people"? WTF do you know about it? Zero is what.

You have no clue how much time I've personally spent with the Hadza or anybody else, right? You are revealing yourself as a kook for certain.

Just so its clear - my perspective on AP and anarchist theory in-general is rooted in 2 decades of work and dirt time with IPs/HGs on 4 continents.

In fact, I'm writing this now sitting here next to IP's who are in agreement with my analysis and who are laughing at yours - who have this morning browsed this thread and are laughing at the entire thing as a pointless exercise. They don't waste their time with this junk - they've got berries and meat from last night's hunt to cut up and put away....

but, yeah, guess I'm just some punter with an "arrogant" "tone" who really does not have anything to offer anarchy and people would instead be better off heeding the claims of A-news chatroom kids and daily hanging out online...

have fun with all that and keep on with doing zero.

If "anarchists" dont start dealing authentically with their material conditions they will forever exist inside of dominance hierarchies and all they claim will be nothing but hollow words - this is the irrefutable fact of materialism - take it serious, or remain in LaLa land....your choice.

its clear you're having a hard time investigating the matter for yourself Nettle - i've cited both an article and a book on the matter of RW/Anti-civ/AP becoming new cancellation categories by ProgLeft actors. Go find the refs and read them in detail.

Chatrooms are not my thing and I rarely go online, but I also do occasionally take time to reply to comments like yours. Yet, I'm not going to spend my precious time writing explanatory essays to help you figure out reality.

I'll have a book coming out by the end of the year which will be explaining this phenomena in complete detail. I hope you will take the time to read my book on the matter.

But, no, its not an "intra-anthro" conflict. There are very few prof anthros who would identify as AP etc. The issue is that anthros themselves are threatened by the ever increasing interest in HG etc. coming from popular culture. And most anthros being ProgLeft'ers themselves have an agenda, really, to assimilate IP's into modernity and NOT to support any IP rejection of modernity - thus such anthros want to cancel RW because they see it as threatening to IP desire to not be "primitive" but to develop and become "equal "members of globalized modernity.

And this promotion within the academy then translates to university students becoming indoctrinated by the status-quo (in fact colonial) anthro perspective making students apt to place in the category of cancellation anything that promotes anti-civ, anti-ag, RW etc.

The topic here is a detailed one and in my book I try to cover all potential variables/arguments in respect to the issues. Again, maybe read the works I cite and then my book in detail before spouting off about what you obviously are pretty clueless about.

You also reveal that your clueless about multiple nuances in respect to the global IP situation. No "joking" from me here. There DO remain actually free indigenous people on the planet residing in relatively in-tact ecologies. Your obviously unaware. I'm not going to type out for you here the details on who/what/where. You can go and figure that out on your own, if you actually care to know. Or you can read one of my upcoming books in which the details of these situations are verified and explained.

I don't list the Hadza as one of these people, so not sure why you're getting that confused. However, out of remaining African HG some bands of Hadza continue to rely predominately on wild food more than any others, and there are future scenarios which might allow this to continue. But yes, the prospects for Hadza at this stage are not looking good.

Your lack of knowledge on the details of contemporary IP environments is also revealed by your attempt to lump Alaska in with other "disturbed" landscapes. What specific context/location re Alaska are you speaking of? Alaska is approx 1/3 the size of the entire USA mainland and most of it remains a fully in-tact wild ecology which supports significant wild food reliance for thousands of people, IP and non.

thanks for confirming that you're (notice the contraction of you are = you're) a condescending jackass, for whoever didn't already figure that out from your (note the possessive = your) interview.

one of nettle's points was apparently beyond you, ie that there is no place on earth that is untouched. even the very most remote places are dealing either directly or indirectly with noise, pollution, habitat degradation and removal, etc. your rejection of this point has more to do with your desire for purity and a binary sense of innocent and fallen, than any particularly relevant analysis of what is going on in the world.

lol maybe we should also compliment him on his marketing strategy for his upcoming book?

"KISS MY ASS NETTLE, YOU CLUELESS FUCK! BUY MY BOOK THEN GO FUCK YOURSELF DUMMY"

we're pretty used to charming charmy charmersons around here!

Lol chill out bro. No one is going to cancel you. If you suggest that homesteading settler anarchists are equivalent to indigenous communities in resistance, someone might point out that that’s ridiculous tho.

Uh, chill out Payne.
“Homesteading settler anarchists”? If you claim homesteaders are equivalent to settlers (colonists?) then some of us might point out you are ridiculous. The only solutions to the issues yr paradigm raises are ethnostates or genocide? Which is it Payne? I know, I know, you don’t actually believe the leftist jargon you spout ( but that’s cause you don’t understand the leftist jargon)

The Hadza are reeking of spooks, like most ancient cultures. Just sayin',,,

Add new comment