Maybe he did. You don't have to be, or call yourself, a Marxist, to be a materialist. And even if you are a Marxist, it doesn't necessarily add, uh, sales appeal to your book to advertise the fact. Richard Lewontin, who _does_ call himself a Marxist, doesn't mention old Chuck or anyone connected to him, for example, in his Biology as Ideology. The anthropologist Marvin Harris -- a teacher of yours, I think, Charles? -- didn't draw arrows to the provenance of some of his own materialist analysis.
FWIW I think Diamond's GGS is great, astounding widely read, very thoughtful, amazingly lucid, and he pulls in and explains a lot of stuff that old Fred didn't discuss, partly because a lot of the research on which Diamond, who's a biologist like Lewontin, btw, relies, wasn't published. Diamond is also a better writer than Fred, though not than Chuck. Also excellent (and equally materialist) is Diamond's Collapse.
I think it's a sort of academic snobbery to be suspicious of popular books that are well written. A book doesn't have to be written in impenetrable somnolent jargon and listed at 3,000,000 on Amazon sales list to be a good, serous, valuable work. Once upon a time American academics and intellectuals _tried_ to write serious, popular, accessible books for an educated audience. William James. WEB DuBois. Walter Lippman. Today, few do -- there's Chomsky of course, but he always did go against the current. And that Henwood fella. When one actually succeeds, makes the best seller list, especially if the book is materialist!, we should welcome the result. There's plenty of grey scholastic glock to shovel. through that attracts no hype because no one reads it, if you want to bother.
--- Charles Brown <charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote:
>
>
> >>> "Tayssir John Gabbour"
>
> * Guns, Germs and Steel - Diamond
>
> I like Harry Potter, yet I'm suspicious of this
> book because of
> the "hype"... Go figure.
>
> ^^^^^^^^
>
> CB: I think Diamond does a good job of popularizing
> some basic
> anthropology and history, such as
> "civilization"/class society arises in
> part based on the material surpluses at the origin
> of agriculture. But
> Diamond fails mention that he is plagerizing _The
> Origin of the Family,
> Private Property and the State_ and archaeology
> works. He acts like he
> thought up these theories himself.
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>
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