>>> andie nachgeborenen :
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.
^^^^^ CB: I agree with you that Diamond doesn't have to call himself a Marxist ( especially if he doesn't consider himself one) I really don't even expect him to give credit where credit is due for mention regarding the role of surpluses in starting "civilization". I'm just talking email list talk, like we do. You know. I'm glad Diamond does popularize that concept and a couple of others anyway.
By the way, he is a vulgar materialist to the extent he makes guns , steel and germs causes without mentioning the specific history ( contingencies; see Carrol on this) of Europe and self-image of modern Europe , i.e. Greek and Roman "conquering" ideological influence on the Europeans of the capitalist era who conquered the world. In other words, inventing guns and steel, and spreading germs did not necessarily entail conquering the globe. I think a specific conquering ideal, idealizing the classical conquering Greeks and Romans, is also necessary for history to have gone down as it has in the last 500 years.
I didn't have Harris as a teacher, but we used his _The Rise and Fall of Anthropological Theory_ as a text for my first theory class in 1969. Harris called himself a "cultural materialist" and specifically said he was not a dialectician.
^^^^^
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.
^^^^ CB; Agree on new research. As I say, there's lots of archaeology since Fred. I did have Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery, as well as Henry Wright as archaeology teachers.
Myself, I like Fred's writing style.
Yes, I know Diamond is a biologist. He sounds like one, just learning stuff that archaeologists have been discussing for decades. But as I say, that's ok, as he's popularizing it, as you say, in a way that academic archaeologists do not.
^^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^
CB: It's not quite possible for me to be an _academic_ snob since I'm not an academic. I'm an "organic" :>) Fred was not an academic either. I'm not complaining about Diamond's writing style. I'm complaining that he is not giving credit to communists, because, hey, that might get some people to take up some of the other communist stuff. But , as I say, I don't really expect him to promote communism or Marxism or materialism explicitly. And anyway, just by popularizing the theory he is doing more than most for historical materialism. So, I agree with what you say here.