New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xvi, 374 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, graphs, B&W photos.) US$90.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-521-51572-6.
It is refreshing to come across a work that articulates in a clear and accessible manner the critiques and concepts that I use regularly in the classroom and in talking to public audiences about the role that archaeological and historical anthropological perspectives can play for understanding human-environment relationships. Questioning Collapse is a collection of essays that were written initially as part of an American Anthropological Association symposium and a subsequent advanced seminar responding to two of Jared Diamond’s far-reaching and remarkably popular works, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse (2-3). The book focuses on three main questions: Why are ancient societies often portrayed as “successes” or “failures” in the popular media? How are people living in the aftermath of empire characterized? How can current environmental issues be linked to what we know about past societies? (5).
The book is organized as a series of case studies in three parts flanked by an introductory chapter explaining the impetus for writing the book (McAnany and Yoffee), and a final chapter interrogating the question of what sustainability might actually be (McNeill). Part 1, “Human Resilience and Ecological Vulnerability,” critically examines the reality of past environmental challenges and adaptations in chapters on Rapa Nui (Easter Island; Hunt and Lipo), the Greenland Norse (Berglund), and nineteenth- and twentieth-century China (Pomeranz). Part 2, “Surviving Collapse: Studies of Societal Regeneration,” looks at the resilience of indigenous societies undergoing processes of social and environmental change in the American Southwest (Wilcox), the Lowland Maya Area (McAnany and Negrón), and Mesopotamia (Yoffee). Part 3, “Societies in the Aftermath of Empire,” looks at the ways current environmental narratives have been shaped by European colonialism and imperialism among the Inca (Cahill), in Rwanda (Taylor), on Hispaniola (Woodson), in Australia (Murray) and in New Guinea (Errington and Gewertz).
What is perhaps most laudable about these essays is that they do not simply critique Diamond’s wide-reaching works for overlooking minor details that only specialists would recognize. After all, any work produced in broad strokes is going to oversimplify specific information relating to a particular region or time period. While acknowledging that local narratives matter, and pointing out some of Diamond’s more severe errors in factual and conceptual details, the authors repeatedly note the bigger problem with the just-so stories in Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. Diamond has provided two parallel myths that are convenient for people living in the contemporary neoliberal West. First, Guns, Germs, and Steel nominally eschews the racist perspective of white superiority by explaining the success of European expansion in terms of geographic accidents, excusing colonial and imperial powers, “the haves,” from any kind of cultural culpability. Next, Collapse focuses on cases of indigenous environmental mismanagement, suggesting that the world’s “have nots” often wound up that way because they “chose” to overshoot their environmental limitations and their societies fell apart as a result.
Another notable aspect of this work is the prominent place that living indigenous people take in the book. Sidebars mention living Rapa Nui (40), Maya (166-167), Assyrians and Chaldeans (194-199), and Australian Aboriginals (308-309), reminders that people from all of these societies that apparently “collapsed” still play an active role in the contemporary world. The excellent chapter by Micheal Wilcox is written from the perspective of a living Native American (Yuman/Choctaw) trying to put the apparent disintegration of Pueblo society (and Native American society in general) as outlined by Diamond into perspective. Comparing indigenous management of the landscape that sustained large populations across the region for many generations through sophisticated water management infrastructure with nineteenth- and twentieth-century American mismanagement that resulted in the disappearance of the Gila and Colorado rivers miles from their former outlets, Wilcox notes that, “Failure, apparently, is in the eyes of the beholder” (127).
Any of the chapters from Questioning Collapse offer similar useful insights that help provide a critical understanding of how ingrained Western notions of progress, civilization and social complexity frame narratives of the so-called success or failure of societies in light of their relationship to the environment. Ultimately, these case studies, which have a broad temporal and geographical coverage, serve as an absolutely crucial reminder that transformation is likely the one inevitable factor in history. Rather than simply tying social and environmental change to tragic catastrophe and destruction, Questioning Collapse provides a set of reminders that these processes, while sometimes accompanied by violent upheaval, usually reflect more of the resilience and adaptability of dynamic human cultures. This perspective is worth remembering as contemporary global society deals with its own environmental challenges.
James L. Flexner
Washington and Lee University, Lexington, USA
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