Crooked Timber on Jared Diamond

[hauptmoduln]

There was an interesting post on Crooked Timber a couple months ago, concerning Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel), and by the time I read it, it had accumulated almost 300 comments. I finally read the whole conversation, and while I learned a lot from it, the signal-to-noise ratio is low enough that I can't recommend a full read.

Comments

[easwaran]

The thing I still haven't figured out about critiques of Guns Germs and Steel is exactly where the Eurocentrism comes in. It may be the case that various factual claims are false, so that his explanation doesn't work. But the only way I can see him being accused of Eurocentrism there is from a standpoint that says there's nothing to be explained. To say that he has failed to explain a real phenomenon (which seems like a plausible criticism to me) is to admit that there is in fact a difference between the role that Europe and its colonies play in the world today and the role that the rest of the world plays.

[hauptmoduln]

I've had similar trouble, and one contributing factor might be different anthropologists offering different complaints. I think the most prominent is as you suggested, one of Eurocentric selection bias producing the illusion of a phenomenon to be explained, where he dismissed non-European expansions such as early Qing China, the 15th century Ottoman empire, and post-feudal Japan

[easwaran]

The dismissal of China as a counterexample is certainly problematic