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Title: Book Filled with Lies
Author: Bob Black
Language: en
Topics: anthropology, Murray Bookchin, primitivism
Source: Retrieved on 25 May 2010 from http://www.primitivism.com/book-lies.htm

Bob Black

Book Filled with Lies

The latest of the Director’s ironic indiscretions is his heavy reliance

on Edwin Wilmsen’s Land Filled with Flies to bash the

anarcho-primitivists. In SALA, Bookchin asserted an affinity between

anarcho-primitivism and post-modernism, with sublime indifference to the

fact that post-modernism has no harsher critic than John Zerzan. To any

reader of Wilmsen not in thrall to an ulterior motive, Wilmsen is

blatantly a post-modernist. One of his reviewers, Henry Harpending, is a

biological anthropologist who is charmingly innocent of exposure to

PoMo. He had “a lot of trouble” with the beginning of the book, which

contains “an alarming discussion of people and things being

interpellated in the introduction and in the first chapter, but my best

efforts with a dictionary left me utterly ignorant about what it all

meant.” Not surprisingly: the jargon (“interpellation of the subject”)

is that of Louis Althusser, the structuralist Marxist who went mad and

murdered his wife. Other anthropologists, more widely if not better

read, have noticed Wilmsen’s post-modernism. According to Thomas

Headland, Wilmsen-style “revisionism is not just testing and rejecting

hypotheses. Partially fueled by postmodernism, it seems to be

ideologically driven.”

When it was published in 1989, Land Filled with Flies created a

sensation, as it was meant to. Not only did it debunk the conventional

wisdom, it did so as insultingly as possible. Not only did it furnish

startling new data drawn from language, archeology and history in

addition to fieldwork, it placed them in a pretentious theoretical

apparatus. And it seethed with self-righteousness. By not recognizing

the San for what they are — an underclass, the poorest of the poor under

comprador capitalism — all other anthropologists were ideologically

complicit in their subjugation. Since all anthropologists who have lived

with the San are strongly committed to some notion of their rights and

autonomy, naturally they were infuriated to be castigated as the dupes

or tools of neo-colonialism. Rebuttals were soon forthcoming, and the

controversy still rages. But Wilmsen enjoyed a strategic advantage: his

quadruple-barreled shotgun attack. His linguistic, archeological,

historical and ethnographic researches all converged on the same or on

congruent conclusions.

Academics are the timid type in the best of circumstances. By

temperament they prefer to be the big fish in a pond however small. The

phrase “a school of fish” says as much about school as it does about

fish. Specialization is the source and the limit of the academic’s

authority. The expert in one subfield, such as ethnography, cannot help

but lose self-confidence — something he probably never had very much of

— when his certitudes are impeached by researches in three other

subfields. He begins to wonder if he can be sure of even the evidence of

his own senses (or what he remembers to be such). Wilmsen, by purporting

to possess expertise in so many areas, intimidates the experts in all of

them — at first, anyway. But scholars have started checking up on

Wilmsen, just as anarchists have started checking up on Bookchin, and

with similar consequences.

Most of Edwin Wilmsen’s observations of 70’s San are strikingly unlike

the observations of all his dozen-odd predecessors in the field.

Previous anthropologists had already reported how abruptly the San

foraging life-way was succumbing to pressures ranging from protracted

drought to entanglement in counterinsurgency in Southwest Africa to the

sedentarizing, nationalizing policies of newly and nominally independent

Botswana. Nobody now denies that most of the San have been forced into

the capitalist world-order at its very bottom level — and while it was

happening, nobody did deny it — but only Bookchin is obscene enough to

enthuse over this particular extension of the development of the

productive forces. He doesn’t care what happens to people so long as he

can turn it to polemical advantage.

Most of Wilmsen’s fieldwork was done at a waterhole he calls CaeCae,

whose inhabitants he labels, according to how he classifies their

“principal production activities,” as variously “pastoralist,

independent, forager, reliant, and client” — a rather elaborate typology

for just 16 households, only 9 of which were San. There’s almost a

category for every San household, which rather defeats the purpose of

categorization. In 1975–1976, only two households (both San) consisted

of foragers, people deriving over 95% of their food from hunting and

gathering; by 1979–1980, both subsisted on a combination of relief and

casual wage-labor. As for the “independents,” who owned some livestock

but derived over half their subsistence from foraging, there were three

households in the earlier period, two in the later. Those in the other

households did some hunting, but subsisted mainly by other means. Now

even if Wilmsen’s findings are accurate, they derive from a ridiculously

small sample, 2–5 households at the most, of people who were obviously

caught up in a process of proletarianization so accelerated that it

would have made Karl Marx’s head spin.

I read a bunch of reviews of Wilmsen’s book, pro and con, before I read

the book itself. Nothing prepared me for the sheer, shocking

near-nothingness of its ethnographic database. Nothing Wilmsen says he

found in the field, even if true, refutes or even calls into question

what previous researchers discovered about far larger groups of San at

earlier times and in other places. Wilmsen berates his predecessors for

ignoring history (they didn’t). But he’s the one who has trouble

accepting the possibility that, just as the people he studied were

living differently in 1980 than they were in 1975, the people that Lee,

DeVore, Howell, Tanaka and others studied before 1975 might have in a

rather short time come to live differently. The historian himself needs

historicizing.

Among Wilmsen’s most controversial claims is for longstanding social

stratification among the San and between the San and Bantu-speaking

peoples. Since his ethnographic evidence is paltry, he relies mainly on

evidence of inequality embedded in the languages of the San and their

Bantu neighbors, such as the Herero. Unfortunately for Wilmsen, one of

his reviewers, Henry Harpending, actually knows these languages. Wilmsen

claims that a word the Herero apply to the San they also apply to their

cattle, implying that the San are their chattels. However, the Herero

apply the same word to the Afrikaaners, and nobody would say that the

Afrikaaners are the Herero’s property. The Herero word implies

antagonism, not ownership, just as I do when I say that Freddie Baer is

a cow. According to Harpending, Wilmsen derives sociological conclusions

from bad puns: “This all, and much more, is fanciful drivel. It is like

saying that the people of Deutschland are called ‘Germans,’ meaning

‘infected people,’ from the word ‘germ’ meaning a microorganism that

causes illness. Almost every foray into linguistics appears to be

entirely contrived, created from nothing, even when there is no reason

to contrive anything.” Yet another “bizarre analysis,” this one drawn

from San kinship terminology, Harpending characterizes thusly: “It is as

if I were to claim that the English word grandmother refers to a custom

whereby old people stay at home and grind wheat for the family bread and

that grandmother is really a corruption of grindmother. Of course, if I

were to write such nonsense it would never be published. Editors and

referees would laugh me out the door because they would be familiar with

English. But hardly anyone in Europe and North America is familiar with

!Kung and Otjiherero.”

Wilmsen claims that archeology demonstrates — well, let’s let Bookchin

say it in his own inimitable way — “The San people of the Kalahari are

now known to have been gardeners before they were driven into the

desert. Several hundred years ago, according to Edwin Wilmsen,

San-speaking peoples were herding and farming [Wilmsen never says they

were farmers, an ecological impossibility], not to speak of trading with

neighboring agricultural chiefdoms in a network that extended to the

Indian Ocean. By the year 1000, excavations have shown, their area,

Dobe, was populated by people who made ceramics, worked with iron, and

herded cattle ...” These conclusions the Director serves up as

indisputable facts. That they are not.

Karim Sadr has recently taken up Richard Lee’s exasperated proposal for

independent review of all of Wilmsen’s controversial claims. Sadr

addresses only the archeological claims, and concludes that they are

unsupported by what little evidence is available so far. Wilmsen’s ally

Denbow, as Sadr has recently related, “says that his model is based on

over 400 surveyed sites and excavations at 22 localities. The 400 or

more surveyed sites, however, provide no relevant evidence. The model is

really based on a dozen of the excavated sites, and of these only three

have been adequately published.”

One does not have to be an expert to notice how forced and foolish some

of the Wilmsenist arguments are. Rock paintings of uncertain age

depicting stick figures, supposedly San, alongside cattle are claimed to

be evidence that the San at some indefinite past time herded cattle.

From this premise — even if true — is drawn the illogical conclusion

that the San were working for Bantu bosses who owned the cattle (why the

San were incapable of owning and herding their own cattle is not

disclosed). As Sadr says, “the stick figures may be herding or stealing

the cattle, or the Bushmen may have received the cattle in fair trade.

To stretch the point, maybe the paintings represent wishful thinking.

One alternative is as speculative as another.”

The main evidence cited to show San “encapsulation” by Iron Age Bantu

speakers from the sixth to eleventh centuries is cattle and sheep

remains found at San sites in the Kalahari. The proportions, however,

are extremely small, like those found in the Cape area where there were

no Iron Age chiefdoms to encapsulate foragers. The evidence of all kinds

is scanty and inconclusive. San might have been encapsulated at certain

times and places, dominant at others. Nothing rules out the possibility

“that they may very well have retained their autonomous hunting and

gathering way of life until historic times.” Wilmsen claims that when

Europeans perceived hunter-gatherers (in 19^(th) century parlance,

“savages”), they were constructing them as such in accordance with

ideological preconceptions. But when Herero pastoralists, refugees from

a vicious German military campaign in Southwest Africa, passed through

the Kalahari in 1904 and 1905, they, too, saw only San who lived

entirely by foraging. It is unlikely that these Bantus were readers of

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lewis Henry Morgan or Friedrich Engels. It is

almost as if the San would have been foragers even if there had been no

Europeans to construct them.

Which brings us to the strictly historical content of Wilmsen’s case. He

made more, and more systematic use, of archival evidence than any

previous ethnographer of the Kalahari. Identifying these sources and

emphasizing their importance may well be his only lasting

accomplishment. What he made of them is something else again. Travelers

reported seeing “Bushmen with cattle somewhere in the Kalahari in the

nineteenth century,” but since nobody ever doubted that Bushmen have

long been in contact with cattle-raising Bantu, this does not prove

anything about the Bushman way of life. Wilmsen denounces the classical

social evolutionists and also those he derides, with questionable cause,

as their latter-day inheritors. But he shares with them the assumption

that upon contact with the higher, more complex systems of society, the

lower, simpler systems are subsumed or else wilt and wither away. To

Wilmsen, as to Bookchin, it is unthinkable that foragers might hold

their own against herders or farmers. They are, by definition, inferior!

Exposure to a higher level of social organization is like exposure to

pathogens to which the savages have no immunity. Trade or any other

interaction necessarily subordinates them to those with a higher, more

sophisticated form of society.

The only thing wrong with this assumption is everything. It begs the

question. For all anybody knows, foragers might have dealt with their

neighbors from a position of strength. If you look at the situation from

a purely military perspective, for instance, the foragers had definite

advantages over the sedentary Bantu herders. The Bantus permanently

occupied villages whose locations were easy for an enemy to ascertain.

The San often moved their campsites, taking their scanty personal

property with them. The Bantus mainly lived off their cattle, whose

whereabouts were easily known, and which could be stolen or killed. The

San lived off of wild game and gathered plant food which no enemy could

destroy or despoil them of. The Bantus could probably mobilize more

manpower for war than the San, but to do what? There’s no reason to

think that Bushmen and Bantus have, or ever had, some cause of chronic

conflict. Wilmsen’s own argument holds otherwise. The peoples had some

incentive to interact, perhaps some incentive to avoid each other

otherwise, but no known incentive to wage permanent war on each other.

It is above all with history that Wilmsen seeks to overawe the

anthropologists. His book is very much part of the historical turn the

discipline has taken in the last twenty years. “People without history”

nowhere exist. Berating other anthropologists as ahistorical possesses a

strategic advantage for someone like Wilmsen in addition to its

trendiness. When he contradicts the ethnography of a dozen predecessors,

they are inclined to retort that either conditions changed or Wilmsen is

wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time an anthropologist with an

ideological agenda went into the field and saw what he wanted to see.

But if Wilmsen was a latecomer, perhaps a too-latecomer to the field, he

was almost a pioneer in the archives where time is on his side. If the

others point to the 1960’s, he can point to the 1860’s. Take that! But

there is a crucial disadvantage too. There is no returning to the

ethnographic 1960’s, but the archival 1860’s are available for others to

visit. Wilmsen’s critics did research his sources, as I researched

Bookchin’s, and with the same devastating results.

Richard B. Lee and Mathias Guenther sought out the traders’ and

travelers’ diaries (in English, German and Afrikaans), the maps, the

letters and the other sources on which Wilmsen relied to prove that the

remote arid region of the Kalahari where the Lee/DeVore anthropologists

found foraging San a century later was a major trade crossroads in the

mid-nineteenth century. The Dobe area, according to Wilmsen, “pulsed”

with commercial activity in which Europeans, Bantus and San were all

heavily involved. On this account the San, however, were herders, not

hunters — they were the serfs of the Bantus whose cattle they tended —

and when disease decimated the cattle in the late nineteenth century,

the San lost their livelihoods and were forced into the desert to forage

(“literally devolved, probably very much against their will,” in

Bookchin’s learned words). Even a priori there was reason to doubt this

remarkable discovery. As Harpending writes: “There is more trade through

Xai Xai than anywhere in South Africa! Yet Xai Xai is perhaps the most

remote isolated place I have ever visited. I am ready to believe that

the occasional trader showed up at Xai Xai, but I am not ready to

believe that it was ever a hub of major trade routes.”

According to Wilmsen, the records left by European traders confirm their

commercial activity in the Dobe area. But not according to Lee and

Guenther. Repeatedly, the diaries and maps cited by Wilmsen to place

these Europeans in or near the Dobe area actually place them hundreds of

kilometers away. In fact, the Europeans say that they went well out of

their way to avoid the area. It was unmapped — all the maps Wilmsen

refers to display the Dobe area as a big blank spot — its commercial

potential was limited, and its inhabitants, who were mostly the

then-numerous San, were known to be hostile to intruders.

The chicanery doesn’t end there. Wilmsen’s linguistic flimflammery,

previously noted, isn’t confined to obscure African languages where he

might hope to get away with it. He mistranslates German too. One of his

most highly-hyped findings is in a German-language source which, he

claims, identifies “oxen” at an archeological San site. The German word

quoted actually means onions, not oxen. Lee and Guenther also adduce

other mistranslations which even I, whose German is scanty, found fishy.

In self-serving ways Wilmsen inserts words which clearly have no

counterparts in the German originals, usually for the purpose of faking

evidence of ethnic stratification.

Revisionism in the extreme form espoused by Wilmsen is untenable, but

nothing less extreme debunks the primitive-affluence thesis as Bookchin

has caricatured it. The reader will by now be weary of !Kung

calorie-counting and kindred esoterica: and Bookchin is counting on it.

He deploys an argument almost as persuasive as the argument from force,

namely, the argument from boredom. Anything you say, Murray, just don’t

say it to me! Anyone ever involved with a leftist group knows the school

where Bookchin learned “process.” Bookchin’s perverse paradise is

precisely this pathology generalized. The winner of every argument is

the guy who won’t shut up, the Last Man Grandstanding.