Speaker 1: Hello, everyone, Welcome to it could happen here at the
Speaker 1: podcast about things falling apart and sometimes have you come
Speaker 1: put them back together. Today it's me Garrison Chris our
Speaker 1: producer Sophie, and Andrew joins us once again. I love
Speaker 1: that guy. Me too, Me too, Hi everyone. Um, another
Speaker 1: episode of Andrew talking about whatever he feels like talking about. Okay,
Speaker 1: today's episode, UM, I am happy to announce that I
Speaker 1: finally finally finished Don't Have Everything by gradually. It took
Speaker 1: it took a while, you know, there was some points
Speaker 1: in time, some weeks it just went by way. I
Speaker 1: didn't even like make a dent um. You know, life
Speaker 1: got in the way and stuff. But I finally finally
Speaker 1: finished it and I get to talk voted and say,
Speaker 1: you know, with some authority that I've read dont of Everything.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, it's a very dense book, but it
Speaker 1: was with it. I mean, there are some critiques that
Speaker 1: I've been taking into by some authors in the field. UM,
Speaker 1: and so I highly recommend people look for critiques as well,
Speaker 1: not just you know, taking it to and consuming who
Speaker 1: will seal, but in addition to those critiques, like armed
Speaker 1: with those critiques, UM, such as by people like um,
Speaker 1: what is politics on YouTube? And also a couple of
Speaker 1: academic writers as well. I think you could get a
Speaker 1: lot out of the book, and I certainly have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is it. This is a this is a very
Speaker 1: good book, and I'm excited to talk about it because
Speaker 1: I read it like it was a while ago. Now
Speaker 1: like it's like five months ago or something. Wow, talk
Speaker 1: about it. I've been like waiting for I've been trying.
Speaker 1: I've been I've been picking bits and pieces of it,
Speaker 1: but unfortunately my book list to get through is way
Speaker 1: too long at the moment, so I've not been able
Speaker 1: to actually dive fully into the text itself. Um, but
Speaker 1: it is definitely on my list after I get through
Speaker 1: my twenty other books I need to read for my job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a lot, it's a lot. Um. At least we
Speaker 1: got to read books for a living. It was something
Speaker 1: adjacent to that. Um. And I mean it is a
Speaker 1: difficult book. I would say to like discussing its entirety,
Speaker 1: and I didn't. I don't intend to not to read
Speaker 1: any preat or anything, Chris, but I don't tend to
Speaker 1: talk about the entire book, you know, because that's like
Speaker 1: several hundred pages, you know, and each chapter covers like
Speaker 1: so so much UM. But I actually wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about chapter four in particular, UM, where the authors explore
Speaker 1: the concept and the origins in a sense of cultures
Speaker 1: UM in one particular set month. I mean, a lot
Speaker 1: of mysteries of the Upper Pelilithic that we don't know, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's why the mysteries UM. But you know,
Speaker 1: we've come to learn, you know, through the course of
Speaker 1: the book that this assumption that everything was just these small,
Speaker 1: tight knit bands, UM, and that was just the entirety
Speaker 1: of the human social arrangement into the states. You know,
Speaker 1: at least it's new to the layman to realize that
Speaker 1: this is not necessarily the case, you know, UM, that
Speaker 1: there is a lot more political structural diversity in that
Speaker 1: time period. We don't know at that point in time,
Speaker 1: you know, what languages PEO who were speaking. You know.
Speaker 1: Of course, linguists have been able to like reconstruct like
Speaker 1: proto languages and stuff. And I mean, I'm just a
Speaker 1: hobby Linquist, just like I'm a hobby everything else. But
Speaker 1: I think it's been really cool to see how I
Speaker 1: think was just able to do that, Like can we
Speaker 1: just take a second and to realize that, like linguist
Speaker 1: able to take scraps of existing languages and just kind
Speaker 1: of piece them together to get a sense of like
Speaker 1: how they're related. Like how do you all do that? Um,
Speaker 1: there's a lots we don't know, right, We don't know
Speaker 1: about their language, don't know about their myths, you know, um,
Speaker 1: their conceptions of the soul, what their favorite foods were.
Speaker 1: You know, they ate, but we don't know what like
Speaker 1: Joe Skeleton thoughts about his breakfast that morning. But what
Speaker 1: we do know is that you know, from the Swiss
Speaker 1: Alps to out Mongolia in the Upper Piolithic people were
Speaker 1: using a lot of the same tools, um, playing a
Speaker 1: lot of similar musical instruments, carving similar rather interesting female figurines, um,
Speaker 1: wearing similar ornaments, and conducting similar funeral rites. And there's
Speaker 1: also reason to believe that people actually traveled a lot
Speaker 1: more than we would expect them to do, and tra
Speaker 1: actually traveled a lot good distances then we would expect
Speaker 1: for that time period. I mean, we don't have they
Speaker 1: didn't have rather you know, like cause or or chariots
Speaker 1: or trains or plans or anything like that. So to
Speaker 1: think that these long distance um journeys were occurring, you know,
Speaker 1: places like Australia or in like North America is just
Speaker 1: really interesting to think about. Yeah, I was one of
Speaker 1: your friend talked about Like one of the things I
Speaker 1: thought was really interesting about this is the way that
Speaker 1: they talk about culture areas where you have these like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have these like very large I mean like almost
Speaker 1: like like half continent sized areas where people are speaking
Speaker 1: similar languages, like the same language, and you have these
Speaker 1: like you have like these clan structures that are like
Speaker 1: you know, you you you can go from like and
Speaker 1: go from like Missouri, and you can end up in
Speaker 1: like Mississippi, and you'll be in a place where they
Speaker 1: still have like you know, the sort of like four
Speaker 1: basic like plan lodges are still the same. You'll beat
Speaker 1: people who are like from your clan. And he has
Speaker 1: this really interesting line about how like sort of kind
Speaker 1: of intuitively like the world's gotten like the world like
Speaker 1: even even when there was like people spread over geographic distance,
Speaker 1: like the world sort of got larger as technology progress
Speaker 1: and not sort of like smaller in the way that
Speaker 1: people sort of think about it, because like I don't
Speaker 1: know instead of there being these sort of like mega
Speaker 1: like culture areas. You can go from one place to
Speaker 1: another and you'll there'll the people who speak the same language,
Speaker 1: and you can sort of slot into the like systems
Speaker 1: that are there. You suddenly have this incredible diversity of
Speaker 1: stuff right right, So I mean specific to like North America.
Speaker 1: You know, Um, we had all these different clan structures
Speaker 1: we usually tend to think of, um, you know, these
Speaker 1: groups says and you know, especially like your immediate relations
Speaker 1: with people that you know, it's like close skin family,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Um. But there's actually, at least
Speaker 1: in some studies of un together as, there's some suggestion
Speaker 1: that their composition can be quite cosmopolitan. So you know,
Speaker 1: you have these these groups and biological relations might only
Speaker 1: make up a small percentage of like total membership. They're
Speaker 1: actually drawn from a wide pool of individuals of a
Speaker 1: larger stretch of area. You know, not all of them
Speaker 1: even speak necessarily the same first language. Um. This is
Speaker 1: YouTuber Indigenous sonics YouTuber named twin Rabbit, and he had
Speaker 1: this excellent, excellent video I need to rewatch it on
Speaker 1: planes Sign language, which is this um method of communication
Speaker 1: that Indigenous Americans um used across you know, the planes
Speaker 1: to conduct trade and diplomacy and discussions, even if they
Speaker 1: didn't share the same language. UM. In Aboriginal Australia, people
Speaker 1: were able to travel halfway across the continent, moving across
Speaker 1: people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find you know,
Speaker 1: camps that had people of you know, their same to
Speaker 1: atomic mighty you know, and those people were we treated
Speaker 1: like their brothers and sisters, you know, so like no
Speaker 1: hanky panky, but you know they had this this you
Speaker 1: know cross continental bond of like hospitality. From the Great Lakes,
Speaker 1: you know, the Louisiana Bayous, you can find settlements of
Speaker 1: people speaking entirely, entirely separate languages, unrelated to their own.
Speaker 1: And yet still you will find you know, bear clans
Speaker 1: or elk clans or beaver clans that were obliged to
Speaker 1: host and feed them, you know. UM. And we could
Speaker 1: only really guess as to like what kind of systems
Speaker 1: were like and how those systems might have worked for
Speaker 1: years ago, you know, in the Upper Pyoithic. But what
Speaker 1: we do see with the you know, similarities and material
Speaker 1: um uniformities and stuff of these different tools and musical
Speaker 1: instruments and stuff suggests that there might be a bit
Speaker 1: of a similar system in place at that time. Roughly
Speaker 1: around like twelve, we see we start seeing like new pottery,
Speaker 1: you know, getting dropped. We started to see the outlines
Speaker 1: of more specific cultures in specific areas, new stone grinding tools,
Speaker 1: new ways of preparing and eating wild grains and roots
Speaker 1: and other vegetables, um, Different ways of chopping, slicing, creating, grinding,
Speaker 1: super can train in boiling and store and smoking and
Speaker 1: preserving meats, plant foods, and fish. And so when we
Speaker 1: start to see something that really brings people together, and
Speaker 1: that is cuisine and cuisine you know, being the birth
Speaker 1: of cuisine, being the booth of like really more specific cultures, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the kinds of soups and porridges and stews
Speaker 1: and broths. And basically what they were talking about was
Speaker 1: the way that people who like wake up and eat
Speaker 1: fish stews every morning tend to you know, develop a
Speaker 1: different center themselves relation to their world compared people who
Speaker 1: might wake up in the morning and eat some porridge
Speaker 1: with like berries and wild oats, you know, and then
Speaker 1: from there they start to develop different tastes and in
Speaker 1: clothing you know, in in dancing and drugs and here styles.
Speaker 1: I remember laster on the book um the David's points
Speaker 1: out that some addigenous um Nat American groups who are
Speaker 1: actually known for specific hair styles. And I kind of
Speaker 1: knew that based on the fact that, you know, we
Speaker 1: tend to associate morehawks with people, you know, morehawkey air style,
Speaker 1: morehawk people, but I didn't realize that, you know, other
Speaker 1: groups also had their own kind of like culturally specific
Speaker 1: hair styles, right, And there's also like courtship rituals and
Speaker 1: forms of kinship and styles of rhetoric, and so of
Speaker 1: course you still have these large cultural areas in the Mesolithic,
Speaker 1: larger than some nation states. But he's starting to see
Speaker 1: a bit more specificity, in a bit more diversity in
Speaker 1: shorter um spans of area. If we look at now,
Speaker 1: for example, where you know, we have in the Amazon
Speaker 1: all these different languages and cultures that co exist merely
Speaker 1: kilometers from each other. I think the overall trend um
Speaker 1: of human cultures, you know, over the past tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of years, has been the opposite of marginalization. And
Speaker 1: it makes me think a bit about the whole concept
Speaker 1: of the nation states and how it tries to like
Speaker 1: bring people together to this like one narrow conception of
Speaker 1: what it means to be you know, X, y Z,
Speaker 1: and how humanity naturally seems to like resist that and
Speaker 1: naturally seems to like split all from that. Like, even
Speaker 1: when you have situations with the forceful spread of English
Speaker 1: in you know, the Caribbean colonies, you still see like
Speaker 1: a diversity springing up with a bunch of different unique
Speaker 1: creoles and dialects making the language something different. You know what,
Speaker 1: if not for the enforcement of language satinization through the
Speaker 1: school system, I think you would actually see an even
Speaker 1: more rapid um explosion of you know, linguistic diversity developing
Speaker 1: out of these creoles and dialects, you know, like a
Speaker 1: couple of centuries. So now you know, Patua and in
Speaker 1: Creole and British English maybe entirely incompatible. Even in Britain itself.
Speaker 1: You know, you might have a case where London English
Speaker 1: and I don't know, Sussex English or whatever starts to
Speaker 1: sound like entirely different. And we already have that with accents.
Speaker 1: But just to see how, you know, even in short
Speaker 1: spaces of time, a short as a century or two,
Speaker 1: because for example, Trinidad, Um was not always an English
Speaker 1: speaking colony. Um. We actually spoke French Creole for the
Speaker 1: most of our history, and only in the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: did we have that period of Anglicization where English was
Speaker 1: you know, brought in Um. And to see that in
Speaker 1: that short space of time, in that handful of centuries
Speaker 1: that you know not already has its own unique English
Speaker 1: based creole, you know, it's just fascinating to see. Um.
Speaker 1: There's something real interesting to me about the way this
Speaker 1: process plays out because it's it's it's almost like because
Speaker 1: you have this sort of like like you have this
Speaker 1: period and it's the Mesolithic. All the period names are
Speaker 1: blinking out of my head. But like like what you say, yeah,
Speaker 1: like you have this period where you have kind of
Speaker 1: like you have a lot of cultural standardization, like spread
Speaker 1: across a long period, like a bunch of places, and
Speaker 1: it's used sort of as a mutual aid thing. It
Speaker 1: allows people to travel because you can go to a
Speaker 1: place and know that like there will be people who
Speaker 1: are like you there and they will take care of you.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting to me. It's like, Okay, so this
Speaker 1: breaks apart as sort of like these these new cultures
Speaker 1: like a people develop local cultures around like food and
Speaker 1: around just like Graver has this thing that he loves
Speaker 1: talking about. These were talking about for ages called scisspo genesis,
Speaker 1: which is like you have two people, you know, was
Speaker 1: like I think, I think there. His position apples like
Speaker 1: a few people who are arguing with each other and
Speaker 1: they like disagree minor ly over like one thing, and
Speaker 1: then by the end of the argument, like they're they've
Speaker 1: they've taken like completely mutually opposed identities to each other
Speaker 1: based on like an incredibly minor disagreement. And you get
Speaker 1: this with yeah, like you get cultures to sort of
Speaker 1: like define themselves against each other and like they have
Speaker 1: things that they like and things that they don't like.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to me that that you see you see
Speaker 1: the state trying to sort of like reimpose the kind
Speaker 1: of like like forty year old cultural homogey on all
Speaker 1: of these places that are like incredibly not homogeous. But
Speaker 1: they're doing it for like the opposite reason. They're doing
Speaker 1: it because they need senatorization in order to sort of
Speaker 1: like make their make their bureaucratic like systems work better
Speaker 1: and make their sort of like seeing like a stage. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and also like like I mean, this is a huge thing.
Speaker 1: Everyone in the in the like the early the late
Speaker 1: nineties and early two thousands thought that like the extent
Speaker 1: of capitalism on the around the globe was going to
Speaker 1: make everything exactly the same, there's only to be one culture,
Speaker 1: and that like kind of really didn't happen. But there
Speaker 1: was this real sort of I don't know, like that
Speaker 1: there was this real sort of fear that that it
Speaker 1: wasn't just gonna be the nation state spreading like comoganization,
Speaker 1: but like capitalism was going to sort of like spread emoganization.
Speaker 1: And I guess I guess the thing that they wound
Speaker 1: up doing aga instead was like figuring out that you
Speaker 1: could just sell everyone into their individual cultural niche, which
Speaker 1: to some extent, yeah, because like we see McDonald's in
Speaker 1: the US and McDonald's in Bangladesh and McDonald's in Japan,
Speaker 1: and they sell all of the same McDonald's stuff, but
Speaker 1: they've also like sort of specified to the you know,
Speaker 1: specific country. Yeah, we have the worst version. The US
Speaker 1: is the worst version of it. By the day. The
Speaker 1: the the like Taiwan has one that has like they
Speaker 1: have like rice sticky rice, patties. It's it's so much
Speaker 1: better than Yeah. I mean, I will say that if
Speaker 1: I did end up traveling to Taiwan, McDonald's probably be
Speaker 1: the last place I would want to go. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: wanted beating there, and we we were we had to
Speaker 1: catch a plane, so we wound up eating like Taiwanese
Speaker 1: Donalds airport food because we had like five minutes. It
Speaker 1: was a you know they say about airplane food. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, that's exactly us about to get into. Actually
Speaker 1: the whole idea of cultural differentiation, you know, um, and
Speaker 1: this this tendency of humans have to subdivide and to
Speaker 1: distinguish themselves from their neighbors. And I mean it's natural
Speaker 1: to assume that, you know, this differentiation comes from like
Speaker 1: differences and like language, you know, with you know, language
Speaker 1: splitting off over the centuries and people associating with the
Speaker 1: native language and ethnicity. But I already tell the full story,
Speaker 1: you know, Like, for example, in northern California in the
Speaker 1: early century, the ethern linguistic map had really a jumble
Speaker 1: of languages that drew from entirely different language families. You know,
Speaker 1: it's distant from one another, as like Arabic and Tamil
Speaker 1: and Portuguese. And yet these groups still shared you know,
Speaker 1: broad similarities. You know, how they went to board gathering
Speaker 1: and processing food, you know, their most important religious rituals,
Speaker 1: how they organized their political life. Um. And they also
Speaker 1: managed to keep themselves distinct. You know, you had the
Speaker 1: Iuroque and the Hoop and the Karak and so forth.
Speaker 1: And I mean to some extent, these identities did map
Speaker 1: on to linguistic differences, but their neighbors who spoke different
Speaker 1: languages still had more in common with them than people
Speaker 1: who came from their same language family in another part
Speaker 1: of North America. Of course, you know, European colonization had
Speaker 1: like a severe impact on like how neat Americans were distributed. Um.
Speaker 1: But we still tend to see this trend of how
Speaker 1: like these modern nation states they went around at the
Speaker 1: time to you know, or the population. And since these
Speaker 1: neat ethno linguistic groups. You know, this idea that the
Speaker 1: world should be divided into these like homogeneous units with
Speaker 1: their own history and everyone has a claim to like
Speaker 1: a certain territory and all that. It's mean, it's really
Speaker 1: a concept that is going onto this mythology of the
Speaker 1: nation state and you know, of course, we have to
Speaker 1: be real careful before we project those kind of uniformity
Speaker 1: is back in time. Yeah, it's definitely really like two
Speaker 1: years old, like it's it's pretty young. Yeah, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: But um, there are some concerns, you know, with the
Speaker 1: concept of culture areas, because that whole notion of culture
Speaker 1: areas came out of North American museums who wanted to
Speaker 1: arrange their stolen artifacts to illustrate their theories of the
Speaker 1: different stages of human adaptation, you know, like Colover's lower
Speaker 1: savagery and upper savagery and Lober lower barbarism and so on.
Speaker 1: And so they had in whether they're in organize these
Speaker 1: artifacts based on like language, family, or regional clusters um
Speaker 1: or some sort of like traced history of of of
Speaker 1: regional of ancient migrations. Right. Eventually they realized that, you know,
Speaker 1: this way of organizing into regional clusters seem to work best.
Speaker 1: The art and technology of different Eastern Woodlands tribes had
Speaker 1: some very similar um things in common compared to like
Speaker 1: trying to group people based on like say the Athabaskan
Speaker 1: language or all the people who relied on fishing, or
Speaker 1: all people cultivate to me is um and they were
Speaker 1: able to find similar patterns in the neolithic villages of
Speaker 1: Central Europe, you know, finding these regional clusters of domestic
Speaker 1: life and art and ritual and so like this whole
Speaker 1: cultural area concept is kind of a way of pushing
Speaker 1: back against this way have you know, talking about humanistry
Speaker 1: that like ranked populations into higher or lower anything. You know,
Speaker 1: this this idea of of claiming that you know, people
Speaker 1: were of a certain superior genetic stock and vicious sign
Speaker 1: ad fance level of technological evolution and so rather this,
Speaker 1: there's been there was a shift in anthropological focus to
Speaker 1: look at the diffusion of more cultural traits like ceramics
Speaker 1: and sweat lodges and you know, the treatment of young
Speaker 1: men or certain sports um as. They wanted to try
Speaker 1: to understand how these different tribes of certain region came
Speaker 1: to share this mesh of culture traits. So one of
Speaker 1: the people who were thinking on this you know, whole
Speaker 1: culture traits cluster idea um it was guy named bous Right,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to figure out why is that, Like
Speaker 1: geography seemed to define the circulation of ideas, you know,
Speaker 1: with like mountains and deserts from these natural barriers, and
Speaker 1: how basically the diffusion within those regions was basically historical accident,
Speaker 1: a legal hypothesizing that there was some sort of like
Speaker 1: way to eventually develop a kind of a natural science
Speaker 1: developing how and even predicting the ebb and flow of styles, habits,
Speaker 1: and social forms, and eventually muscle Mouse pulls up, you know,
Speaker 1: and he's basically taught he basically, like right, a bunch
Speaker 1: of essays on nationalism and civilization, and he says, it's basically,
Speaker 1: this whole idea of cultural diffusion is nonsense because it's
Speaker 1: based on a false assumption. And the false assumption is
Speaker 1: that the movement of people, technologies, and ideas is some
Speaker 1: sort of rarity, something unusual. Instead, Mouse argues that like,
Speaker 1: people in past times traveled even more than people do today,
Speaker 1: and it's just that when these people interact with people
Speaker 1: of other cultures and they see their cultural traits, they
Speaker 1: reflect on that and find a way to relate that
Speaker 1: to their own cultures. Right, so that people who are
Speaker 1: traveling back then, obviously all of them, you know, we're
Speaker 1: aware of basketry, you know, or or or feather works
Speaker 1: or whatever the case may be that other people were
Speaker 1: using a couple of miles away seem to be said
Speaker 1: for like certain drum rhythms or certain you know, games,
Speaker 1: or like For example, he spent some time focusing on
Speaker 1: the distribution of the ball games around the Pacific Ocean,
Speaker 1: around the Pacific Rim from Japan's New Zealand to California,
Speaker 1: and what he realized is that while the people pick
Speaker 1: up certain ideas certain traits from other cultures, comes down
Speaker 1: to how they'd want to be defined against their neighbors,
Speaker 1: against their closest neighbors. The question becomes less about why
Speaker 1: certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn't.
Speaker 1: Because if you were aware of all the things that
Speaker 1: your neighbors and stuff are doing, all these foreign customs
Speaker 1: and arts and technologies. I mean, we know that the
Speaker 1: Silk Road, for example, when we talk about the Silk Road,
Speaker 1: you know, we had a Silk roup growing from China
Speaker 1: all the way into Europe and all across the Silk Root,
Speaker 1: all across Central Asia and West Asia. And despite that
Speaker 1: constant you know, sharing of ideas, not every idea that
Speaker 1: you know came from China or came from Pussia, or
Speaker 1: I don't know if Pussia was around during the Silk Rude.
Speaker 1: But you know what I'm saying, like, not every idea
Speaker 1: that was along the Silk roud everyone necessarily picked up on,
Speaker 1: even if it was a technology that might have benefited them,
Speaker 1: because cultures effectively structures of refusal. So for example, um,
Speaker 1: there's this guy on YouTube Religion for Breakfast. He did
Speaker 1: a video recently on the pork taboo in certain cultures
Speaker 1: and certain religions, right, And one of the things he
Speaker 1: pointed out was that the taboo tends to be strengthened
Speaker 1: in times of like repression so for example, or in
Speaker 1: times of cultural um definition. So for example, he was
Speaker 1: pointing out that in the period of Roman conquest, the
Speaker 1: Jewish people were more inclined to define themselves as you know,
Speaker 1: against the consumption of pork, compared to the Romans. You know,
Speaker 1: for example, the Chinese are the people who use chopsticks.
Speaker 1: You know, they don't use knives in four so you're
Speaker 1: the tie of people who use spoons and so on.
Speaker 1: You know, it could just you say it said that.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like aesthetics, like styles of art or
Speaker 1: music or TV man and of course those things won't differ,
Speaker 1: but even like technologies that have like an adaptive or
Speaker 1: utilitarian benefits might still be might it might still be
Speaker 1: refused by people who might even benefit from them. For for
Speaker 1: for example, the Athabaskans in Alaska refused to use Inuit
Speaker 1: kayaks despite the fact that there are a lot better
Speaker 1: suited for the environment and their own boots, and the Inuit,
Speaker 1: for example, don't use Athabaskan snow shoes um at least
Speaker 1: in the time that Marster Mouse is writing. And then,
Speaker 1: of course this is a self conscious process, you know,
Speaker 1: this is a process where a debate and discussion of
Speaker 1: all these different customs would have been occurring. You know,
Speaker 1: for example, pull in the Chinese courts, when different foreign
Speaker 1: styles and customs would you come into the lands, There
Speaker 1: will be debates and arguments put forward by you know,
Speaker 1: the kings and the advisors and their vassals, you know, discussing,
Speaker 1: you know, whether they would ride the horses or drive chariots,
Speaker 1: or adopt like the man chew dress codes and customs.
Speaker 1: And so society's mouth said lived by boring from each other.
Speaker 1: But they define themselves by the refusal of boring than
Speaker 1: by its acceptance. The question of how culture areas form
Speaker 1: and how cultures split off is definitely a political one.
Speaker 1: The decision to adopt a certain form of agriculture, or
Speaker 1: to cultivate a certain crop more specifically, or to adopt
Speaker 1: a certain style of dress. It's not just like a
Speaker 1: matter of like mere utility of maya or caloric advantage
Speaker 1: or material efficiency, or it's also a reflection and questioning
Speaker 1: of the values that that group of people holds or
Speaker 1: purport to hold, who they consider themselves to be. I
Speaker 1: like to think about the development of cultures, you know,
Speaker 1: I like to think about how our ancestors are, distant
Speaker 1: ancestors even consider themselves. You know, it's easy to just
Speaker 1: fall into this trap because it's a very common cultural
Speaker 1: troop that you know, once you go before the invention
Speaker 1: of writing or whatever, all of all answers, tos are
Speaker 1: just like booga boogle cave men kind of thing. But
Speaker 1: to think of them as self conscious and politically um conscious,
Speaker 1: politically considerate, thoughtful actors, not you know, static or passive
Speaker 1: props um. It's just I think it's it's I think
Speaker 1: it's just very cool. I think it's very cool, and
Speaker 1: I think we should keep you know, these developments, these
Speaker 1: this recognition in mind as we you know, in the
Speaker 1: modern time look to try to transform the cultures we
Speaker 1: live under and to try to develop new values, new
Speaker 1: values of like anti authority, nism and anti capitalism and
Speaker 1: of you know, agreed to priority on mutual aid and
Speaker 1: on egalitarian and social relations. Yeah. I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot of very interesting political consequences of of thinking about this,
Speaker 1: because like I think that there there's sort of like
Speaker 1: two tendencies that that we sort of get stuck in
Speaker 1: when we think about like our social structures, which is
Speaker 1: there's there's there's one which is the sort of like
Speaker 1: I guess it's called capitalist realism, which is the assumption
Speaker 1: that like nothing else could possibly like this is the
Speaker 1: only system that works, nothing else can possibly exist, and
Speaker 1: that's unproductive. And you know, you go back and you
Speaker 1: look at like any other culture or society and it's like, well, no,
Speaker 1: like there's there's like an unbelievable, like nearly infinite number
Speaker 1: of ways you can organize your society. But then I think,
Speaker 1: I think the second one is that like, yeah, if
Speaker 1: you look at this sort of cultural fusion and culture
Speaker 1: refusal stuff, you see a lot of examples of people
Speaker 1: doing stuff that like under sort of like classical economic
Speaker 1: or like sociological laws, they shouldn't be doing right, Like,
Speaker 1: there there's no reason why you shouldn't using more efficient
Speaker 1: canoe if you're in a place of the part of
Speaker 1: the world that's like extremely hard to surviving, right. And
Speaker 1: I think that there's this tendency to sort of like
Speaker 1: reduced culture, reduced just all of the ways that our
Speaker 1: social and political systems function to these sort of like oh,
Speaker 1: the the product of these like abstract historical forces and
Speaker 1: like it's all like tech, it's all determined by technology,
Speaker 1: and like how you farm and stuff. It's just not true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, not to say, the material conditions on you know,
Speaker 1: very important in understanding UM, you know, how these cultures develop,
Speaker 1: and that's one part of UM. I don't have everything
Speaker 1: that I found was a bit lacking. I think that
Speaker 1: not all the time those thoughts were clearly connected. Oh,
Speaker 1: i'd see. But I do think people put too much
Speaker 1: stock in solely material materialist um explanations and that kind
Speaker 1: of ends up precluding or leaving out the more messy
Speaker 1: human round of explanation. Yeah, And I think I think
Speaker 1: part of why this happens is that, like, it's much
Speaker 1: if you assume everyone is like behaving a quality to
Speaker 1: historical forces or like the thing that they're trying to
Speaker 1: do is like maximize um, they're trying to maximize their
Speaker 1: utility and they're trying to like maximize the amount of
Speaker 1: calories they have. It that that's a very easy thing
Speaker 1: to like you like think about numerically, right, Like it's
Speaker 1: a very easy thing to refuse the numbers. It's extremely
Speaker 1: difficult to refuse the numbers, like to reduce to like
Speaker 1: reduce two numbers. A society that is like I'm going
Speaker 1: to I'm going to intentionally make my life harder for
Speaker 1: myself because this is the way we do things, and
Speaker 1: we've decided we don't want to do things like other people.
Speaker 1: We've decided that we have some kind of political value
Speaker 1: that we have that makes it such that we're going
Speaker 1: to like induce difficulty into our lives and like that,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like that that kind of stuff. The
Speaker 1: the fact that culture is not just a sort of
Speaker 1: like superstructure that gets that's like a product of like
Speaker 1: some kind of economic base like that that is very
Speaker 1: important and something that gets ignored or downplayed constantly that
Speaker 1: I think I don't know, and like I think, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think you can argue that everything like
Speaker 1: maybe goes too far in the other direction. But I'm
Speaker 1: I'm sort of okay with that, just because we've been
Speaker 1: so far on the side of like everything is historical
Speaker 1: forces for so long that you need something to remind
Speaker 1: people that, like, societies make conscious political choices, and not
Speaker 1: only have they made conscious political choices for like tiens
Speaker 1: of thousands of years, like we also can make conscious
Speaker 1: political choices that are not just sort of like pure
Speaker 1: reflections of like how are many tons of iron have
Speaker 1: been extracted? And like what percentage of like workers are
Speaker 1: currently working in hospitals versus like making cookies or something. Right,
Speaker 1: Thank you for that, oh analysis, Chris, I agree that
Speaker 1: that's a joke, Like twelve people will get I I
Speaker 1: love you if you if you understand that joke. Also,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, yes, so you can wrap it up, Carson. Um,
Speaker 1: all of this has been very fascinating. What what I've
Speaker 1: learned the most is that I need to finished reading
Speaker 1: all my books so that I can read the Dawn
Speaker 1: of Everything. Um, I know, I like, I like got
Speaker 1: it from my dad for Christmas, because um, because I
Speaker 1: knew that it would be uh, at least I think
Speaker 1: I did. My memory could be I could actually be wrong.
Speaker 1: I could have only intended to get it for my
Speaker 1: dad for Christmas and forgotten to actually get it. But
Speaker 1: I've been reading it to have been meeting to both
Speaker 1: buy it for myself and get it for other people
Speaker 1: because I've heard a lot of interesting things about the book.
Speaker 1: So it is definitely on my list. It's been a
Speaker 1: pleasure listening to. Uh, you'll discuss it, um Andrew. Where
Speaker 1: can If people want to check out more of your
Speaker 1: your work? Where could where could they go about that? Right? So,
Speaker 1: you can still find me on Twitter and underscore see
Speaker 1: and Drew when I'm not um hiding, And you could
Speaker 1: also find me on YouTube andrewism, YouTube dot com, slash andreism,
Speaker 1: where I post videos about all sort of stuff, random stuff.
Speaker 1: You know that I'm thinking about politics, history, Well that
Speaker 1: Jazz A few days ago, as the time of recording,
Speaker 1: UM Andrew put out a wonderful video on the solar
Speaker 1: punk stuff. Um. I have no idea what this episode
Speaker 1: will air, so that it's probably been like a month
Speaker 1: or two or something, but definitely check out the Anderism channel.
Speaker 1: It's one of my favorite spots too. Uh watch something.
Speaker 1: When I feel like I can't put a new words
Speaker 1: on the page, I go watch your things because it's
Speaker 1: very helpful. M Yeah, so that doesn't for us today.
Speaker 1: You can find us that Twitter and on Twitter and
Speaker 1: Instagram at Happened here pod Calls out Media. You can
Speaker 1: find me posting about hyper objects and liminal spaces at
Speaker 1: Hungry bow Tie And I heard that you have a Twitter, Chris. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's at mc HR three. You can find me mostly
Speaker 1: complaining about other people who are doing communism wrong. I
Speaker 1: guess that most of what I post about. Love that
Speaker 1: for you. You two will be able to differentiate between
Speaker 1: the sixteen different for ecceitly, which there's not even sixteen.
Speaker 1: There used to be long ago in a galaxy far
Speaker 1: far away, and made a decision, and that was that
Speaker 1: I was going to sacrifice my brain to understand the
Speaker 1: different kinds of Maoism and if too want to understand
Speaker 1: why it still exists in all twenty varieties of them, Yeah,
Speaker 1: go there. If you don't want to do that, do not.
Speaker 1: You'll be happier. Well, what a ringing endorsement. Uh, goodbye,
Speaker 1: everyone go. I don't know, should should we should we
Speaker 1: plug up? Pull at the other shows? Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: everyone's tune out at this point. I hope they've all
Speaker 1: stopped the podcast player. I think. I think, uh yes,
Speaker 1: go outside and be free there, I can you can
Speaker 1: you can edit that into something that is more concise. Sorry,
Speaker 1: Daniel Slash, I don't care. It could happen here as
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media. Well more podcasts from
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
Speaker 1: or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Speaker 1: cool zone Media dot com Slash sources. Thanks for listening.