E. N. Anderson

Fascist America?        

The United States is teetering on the edge of fascism or some very similar totalitarian regime, and only prompt action can save it.  The modern United States is hopelessly lost trying to deal with long-term, wide-flung concerns, notably environment and education.  Steady deterioration of social solidarity—from civics education to politics to plain personal responsibility—is the immediate problem; corporate narrowness lies behind it.

My wife Barbara Anderson and I have now spent several years researching genocide and its epidemiology.  The present posting derives from that systematic research and analysis.

Historical precedent from dozens of cases in dozens of countries makes it very hard to escape the conclusion that, if certain present trends continue, the United States will very soon have a totalitarian regime.  It will bring racial and religious discrimination and will become massively corrupt.  It will go on to eliminate liberal and minority leadership by torture and extermination,   The current combination of economic decline and virulent hate produced exactly that scenario in dozens of cases in the 20^th century.  To my knowledge, no country reached the levels of hatred combined with economic decline now seen in the United States without going through a brutal, totalitarian period.   The fact that the United States is a democracy, and the fact that very few of even the extreme right wing really wants to kill large numbers of people, both do offer protection.  But one could say the same of Germany in 1932, or Iran in 1953, or most of the other countries with bloody records.  Past a certain point, totalitarianism takes on a logic of its own.  (On this and what follows, see esp. Kiernan 2007; Rummel 1994, 1998.) 

Recent examples are too numerous to list, but consider just the democracies that have endured dictatorial periods in recent decades:  Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Lebanon, Philippines, Serbia, Thailand, and quite a few more.  The above nations span the supposed “spectrum” from “left” to “right.” 

The situation facing the United States, in which the giant production interests have joined forces with the most repressive and bigoted elements of society to rule the nation, now exists in Burma, China, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, and a couple of dozen other countries.  If you want to see what is possible, look at Burma and Iran in particular.  Not only is there mass killing; there is economic stagnation.  China’s supposedly impressive economic growth, which has made many people look to it as a model, is an illusion; the figures have no relation to reality (see e.g. Abe and Nickum 2009; Tilt 2009). 

            In the 1930s, most of Europe went fascist under similar circumstances: apparently hopeless economic decline coupled with virulent ethnic and political hates.  England and America stayed out because the people were still hopeful.  Only fear of continued decline, and thus of increasing competition from those hated minorities, makes a majority actually choose fascism.  Sadly, it is universal human nature under such circumstances to take out one’s fear and anger on scapegoats.

With any kind of hope or stability, one can bear downward mobility and go on, but individuals hit by multiple problems are almost certain to fall into denial and hate. 

Most Americans have a vague sense that fascism means hating Jews.  In fact, fascism is an economic and political system, designed largely by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s.  It was not originally anti-Jewish, and many fascists have not cared one way or another about the Jews; Hitler’s anti-Semitism was widely but wrongly equated with fascism.  Fascism is actually defined by totalitarian government and by fusion of government with giant firms, so that both politics and the economy are controlled by rigid, top-down, authoritarian hierarchies.  Religion was also controlled that way in Mussolini’s and Franco’s Catholic countries, providing a symmetrical picture.  Fascism is also characterized by oppression of women, the poor, and minorities; any minority may be hated if it provides a convenient scapegoat.  

Fascism led to mass murders when its authoritarian leaders were challenged.  All the great fascist massacres have occurred under three circumstances:  when a regime was new and consolidating itself; when its power was threatened by popular uprising and civil unrest; and when it was in a war and fearing loss.  Hitler’s “final solution” came only when the tide of World War II turned against it.  Later fascist genocides (Guatemala in the 1980s, Sudan in the 2000s, and so on) occurred when guerrilla activity broke out in areas suffering from government neglect and discrimination.  

In the United States, nascent fascism appears in the Patriot Act and other measures that limit or suspend Constitutional freedoms and guarantees, and in the extreme racism, religious bigotry, and political hatred that now characterize the nation.  The G. W. Bush administration instituted torture, “rendition,” illegal wiretapping, illegal covert surveillance of other kinds, and a general attitude that the executive branch could do anything they wanted to, without consulting Congress or anyone else.  They eliminated oversight on several levels, tried to limit Constitutional freedoms, and did everything they could to allow arbitrary arrest and detention.  The ostensible excuse was “terrorism”; administration personnel, apparently quite seriously, accused the National Education Association of being a terrorist organization for opposing some of Bush’s educational reforms, and accused environmentalists across the board of terrorism because a few did indeed indulge in sabotage and violence—deplorable, certainly, but hardly an adequate excuse for apparently condemning a whole movement.  In general, the Bush administration moved toward secrecy and totalitarian actions on all fronts.  The Obama administration has done essentially nothing to reverse this, and totalitan repression is firmly in place in the United States as an option. 

This is not to say that anyone right now intends to take over and heat up the gas ovens.  Our work shows that leaders very rarely start out to be despots.  They move into that position gradually, as their policies make the economy worse and often bring civil unrest or rebellion.  Worsening economies cause worsening social tensions, and if there is a genuine civil outbreak, the temptation to crack down is harder and harder to resist.

The recession since 2008 has made worse the already serious levels of hatred.  Religious bigotry, racism, political hatreds, and class tensions have been intense and dangerous for years, and are now out of control, as anyone can see by watching Fox News or looking at the comments at the ends of on-line news stories.  These comments—the voice of an increasingly numerous and vocal group, obviously—are really quite incredible. 

In the United States today, hatred is shared by right and left, which is, of course, particularly disturbing.  Both old-time liberals and old-time conservatives would have little patience with the current mix of authoritarianism, subversion of the Constitution, government favoring of big business, and social hatreds.  The stalwart conservatives of my youth—anti-Communist, pro-small business, patriotic, and so on—seem to have disappeared.  The old-time liberals, devoted to helping the ordinary worker by leveling the political playing field, also seem embattled.  Labels like “capitalism” and “socialism” are also markedly unhelpful today.  We are dealing with a new and really ugly system that does not respect the old-fashioned political lines.  It is not what used to be called “capitalism.”  

Hatred of, and scapegoating of, “different” people is a human universal, and must be constantly fought or else it takes over and dominates politics.  We have seen this in every nation and group on earth.

 “It can happen here,” and it will happen unless major efforts are undertaken immediately.

Economic Decline Leads to Reactionary Politics

We are now rapidly moving toward lowered hope in the United States—at least the polls of consumer hopefulness say so. 

This recession differs from the 1930s in two very important ways.  First, it comes after a long decline in wages—real wages and real working-class incomes have been declining (unevenly) since 1972.  A great deal of this decline has come about through progressive offshoring of manufacturing and other skilled and high-wage jobs, and the rise of abysmal dead-end service jobs. 

Most of it, however, has come from the concentration of more and more economic and political power, as well as wealth, in fewer and fewer hands (see e.e. Kutter 2008; Rothkopf 2008).  The extreme gap between wealth and poverty is bad enough, but more serious is the dominance of American life by a relatively small number of giant firms.  Almost all areas of economic activity are now dominated by a few majors.  The hundreds of drug and medical firms of the 1960s have narrowed down to half a dozen “Big Pharma” companies.  Oil is concentrated in a few giant firms.  Chemicals, agribusiness, food processing, and, increasingly, retailing have followed.  They are now transnational, and are taking over the world, with catastrophic effects for many (Ellerman 2005; Collier 2007; Humphreys et al. 2007). 

The giant firms can use their immense wealth to buy political power—donating to candidates, influencing regulatory agencies, threatening activists and whistle-blowers, and bribing politicians outright (cf. Wedel 2010).  One thing they buy is subsidies.  The US taxpayers hand over uncounted billions of dollars to giant firms (see Waxman and Green 2009).  The big oil corporations get the biggest chunk (see Antonia Juhasz 2008).  Farm subsidies also go to the biggest farmers, and specifically to those who produce “commodity crops”:  Staple grains, soybeans, cotton.  This encourages the large-scale monocropping that is maximally dangerous to the environment.  Small farmers get little or no subsidy money, and thus go under.  This is uneconomic, but is favored by the Farm Bureau (ever the representative of the larger farmers) and kept going by farm-state politicians.  Another trick is getting tax breaks and tax cuts, or simply making sure that tax laws are not enforced (Johnson 2003, 2007).  The George W. Bush administration cut enforcement almost completely (Johnson 2007).

ExxonMobil, the biggest corporation in the world, made $11,680,000,000 profits in the second quarter of 2008 and $14,800,000,000 in the third, setting an all-time world record.  This company has been an extremely bad corporate citizen.  It has funded the disinformation campaign on global warming.  It have been involved in underhanded dealings and local violence in many countries.  It funded a great deal of the Republican national convention in 2008, and the result is clearly visible in the natural-resource components of the Republican platform—especially the focus on more oil drilling and the downplaying of both alternative energy and global warming.  And it gets millions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies—including freedom from worry about regulations and rules being enforced very strictly.

Gigantism has invaded government and education too.  One of the worst problems here is that the waste and boodling in the system is concentrated at the top, but any cuts—including those intended to eliminate waste—are taken out of the bottom, where the actual work is done.  The high bureaucrats can protect their positions and salaries, passing all cuts downward through the system.  The University of California (where I work) is typical.  A rapidly increasing mass of higher administrators do little (if anything) beyond making sure their huge salaries are not seriously cut as libraries, student services, and teaching positions are being cut to the bone.  Fast-increasing student fees are increasingly going to support a vast, parasitic bureaucracy.  One can sympathize with anti-government agitators, but when they get their way and cut government spending, the libraries and students suffer even more, while the fat cats continue to protect themselves. 

The rise of managerial bureaucrats has come at the expense not only of workers but also of old-fashioned bosses.  The boss had a literally vested interest in his firm.  If it went down, he was ruined, financially and socially.  Not so with today’s CEOs and managers; they go on to the next big job, no matter what their performance.  Time magazine reported that the motto around Goldman Sachs before the crash was “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone” (often shortened to IBG YBG).  We all know about the revolving door between government, big business, and education.  Such administrators have no incentive to look out for anything but themselves, and ever-increasing incentive to look out for themselves at the expense of the system. 

The US decline after 1980 was addressed by massive deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s.  This was counterproductive.  The 2008 economic meltdown occurred because of deregulation and failure to enforce even the regulations that survived.  Steady pullback on government regulation and oversight of business began with Reagan and continued unabated through the Clinton presidency, then shifted into high gear under George W. Bush.  From the Securities and Exchange Commission to the IRS, oversight and enforcement agencies were both cut back and told to serve their rich clients (as opposed to the country).  The rich thus shifted from profitable investment to speculation, predatory mergers, offshoring of capital, and other techniques that paid better in the short run.  By 2008, the country had hemorrhaged jobs, capital, and investment.  The economy was in the position of a man sawing off the branch he is sitting on.  The branch fell in November. 

Not only were regulations repealed; the regulations that survived were not enforced.  By 2008, when the roof fell in, Bernard Madoff could get away with stealing over $170 billion dollars (see National Public Radio, Seattle Times, New York Times, etc., for March 11-12, 2008).  The Securities and Exchange Commission and other enforcement agencies never made a sound; SEC employees interviewed on National Public Radio on March 12, 2008, said they knew about the problems but were scared to go after Madoff.  They reported that the higher-ups in the Bush administration had made it clear that important people were not to be bothered.  Thousands of similar cases of shady dealings also surfaced, as well as many stories of corruption in government.

Basically, people are getting poorer—not necessarily in nominal dollars, but certainly in resources.  Meanwhile necessities are increasing; a functional American has to have credit cards, a cellphone, a computer, and all sorts of other things we did not need 30 years ago. 

The poor currently make up 1/6 of Americans, with rapid increases in desperate poverty—even among those with steady jobs, for bosses are no longer under any pressure to pay even living wages.  (See Tony Pugh, “Many Americans Are Falling Deeper into Depths of Poverty,” McClatchy Newspapers, Feb. 26, 2007; Seattle Times, p. A3.)  The result was a situation in which both parties vied to see who could repeal the most regulations protecting the economy

To keep up with necessities, everyone but the super-rich has to cut back steadily on quality.  Also, consumerism is promoted not only by the corporations but also by the government; we are supposed to buy, to keep the economy going.  Efficiency, throughput minimization, recycling, and above all simplicity would make infinitely more and better economic sense, but we are living in a world where the giant corporations impose accounting and measuring systems that count throughput as “gain” and savings as mere loss.  Eventually resources will have to run out.  Cuts are naturally kicked down the socioeconomic scale, making the poor worse and worse off. 

Of course, the poorest have to turn to crime to stay afloat, but more and more of the rich turn to crime also, as enforcement breaks down.  This is already the rule in semiperipheral countries that often supply dubious commodities to the core nations:  Mexico and Colombia, eastern Europe, Thailand.  It is fast becoming the rule in the United States.

All this adds up to one thing:  loss of grassroots action due to passivization.  The rise of bigness, specifically of giant corporations that fuse public and private, not only destroys everything directly; it structurally disempowers people.  The elites of giant organizations want everybody passive, and they work deliberately toward that end, but the real force making people passive is the sheer hopelessness of going against the system.  (Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon made this point already in 1991, as quoted by Ellerman 2005:220.)

People have lost control of their lives.  They have become mere passive consumers, their lives dominated entirely by giant corporations (business, government, education, and even church—the new megachurches and the old hierarchic organizations).  What was different about the early 20th century was that people had to work—usually physically, and in ways that forced them to show initiative and responsibility.  Above all, they had to work together.  Mutual cooperation and mutual aid are what make folk society, social life, sane politics, and real concern for social issues.  Passivity leads to giving up on nature, exercise, and civic life, and leads also to overeating, TV and internet addiction, and educational apathy (Putnam 1993, 2000).  It also leads to the political extremism of our time (on emotion in politics, see Westen 2007).  This is less “passive” but no less a denial of personal and social responsibility.

Another result of gigantism and nonaccountable bureaucracy has been the steady deterioration of the quality of life.  Consumer goods, the urban environment, the media, and eeducation are all getting steadily shabbier, uglier, and worse.  America is becoming a vast suburban sprawl punctuated by shopping centers that are all identical—the same chain stores selling the same bottom-quality stuff, everywhere.  People have become increasingly used to this, and insist less and less on quality.

If there is one most dangerous change in the United States, though, it is the disappearance of newspapers and other thoughtful media (see Bennett et al. 2007).  Investigative reporting is now down to a tiny residual presence at perhaps half a dozen newspapers nationwide.  People now rely on Fox News and the blogosphere for information. 

In the absence of investigative reporting and full accurate journalism, everything from biological evolution to the dangers of smoking is denied.  Scientific findings on the absurdity of racism are denounced as “mere political correctness.”  We are now in a world where information is managed by people who model themselves after Joseph Goebbels and his “Big Lie.”  A world in which people can deny global warming and claim that inoculations are a bad thing is a world on the edge of collapse.  The giant firms are behind this, funding “think tanks” and disinformation campaigns (see Bowen 2008; Michaels 2008; Mooney 2005; Oreskes and Conway 2010; Stauber and Rampton 1996).  To the extent that the firms and think tanks depend on government subsidies, taxpayers’ dollars are going to support campaigns of lies, intimidation, and deception that are hurting said taxpayers seriously.  Junk physics, junk biology, junk nutritional science, junk psychology, and other campaigns of lies have created a whole worldview based on denial. 

This goes far beyond the ostensible issues—global warming and so on.  The goal of the right has been to discredit science in general, leaving the regulatory agencies and public health authorities with no credibility.  Virtually all scientists who are not long retired or in the pay of the giant corporations are aware that evolution and global warming are real.  There is really no debate on this.  The right wing, however, is not content with claiming there is debate; they portray evolution, global warming, the problems with pesticides and pollution, and other issues as actual lies fabricated by science because science is a “liberal establishment” that is devoted to spreading liberal causes rather than truth.  On the other hand, certain scientists have not helped the situation by militantly pushing atheism, often in ways maximally calculated to offend anyone even slightly religious.  It is not lost on the religious that this atheism is mere opinion, and uninformed at that; this puts the whole scientific enterprise under a cloud.

The whole scientific enterprise is under total attack.  This was characteristic of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.  It is also the natural heir of the wild-eyed religious movements of the Dark Ages.  Fake science is our equivalent to the lunatic-fringe heresies and millennarian movements. 

The United States today also gives maximum opportunities for impulsiveness and for ruining one’s life.  Drugs, in particular, are freely available; the “war on drugs” never got anywhere, partly because of selective political donations by large-scale drug-lords in Miami and elsewhere.

Cultural Moves

The Tea Party movement had early appeal to small-government activists and other dissidents who could at least theoretically be well-meaning and hopeful.  However, under constant pressure from the Fox News crowd, it now seems increasingly dedicated to traditional hatreds and to repressive government.  More and more, Tea Party activists support such things as the Patriot Act (which undercuts the U. S. Constitution seriously), and such outright fascist legislation as Arizona’s “immigration” law.  (The latter was quickly followed by a ban on Chicano Studies; the association proved that the target of the law was Mexican-Americans in general, not illegal immigrants.)  If the Tea Party actually opposed big government, they would start by attacking subsidies and corporate welfare.  They have been totally silent about those.

The current right-wing extremism in the United States is a resurfacing of a general set of ideas that have been associated since the days of John Calhoun and the Know-Nothing Party.  They surfaced in the Ku Klux Klan and later in McCarthyism and Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats, then George Wallace’s and Orval Faubus’ brief flourishing in resistance to the civil rights movement.  They have not changed much.  They unite racism, anti-immigrant zealotry, militarism, and sexism including hysterical hatred of gays and “liberated women.”  They have always combined claims of being “against big government” with aggressive attacks on First Amendment freedoms and on civil rights in general.  They have even come to view advocating a healthy diet as “food Nazism”—apparently because of disinformation spread by giant food corporations.

There is steady growth in the reactionary religious movement that seeks to return women to “submission,” homosexuals to the closet (or prison), and people in general to subservience.  It has gained tremendous political power (Donke and Coe 2007; Phillips 2006; Spence 2007).  The George W. Bush administration almost made fundamentalist Christianity into an official state church, and claims that the United States is a “Christian country” continue to surface.   (Not only was the United States founded by a mix of Christians, deists, Jews, and atheists, but fundamentalism—now equated with Christianity in the political rhetoric—did not exist in the 18^th century; it was created in the late 19^th century.)  The Bush administration also apparently stopped enforcing civil rights laws, except when whites were the aggrieved parties. 

Extremism in earlier days were evenly distributed between parties.  In fact, the real racist-jingoist leaders of the 1950s and 1960s were Democrats—southern senators and congressmen like Strom Thurmond (a Democrat back then), or governors like George Wallace.  Both the Democratic and Republican parties also included plenty of good people.  Even the stuffy small-business persons that were the mainstream Republicans of my childhood were generally well-meaning and harmless. 

In the 1950s, well-to-do people voted Republican and poorer ones voted Democrat, with little except regional traditions to confuse that division.  In the 2000s, both the rich and the poor were split 50-50.  The Republican vote was associated with the primary-production world, and with the less educated, more religious, more rural voters.  The Democrat vote was overwhelmingly urban, and most Democrats were involved in secondary and tertiary economic sectors.  Maps showing “blue states” and “red states” were misleading; more detailed maps showed all states as urban spots of bright blue in a vast sea of red.  In the 2004 and 2008 elections, the Republicans’ biggest single base of support was actually the white poor.

Today, the Republican Party has narrowed down until it is little more than the voice for the Know-Nothing element.  Only 24% of American voters are registered Republicans.  Most of the traditional conservatives seem to have split from the Republican Party and become independents. 

The Republican Party still contains a fair number of the old-fashioned honorable conservatives, but the party leadership has been assumed by the outright extremists; Rush Limbaugh declared himself head of the party in 2010, and no one contradicted him.  Basically, the American right—from the center rightward—is organized by the most conservative 24%, and that conservative 24% is organized by its most extreme and irresponsible members. 

It is sobering to think how different things were as recently as the Nixon presidency.  Nixon signed into law the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, several wilderness bills, and a flock of other responsible civil measures.  The Republicans were solidly behind all these, almost no one opposing them.  Today, such measures would be unthinkable.  Even the most trivial and obviously needed energy bills cannot get through.  Even later, Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” was downright liberal compared to the brew of religious hate, militaristic and authoritarian rhetoric, and general extremism coming from Fox talk radio and Rupert Murdoch’s other media. 

The diversity of conservative thought that flourished in the United States 30 or 40 years ago has virtually ceased to exist.  Formerly challenging and exciting journals like National Review and Wall Street Journal simply toe the Murdoch line—in fact, the latter is now owned by Murdoch, and has become a dismal shell of its former self.  Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and their group have taken over public discourse in the United States.  Rarely in a democracy has public discourse been so dominated by a small, extreme group.  Parallels are closer with Germany in the 1930s and Mao’s China in the 1960s. 

The opposition to big government claimed by the far right is very selective; it applies only to governmental programs that help minorities or restrict the freedom of giant firms, polluters, and environmental wreckers to do what they please.  Any program that works for the public good is targeted, apparently on the assumption that it benefits disproportionately “those people” (liberals, people of color, the young…).  Anti-intellectualism guarantees that public education, libraries, and museums are second only to “welfare” on the lists of “wasteful spending” to eliminate.

Conversely, however, the right wing powerfully supports subsidies to giant firms, government interference with freedoms, huge military programs, and indeed the majority of government programs and spending.  The far right also supports a huge range of restrictions on civil liberties, and now is beginning (e.g. with Rand Paul) to come out in open opposition to civil rights protection.  Sexual puritanism and repression of women is also a major part of right-wingism today; the government is expected to act as bedroom police.  Small government and personal liberty are obviously not part of the agenda, the Tea Party to the contrary notwithstanding.    

Small government would be bad enough, given current rapid deterioration of schools, libraries, museums, infrastructure, and law enforcement, but what we are really facing is far worse.

            American right-wing extremism (including the active support of Hitler in the 1930s) has always been largely connected with the South, including the border south and southern Midwest.  It grows from the ideology that developed around slavery.  This includes idealization of powerful top-down hierarchies, with leaders firmly in control and minorities expected to “keep their place.”  It also includes the Southern code of honor.  It also incorporates attitudes from puritanism and extremely conservative religious traditions.

In recent decades, it has spread farther, largely because it has been manipulated to an enormous degree by the giant primary-production corporations.  This explains a number of contradictory beliefs that seem quite widely held in spite of what would appear to be mutual incompatibility, especially the opposition to big government while favoring huge subsidies to primary-production firms, and also favoring restrictions on freedom of speech—including criticism of said firms.  (Several states have even passed “veggie libel” laws, outlawing criticism of local farm products.  These are clearly unconstitutional, but the effort and expense of fighting them in court is a deterrent to challenging them.)  Attitudes toward giant firms are shaped by attitudes formed from the social structure of the old-time plantations: a small group of extremely powerful bosses, who can do what they want, ruling a vast uneducated and servile workforce. 

The southern system developed when the south was economically dynamic and powerful.  It persisted and strengthened when the south was economically less successful, in the early 20^th century, but continued to strengthen with the rise of the “Sunbelt” in the late 20^th century.  Its spread throughout the United States, especially rural and small-town areas, follows from economic decline.

The correlation of all this with upbound and downbound is fairly solid.  Less educated white males are, in general, downwardly mobile, and they see that the rising successes of our age are very often young and nonwhite—all those blacks and Chicanas fresh out of college, all those immigrant engineers from India. 

The right wing has been overwhelmingly successful in the US, through absolute solidarity and absolute commitment to basic principles, coupled with absolute immorality about everything else.  Key has been the trinity of violent emotional arousal, junk science, and solid cooperation with the more reactionary corporations.  The left and environmental movements have to copy the better part of this—the solidarity and principle.  Then stir up more decent emotions and use real science, and work with the forward-looking interests of all kinds.  Then focus on real immediate problems, especially population and biodiversity, also food production—critical now is the desperate need to reform agriculture to feed more people while being less environmentally damaging.

Nor Is the “Left” Innocent

The self-styled liberal or progressive end of the American political spectrum has had its own evolution in the same direction.  Besides the sillier “nanny state” measured condemned by reasonable conservatives, there are much more sinister, and far less noticed, problems.

Education declines into drilling for standardized tests.  Defunding  public and university libraries is part of this, but much of it is ideological, a part of “educational reform.”  Meanwhile, children never get outside or get any meaningful environmental education (Louv 2005).  Educational levels are rapidly sinking, because of reforms pushed by both left and right that privilege the mindless standardized tests more and more, and push actual study and learning into the background.  Schools now do little beyond drilling students for the tests.  Science, music, art, history, civics, and physical education are pushed to the wall.  The right and left have agreed broadly on these savage reforms; the Obama administration has simply continued the Bush administration’s policies.

Students naturally lose respect for education under such conditions—especially since the schools are now among the shabbiest and most poorly-maintained buildings in cities and suburbs.  So, instead of school, children are socialized by mindless pop culture.  This is one of the factors in the increasing alienation of more and more people—especially the young—from politics and civic participation. 

One of the best ideas of the conservatives is a return to civics and American history.  Too many conservatives confuse this with dishonest indoctrination, as in Texas recently, but the general goal is still laudable.  We sorely need honest teaching in these areas.

On the (self-styled) left, we have also seen the rise of the “postmodern” moment in academia, which, in spite of claims that it is “progressive,” is a return to the right-wing German idealism of the late 19^th century.  It stems largely from Nietzsche, and later from the outright Nazi philosophers Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, as well as from other European right-wing thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur.  This is why it propagates from the elite private schools, which may seem “liberal” to Fox News but are basically elitist rather than liberal.  One part of it is the kind of elitist pessimism and negativism seen in the cynical philosophies of Foucault and Derrida.  Only the richest of the rich can afford the luxury of giving up like that. 

A key, and widely shared, belief, stemming from this tradition, is that people are motivated basically by the search for power, that society is thus an amoral power struggle, and that discourses are constructed to serve the needs of this search.  Truth-value does not inhere in discourse; humans either cannot know truth or do not choose to.  Their beliefs and interpretations are set by power needs.  Thus, science, political liberalism, human rights, and civil rights are all mere discourse, purely arbitrary, lacking in definition or truth-value.  They are condemned to the ash-heap of history. 

This renders meaningless the classic question of social justice.  Bad enough that we cannot very seriously hope for economic, personal, or social justice in a world of giant corporations; the academics who serve those corporations have defined the very concepts out of existence.

Another result is the essentialization of “race,” gender, ethnicity, and other arbitrary social markers.  Academia is balkanized, and the wider society troubled by a form of “multiculturalism” that sees cultures, or ethnic or racial groups, as closed worlds totally cut off from and alien to each other.  This is, of course, the extreme right-wing position, and it is truly disturbing and frightening to see it prevail on the “left” too. 

The fact is that America is still the great melting pot—more now than ever—and our groups blend, merge, mix, cross-cut, borrow, and intermarry with glorious freedom.  This remains a major hope and blessing, and something to be celebrated, not denied.

            Modern education is declining into mindless cramming or job training.  Culture, in the old sense, is left to the mass media, which go for the lowest and worst common denominator.  The postmodern turn in academia has led to a great deal of “media studies” that takes such stuff seriously.  We should have opened up the canon, but to the great productions of the whole human species, not to the trash.  Postmodernist philosophy coupled with “media studies” simply opens the way for the corrupt administrators and the job-trainers.

Saving the Nation

Basically, the need is to understand what is going on, forthrightly oppose it, and campaign on that basis.  Liberals, moderates and genuine conservatives must unite in this effort.

The first need is for anyone of good will to get the word out about what is really going on:  a power grab by extremist political forces motivated by hate, and heavily funded by giant backward-looking corporations that see their interests advanced in the short run by playing the “big lie” game.  The corporations themselves can only lose in the long run, since they are taking the country down to ruin.  Current right-wing politics is not about small government, free enterprise, or capitalism!

This perception should bring liberals, moderates, and any remaining genuine conservatives together.  Liberals and conservatives of good will would certainly unite in opposing the giant corrupt bureaucracies that fuse government with big firms and eliminate accountability and recourse in both cases.   Subsidies, corporate giveaways, failure to enforce laws and rules (after due under-the-table donations), special tax breaks, and other special favors to big business have to be stopped (Myers and Kent 1998; Pye-Smith 2002).  It may help to remember that all these favors come at the expense of small businesses and small farms, which have to compete on a very nonlevel playing field.  Accountability and recourse have to be restored.

            Big businesses that rely on highly skilled and educated labor and on free, creative thinking need to realize that they have to break with firms that want to defund education and science.

            The power of the giant corporations has to be tempered.  This means reversing the huge tax cuts to the super-rich, eliminating subsidies (direct and indirect), and stiffening the resolve and ability of regulatory agencies.  It means taking corporations to court for abuses and crimes. 

            Waste, pollution, wanton destruction of valuable natural areas, and other ecological crimes have to be stopped also.  Experience shows that this happens only when people genuinely love nature, in whatever form, and thus can be emotionally mobilized to fight for the environment and save environmental amenities.

However, the most important thing is to try to get America back together.  The country is sinking down into a “perfect storm” of mutual hatreds.  Liberals and conservatives, blacks, whites, browns, religious and antireligious groups are all at each others’ throats, at precisely the time when the country needs unity to deal with economic downturn and environmental deterioration.  Even the corporations must realize, at some level, that they cannot keep backing the hate-merchants much longer. 

We have to get back toconsidering the public good.  With even minimal repairs to bridges, highways, and ports stopped, with police and fire protection cut steadily, and with environmental protection gutted, even minimal survival is endangered.  Again, reasonable small-government conservatives cannot really believe that we can get along without any public maintenance or security.  All but the most libertarian would presumably add public education.

            This means doing something about the media crisis.  We have to reverse the decline of book stores, publishing, newspapers and investigative reporting, and the rise of the Big Lie media.

            Ultimately, if we survive long enough, we will have to reform the educational system—and in exactly the opposite direction from current reforms.  The steady replacement of literature, arts, and ethics by mindless drill for mindless testing is national suicide.

Providing a common education in the finest of our world heritage is critically important.  This means gong back to the classics, including classics from all world cultures.  We need the solidarity that comes from such common ground. 

That done, education must then be in actual life skills, notably including writing, solving real math problems, doing science, studying nature in outdoor environments, and doing community work.  These must be assessed by seeing if students can actually do them, as opposed to guessing about them among four arbitrary choices on a sheet of paper. 

There is no way to deal with any of the above except by emotional driving of solidarity, loving nature, conservation, and responsibility.  Rational choice will not do it, because all the problems involve sacrificing immediate self-interest—especially of the elites—for long-term, wide-flung benefits.  By the time they come back to bite even the elites, it’s too late. 

We must also restore the primacy of individual work that involves both initiative and cooperation.  This is what made America great, and made it concerned with education, the environment, tolerance, and democracy in the first place.

The cutting edge has to be on actual life-and-death rights, where every decent person can actually be mobilized.  Support for reducing infant mortality, ending environmental pollution (including global warming), ending starvation, ending slavery, reducing war, ending gross bias and prejudicial treatment, and above all ending human rights abuses (torture, etc.) provide the main hope.  Environmental protection has to be in there with real knowledge search, real science, and birth control.  On a more positive note, saving biodiversity, conserving renewable resources, and reforesting are among many goals that no sane person (right or left) can disagree with.  Wide coalition-building around these ends would mobilize people, discredit the giant hierarchic systems, and form broad coalitions—since everyone from left to right has to pay at least lip service to them.

The essence of morality is tolerance.  We have to realize we are all in this together, and thus have to treat people fairly and decently even if we fear them.  Hate and scapegoating must be minimized, but cannot be prevented, humans being what they are.  Thus we have to have extremely comprehensive and strong civil rights laws, to prevent invidious treatment.

Obviously, tolerance and valuing diversity make up the absolute core of fixing anything.  We must get people to realize that we are all involved in countless cross-cutting groups, all depend on each other, and all must work together to survive; therefore we must all care for each other.  Those ethical principles have been held in contempt lately by all political factions.  Yet without them no country can survive.  We have to create some sort of genuine solidarity, by shared heritage and interest.

Abe, Ken-Ichi, and James E. Nickum (eds.).  2009.  Good Earths:  Regional and Historical Insights into China’s Environment.  Kyoto:  Kyoto University Press; Melbourne:  Trans Pacific Press.

Bennett, W. Lance; Regina Lawrence; Steve Livingston.  2007.  When the Press Fails:  Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Bowen, Mark.  2008.  Censoring Science:  Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming.  New York:  Dutton.

Collier, Paul.  2007.  The Bottom Billion:  Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Dionne, E. J., Jr.  2008.  Sould Out:  Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Domke, David, and Kevin Coe.  2007.  The God Strategy:  How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Ellerman, David.  2005.  Helping People Help Themselves:  From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Hoggan, James, with Richard Littlemore.  2009.  Climate Cover-Up:  The Crusade to Deny Global Warming.  Vancouver:  Greystone.

Humphreys, Macartan; Jeffrey Sachs; Joseph Stiglitz (eds.).  2007.  Escaping the Resource Curse.  New York:  Columbia University Press.

Johnston, David Cay.  2003.  Perfectly Legal:  The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System the Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else.  New York:  Portfolio.

Johnston, David Cay.  2007.  Free Lunch:  How the Richest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill).  New York:  Penguin.

Juhasz, Antonia.  2008.  The Tyranny of Oil:  The World’s Most Powerful Industry-and What We Must Do to Stop It.  New York:  William Morrow.

Kiernan, Ben.  2007.  Blood and Soil:  A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

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Mooney, Chris.  2005.  The Republican War on Science.  Basic Books.

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Wedel, Janine.  2010.  Shadow Elite:  How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market.  New York:  Basic Books.

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E. N. Anderson

Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Anthropology,

University of California, Riverside

“Bless the Lord….

He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills.

They give drink to every beast of the field:  the wild asses quench their thirst….

He watereth the hills from his chambers:  the earth is satisfied…..

The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted;

Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees are her house.

The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks for the conies [rock hyraxes].”    Psalm 104:1, 10-18

Arizona has a water problem.  Its water resources are exceedingly limited by climate and geography.  It is expanding rapidly.  Its citizens love lawns and gardens.  And it is in the very eye of the hurricane of global warming:  all models show that Arizona will be one of the most drastically drought-stricken areas of the world as global warming progresses.  The climate we now associate with Arizona’s southwest border will move northward.

Groundwater is overdrawn in Arizona, as elsewhere (Glennon 2004).  There is little recharge of Arizona’s groundwater basins today; the water is essentially fossil water, left over from the Pleistocene.  The Colorado River is overcommitted by at least 50%.  It does not reach the sea; in fact, it is essentially dry below the Arizona-Mexico line, in violation of treaties with Mexico.  The Gila, in turn, no longer reaches anywhere near the Colorado.  Indeed, most of Arizona’s rivers are now dry washes for at least part of their length.  I remember when the Santa Cruz River still ran through Tucson, feeding mesquite thickets and the occasional cottonwood.  No longer.

At least Arizona is not, so far, forced to draw on poisoned wells, like the citizens of Bangladesh whose wells are increasingly contaminated with arsenic from groundwater.  However, agricultural and industrial wastes, including extremely toxic ones, are percolating into groundwater.

Worldwide, the situation is bleak.  Several excellent reviews of the situation exist, The best include Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry (2007) and Peter Gleick’s biennial reviews of world freshwater resources (most recently Gleick 2006; see also De Villiers 2001; Fagan 2008; Glennon 2004; Oki and Kanae 2006; Postel 1999; Rogers 2008; Shiva 2002.)  The Colorado River is not the only major river that no longer reaches the sea.  The Nile, the Yellow River of China, and many other rivers now share this dubious distinction.  The Yellow River’s drying and other dry-ups in China have left 300 million people without adequate water for irrigation, sanitation, or locally even drinking (Smil 2004).  Deforestation led to huge floods in China and elsewhere (Laurance 2007).  The Chinese belatedly tried to stop logging, but were too late; illegal logging is rampant (according to many reports I have heard, including studies ongoing by my student Ayoe Wang).  The Three Gorges Dam, in addition to its countless other problems, is already silting up because of deforestation (Stone 2008).  Droughts have brought down civilizations, including the ancient Maya (Gill 2000).  They have also depopulated whole areas of the United States, as in the dust bowl or the Oregon desert (Jackman and Long 1967).

Gleick, with Meena Palaniappan (2010), has recently shown that the world has plenty of fresh water, but not where people want it and not always in usable form or situation.  About 70% of it is tied up in ice sheets (rapidly melting with global warming).  Most of the rest is in groundwater, much of it too saline or deep-down to use.  These two authorities describe three types of peak water.  Renewable peak water refers to river flow and renewable groundwater.  This will reach peak when drafts on the water equal inflow, as on the Nile and Colorado now.  Nonrenewable peak water will occur when withdrawal of fossil groundwater becomes more expensive than the water is; this is close to occurring in much of the world, including parts of the Ogallala Aquifer in the United States.  Ecological peak water occurs when damage to ecological services exceeds benefits from the water.  This is a sliding economic scale and very hard to calculate, but we are certainly close to it in parts of California, where water withdrawn for very low-value agriculture (irrigating wild hay, potatoes, and the like) has destroyed extremely productive and high-value fisheries as well as wetlands that had less quantifiable but no less real values.  They point out that at some point we will have to desalinate sea water, but that is, so far, expensive.  We would also have to desalinate it by solar evaporation, since distilling it with fossil fuels would cause intolerable global warming and other energy sources are also rather less than practical at this time.

One problem is that water use for cities and irrigation tends to remove the water from the aquifer recharge system, thus leading to faster reduction of aquifers.  Where irrigation causes buildup of groundwater instead of drawdown, the buildup is often salty, making the water unusable.

Ismail Serageldin, former World Bank vice-president and a good resource economist, said in 1995 that “the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water” (Barnaby 2009).  This was overstated on both counts.  As of 1995, the main war over oil was still to come—in the next century.  And there has still never been a war over water.

Wendy Barnaby started out to write a book on the coming water wars.  Her research showed that no country has come even close, as of 2009.  Countries will deal over water.  It is not nearly so limited as oil; most countries have plenty of it.  The few dry countries can import water-demanding products (from fresh fruit and meat to paper).  She thus predicted that there will not be wars over water in the 21^st century.  Many are not so sure.  Several letters to Nature about her article there argued against her position.

At least the record is clear so far:  countries do agree and do find treaty-making far preferable to fighting.  But local conflicts have erupted, and, as one letter says, “the potential for water conflict is on the increase, as populations in water-stressed areas continue to grow and the demand for water increases to improve living standards with better sanitation and a water-intensive diet” (Kundzewicz and Kowalczak 2009).

Some countries are truly desperate:  Tunisia, Afghanistan, Jordan, and many others.  Some are very close to the edge and will not be able to carry out current development plans without extremely major changes in water management; this includes China, India and Iran, not the most insignificant players on the world stage.  Some are in desperate straits because they are downstream:  Egypt, Syria and Iraq depend almost entirely on rivers flowing from other countries.  Barnaby points out that Egypt has treaties with its upstream suppliers, but those are Sudan and Ethiopia, countries with no history of honoring such scraps of paper.  At present, Egypt has its armed forces on the ready.  Syria and Iraq are in worse shape, since their supplier, Turkey, has a military that could beat both of them (and several other countries) at once with ease.  They are, to put it mildly, nervous.

As we speak, global warming is rapidly drying the planet.  Global warming increases rainfall—rain has increased about 1% already and will increase 5% more before the end of this century (Smil 2008:401).  However, this rain will be largely over the ocean or in already-rainy areas.  The dry parts of the world are rapidly getting drier.  The driest rainfall year in southern California history, as of 2000, was a year in the 19^th century that gave Los Angeles about 5” and Riverside 3.  Since 2000, 2001-2 gave Los Angeles 4 and Riverside less than 3, and then 2006-7 only 3 and 2 respectively.  The future is incredibly bleak.

Population is rapidly expanding.  Agriculture is taking more and more; irrigation expands, and the really productive agriculture of the world is typically irrigated.  Manufacturing takes more and more water.  Contamination is very rapidly increasing everywhere, and includes some horrific problems unknown till recently, including an explosive increase of drugs in the water.  Everything from cocaine to birth control pills is contaminating water supplies, with rapidly mounting serious effects.

Governments mismanage water shamelessly, because of incompetence, corruption, and bureaucratic paralysis (see Ascher 1999 for the best discussion of the general problem).

Mismanagement of water resources not only leads to loss of water; it leads to poisoned soil.  Salts of all kinds leach out from upstream or leach upward from deep in the earth.  I have seen thousands of acres in Australia rendered unusable because farmers cleared off the forest and planted wheat.  Without the deep roots of the trees, the groundwater from deep underground moved upward, carrying salt.  The ground over millions of acres of Australia is now white with salt and will be unusable for millennia.

Public relations campaigns endlessly “spin” the benefits of pollution, the need for rampant and unregulated economic growth, and the inexhaustibility of fresh water and other resources (Stauber and Rampton 1996).  You will be aware how Arizona has sustained itself and excused its lack of limits to growth by appealing to absurdly inflated claims about the Colorado River—based on surveys done during the wettest period in about 500 years.  Agriculture has changed from careful management of water to considerable waste, partly due to the rise of big agribusiness (see Monks 1998 for a rare critique of this).  There is some hope of changing back.  Meanwhile, Arizona cities buy water rights from farmers.

The poster child for water mismanagement is the Aral Sea (Kobori and Glantz 1998; Micklin and Aladin 2008).  The Aral Sea is a vast lake in a closed basin in central Asia.  For millennia, it was sustained by model water management.  Some of this management was developed by unlikely heroes, including Tamerlane the Conqueror.  A rich economy producing wheat, barley, silk, melons, vegetables, and livestock developed along the Amu and Syr Rivers.  The Soviets changed all that.  They planned to turn the whole basin into a vast cotton source.  The resulting monocrop agriculture has been a disaster.  It takes many times as much water as the old economy did.  Also, cotton uses more artificial chemicals than any other crop; one-third of all the pesticides in the world are used on cotton.  After a few decades, the Amu and Syr Rivers failed to reach the sea, and a toxic mix of natural salts and accumulated pesticides and fertilizers blew over the desert plains.  Infant mortality in the Amu delta reached 10% and locally 50% (Micklin and Aladin 2008; Paul Buell, pers. comm. on basis of wide reading of the Uzbekistan press).  The huge fishery of the Aral Sea disappeared as the sea dried.  There remains a small salty puddle in the lake basin.  Most of the basin is now owned by Uzbekistan, which is trapped in a vicious circle:  it cannot stop growing cotton, the source of most of its income, and cannot make enough from cotton to do much.  The north end of the Aral Sea is more fortunate; it is owned by Kazakhstan, which is richer and has a more diverse economy.  Kazakhstan has dyked off its end, which includes the Syr River delta, and is restoring that end of the sea (Micklin and Aladin 2008).  But there is no hope of real restoration.  The Aral basin is ruined forever, and will never produce more than a tiny fraction of the wealth it produced in Tamerlane’s time.

If you know Arizona’s economy, you will feel this is uncomfortably close to home.  Indeed, Arizona has had not only one but many disasters over the millennia.  The current scene has an unpleasantly suggestive antecedent in the fall of the Hohokam civilization.  The Hohokam and their neighbors constructed an incredible network of canals in the Gila and Salt drainages.  Some of these were as large and long as major modern irrigation canals.  They fed an intensive agriculture based on maize, beans, squash, agaves, and many other crops.  Sophisticated terracing and check-damming added to the water management picture.  Yet, after devastating droughts in the 1200s, the Hohokam fields dried up or salted up (Abbott 2003; Redman 1999).  The Salt River deserves its name, and thus is not the one you’d want for irrigation, unless you were desperate.

The Little Ice Age came, the rivers refilled.  The Pima arrived and made the land fertile and well-irrigated again.  Unfortunately, the Spanish and then the Anglo-American settlers devastated this blissful scene by increasingly severe water drafts.  Exactly as in the Aral Sea case, the Pima had been using the land carefully and sustainably, with drought-tolerant crops.  The early-day anthropologist Frank Russell and the contemporary botanist Amadeo Rea have provided possibly the best account of traditional small-scale plant and water management in the entire world (Rea 1983, 1997; Russell 1975).  Thus we have a solid baseline of knowledge here.  The Anglo-Americans planted a great deal of moncrop cotton.  Finally, as you know, the Gila River went dry from Phoenix onward (Dobyns 1981; Rea 1983; Webb et al 2007).  The Pima were left high and very, very dry, in violation of treaties as well as common decency (Russell 1975) /1/.  Ironically, Phoenix takes its name from the Hohokam ruins.  The English developer and “character” Darrell Duppa, seeing huge ruins there, planned a city that would rise as the phoenix bird rose from its own ashes.  The settlers were better prophets than they knew.  The phoenix doesn’t burn up only once.  It cyclically burns up and has to rise again.  We are probably about to witness the next fire.

An even more incredible part of the story is the great beaver massacre.  Hats made of beaver-fur felt were the fad in 1820s England.  It is estimated that as many as a million beaver were taken out of the lower Colorado drainage (including the Gila drainage) in the early 19^th century (see e.g. Hilfiker 1991; Pattie 1962 [1831]; Rea 1983).  The result was arroyo cutting, floods, and general disaster.  The Gila and its tributaries had been sluggish streams draining through vast beaver ponds, sloughs, and water meadows, with scattered trees growing from lush mesquite, rushes, grasses, and sedges (Rea 1983).  Much of the damage to Arizona’s hydrology and soils that has been blamed on overgrazing, climate change, and so forth was actually done by beaver trapping.  The damage each year from flooding alone in Arizona is probably greater than the value of all the beaver skins.  And we can’t even go back—the rivers are dry and the land is urbanized.

The same sort of madness existed elsewhere.  Peter Skene Ogden was paid to wipe out the beaver totally in eastern Washington and Oregon, to deny the resource to American trappers (Ogden 1987 [1827]).  Of course the result was billions of dollars in damage every year recently, though at least the beavers are coming back in some of that area.  Similar things happened in Colorado’s Front Range (Wohl 2005).  And all this so some rich men could wear funny hats for a few years, until the style changed to sustainable silk.

Beavers are incredible water engineers (Hilfiker 1991; Morgan 1868). If people were as good at water management as beavers, there would be no world water problem.  The 18^th-century French zoologist Charles Bonnet half-seriously and half-wistfully expected that evolution would produce beaver architects as great as Vauban, the leading architect in Bonnet’s time (Foucault 1971:153).

Incidentally, Lewis Henry Morgan, who invented modern anthropology, also in his spare time invented modern animal behavior studies.  He got interested in beavers and produced what is still the best monograph on their behavior (Morgan 1868).  Of course he did not fail to compare them to humans.  He pointed out that they are not very bright; instinct guides them.  Modern studies confirm this.  A biologist tested a beaver by playing the sound of running water.  The beaver carefully covered the sound-system speakers with mud.  This must have been cute to watch, but it certainly shows blind instinct rather than rational calculation.  Still, I have seen beavers show considerable ingenuity at working sticks into their dams.  The point is that simple beavers manage water infinitely better than smart but foolish humans.  Blaise Pascal said it best:  “We walk blindly over the precipice after covering our eyes so we don’t see it.”

By contrast, humans that make dams make a bad job of it (Chamberlain 2008; Giles 2006; Scudder 2005; Stone 2008).  Ellen Wohl has done a particularly superb, sensitive, and historically sophisticated account of the superiority of beavers and the idiocy of humans in managing Colorado’s water (Wohl 2005).

The Aswan high dam brought schistosomiasis to all Egypt, wiped out the fisheries of the Nile and the eastern Mediterranean, and loses 25 to 40% of its water to evaporation (Chamberlain 2008:96).  Arizona dams have similar evaporation losses.  It is doubtful if any big dams in the Third World have positive cost-benefit accounts (Scudder 2005; W. Partridge, pers. comm.).  They drown good farmland, displace millions of farmers and other productive citizens, spread disease, waste water, and destroy fisheries.  The benefits they supply are often illusory, or confined to the rich.  Benefits of undammed water can range from 50 to 400 times as high as those from the same water, dammed (Katz 2006:41).  These are probably extreme cases, but, in the Third World, no clear cases of even slight advantages for big dams have been reported to balance them out.  In the First World, many dams are now clearly costly rather than beneficial, and many older and smaller dams are being removed.

Beavers are infinitely better dam designers.  Maybe we should take the big dams out and bring the beavers back.  I am happy to report that, while we were in Scotland last June, beavers were reintroduced there—the first beavers in Britain since the 17^th century.  Anyone named Beverly in the audience should rejoice—Beverly means “beaver meadow,” and was originally the name of an estate based on one such in England.

Fish, of course, suffer even more than beavers.  Salmon are now a rapidly disappearing resource everywhere except Alaska.  Steelhead are in even worse shape.  The steelhead runs of southern California are down to a few fish; the only one south of Los Angeles is in San Mateo Creek, and it was down to ONE female fish in a recent drought (Hovey 2001).  Many, if not most, of the freshwater fish, amphibia, and shellfish of America are threatened or endangered.  Caviare will soon be a thing of the past; fishing for it is out of control, and sturgeons are succumbing to pollution and dams even where they are not fished.  The only healthy sturgeon populations in the world are in the major rivers of the Pacific Northwest, and even here they are declining fast.  Even aquatic birds are in terrible shape.  Shorebirds and sea ducks are disappearing.  Marine resources are not doing much better, but are outside our scope here.

However, and this brings us to the real point of the talk, people are not always so dumb.  Anthropologists and other social scientists have recorded many success stories in water management around the world.  They reveal very clearly what is wrong with our system in the world today, and what we can do about it.

Most of the interesting work has revolved around questions of common property resource management.  Water, by its very nature, is usually owned in common.  One would think that it would be thus wasted, because people so often treat a common property resource as something to use without care—Garrett Hardin’s classic “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968).  However, as Hardin saw (Hardin 1991), if a common resource is owned by the group as a corporate entity, and managed by them, it can be excellently managed and sustainably used.

Water is an open-access free good only in situations of extremely low and transient population.  Otherwise, water is almost always owned by communities—tribes, villages, cities, states.  In the Middle Ages and locally since then, lords owned streams and lakes, but they could be said to be owning them as feudal lords—that is, administrators—rather than as private citizens.  Recently, a drive to privatize water has allowed corporations, large and small, to control water sources as well as sales, but this is an unusual development from the point of view of history.  It is an exceedingly ominous development (Chamberlain 2008).  It often drives up the cost of water severalfold, while lowering availability.  If there were actual competition this might not be the case, but such schemes involve governments cutting deals with big firms to have local monopolies.  Corruption is endemic.  All the abuses of monopolies and mercantilism immediately surface.

Thus, water has been prudently maintained as a common-property good until now, even in the most capitalistic societies.  Water thus becomes a fascinating study.  Some of the most interesting researches refer to Muslim or Muslim-influenced local irrigation systems.  This is in large part because Muslim law, developed in arid lands, is quite specific about water.  Gary Chamberlain, synthesizing a number of sources, reports:  “Muslim law codes…forbid private ownership of water, at least in its natural state.  There is a hierarchy of uses…first is the right of thirst…no one can be denied the water necessary to drink…then all are allowed water for their daily needs of bathing, cleaning, cooking, and so forth;” this is a priority partly because Islam enjoins cleanliness, making thorough washup and bathing a religious duty.  Then “next comes the right to provide water to livestock; and last coomes the irrigation of crops, which consumes the most water.  Only when water has been placed in a vessel…is water considered a private good” (Chamberlain 2008:54).  The duty to provide water for livestock is taken very seriously, Islam having originated among desert travelers.  Accounts describe careful management of flocks at the wells, with the most water-needing animals drinking first.

This emphasis on common property led to intricate but efficient and enforceable common property regimes being established in Muslim lands.  The Muslims could build on earlier systems that were often extremely intricate and highly developed.  South Arabia—today’s Yemen—had a vast system involving a huge dam across the major wadi; this system died when weather patterns shifted, drying the wadi except for occasional damaging floods (Scarborough 2003).  The Nabatean system in the Negev Desert had harvested water by incredibly sophisticated means in Roman and pre-Roman times.

Most spectacular of all were the qanat systems of Iran and neighboring areas, including the slopes around Mesopotamia.  A qanat is a long tunnel dug back into an alluvial fan.  It is set at a very slight upward slope.  Water percolates in from the alluvial material, so the qanat produces a live stream that can be directed to irrigation.  Otherwise, the water would evaporate through the porous fan material and be lost.  Qanat systems extend east as far as west China (Xinjiang), where they are called karez.  Major innovations in qanat irrigation, dam-building, and integrated irrigation system engineering were made in Central Asia in the medieval period (Hill 2000).  This was a little-known golden age of engineering innovation, especially in systems design.  The Persians and Mongols introduced this technology to the western world, and may lie behind some of our modern “systems thinking.”

The Arabs brought them to Spain, Italy, and elsewhere.  They grade into ordinary water tunnels that merely convey water to cities with minimal evaporation.  Qanat systems are maintained by local communities.  A fee is charged for the water.  Specialists maintain the water tunnels.  It is a dangerous job, since cave-ins are hard to prevent and generally fatal.

Arab systems survive everywhere in the Middle East and in much of North Africa.  I have observed them in Morocco, where they have blended over many centuries with indigenous, related Berber traditional systems.  The latter in turn may go back to the Roman Empire, when North Africa was a key part of the empire, producing agricultural products of all kinds.

The Arabs supplied Palermo, Sicily, through aqueducts cut into rock in the 9^th and 10^th centuries (Maurici 2006); these still supply Palermo today.  The Spanish qanat systems are gone, but the Spanish took them to the New World, where they flourish—I believe to this day—in the dry Tehuacan Valley of Mexico.  From here they were introduced to San Bernardino, California, where I used to live, and until not long ago San Bernardino was supplied by this ancient Iranian technology.  Incidentally, San Bernardino also benefited from ancient Chinese technology, via “Pedley dams,” huge sausage-shaped bundles of rocks done up in ropework (or wire) and used for instant levees.  Pedley was a 19^th-century water engineer.  He had seen them in China, where they were invented in the far past.

The Arab irrigation systems of Yemen (Varisco 1996) and elsewhere are legendary, but the best studies of Arab systems have been done in Christian lands.  Sicily still uses them to irrigate crops, especially those the Arabs brought, such as lemons, sugarcane, eggplants, and high-quality melons (Pizzuto 2002).  In Spain, the “Reconquista” conquered Spain from the Moors after 800 years of Moorish rule.  Most of the Moors were expelled, to Spain’s permanent and major loss.  However, a few villages hung on in areas so remote that they could avoid exile by superficial conversion to Christianity.  The most significant of these for our purposes was the Sierra de la Contraviesa area southeast of Grenada, studied by Gaston Remmers (1998) among others.  Remmers describes an incredibly sophisticated system for making sure that everybody has fair access to irrigation water, no matter how wet or dry the year.  The village social organization is based on water management.  (Spain has other successful irrigation systems without obvious Moorish ancestry, too; Grove and Rackham 2001, Guillet 2006.)

Many of the Moors converted to Christianity but were not quite trusted, and were sent to remote parts of Mexico, where they could not do much damage by rebelling.  This gave us the qanats in Tehuacan.  It also gave us the New Mexican irrigation villages, and some systems in California as well.  The ditch that brings water to Redlands, California, is still called “the Zanja,” and the city water manager is officially the Zanjero.  In New Mexico and extreme south Colorado, Arab systems flourish, and my friend Devon Peña is not only studying them anthropologically but also using them to irrigate his own farm in a Hispanic community there.  He has used water management as a natural symbol, or entry point, for his excellent discussions of environmental justice (Peña 1998, 2000).

Perhaps the most remote extension is into Zuni Pueblo.  The famous waffle gardens of Zuni are indistinguishable to my eyes from those of Sicily, and are often used to grow the same crops (melons, cucumbers, etc.).  The Zuni are creative and brilliant gardeners and water engineers in their own right, and surely did much innovation, but it is really impossible for me to believe that the Zuni gardens were not influenced by conversos—converted Moors—in northern New Mexico.

Moorish systems also went to South America, where they fused with the formidable systems of the Quechua and Aymara Indians.  The Incas and their predecessors in Peru had constructed canals up to dozens of miles long, through some of the harshest and most difficult country in the world.  They had terraced mountain slopes up to two miles high, and run irrigation systems throughout these terraces, perfectly controlling the flow of water on slopes up to 45% or so.  They had integrated water systems all the way from glacier snouts 18,000’ above sea level down to the edge of the Pacifc.  These nonliterate people, with little metal, no wheeled vehicles, and limited animal power, had carried out some of the most spectacular water engineering jobs in the world.  Naturally, they quickly saw the value of metal tools and European draft animals.

They also saw the value of  Moorish technology and organization (Gelles 1995, 2000; Trawick 2002).  Traditional Quechua society (I do not know about Aymara) is organized dualistically:  there is an uphill group and a downhill group, or some comparable split into two, in every village.  This has a real but uncertain amount of influence from Moorish and Spanish customs.  The water hierarchy in a village is more clearly influenced by Moorish-Spanish usage, with water officials and titles similar to those elsewhere in the Hispanic world.  Each half of the village has its water organization, and the two must cooperate and distribute water fairly.  They tend to keep each other honest.  Also, typically, the two halves of the village are not really separated; plots belonging to members of the uphill half are scattered through the downhill side, and vice versa.  This is partly a matter of inheritance and marriage, but partly also a matter of geographic necessity.  Warm-weather crops have to be downhill, cold-weather crops uphill, in a village like Paul Gelles’ field site; its fields extend for a vertical mile up and down the slope of the Colca Valley (a canyon twice as deep as Grand Canyon).

Critical to the operation of the system are the fiestas.  Every village has, or had, its huge party, usually in the summer.  This brought everyone together and allowed everyone to have a good time.  It also allowed some working out of conflicts, because both sanctioned competitions and unsanctioned fights naturally occur at fiestas.  A fiesta without a fight or two just isn’t much fun.  Occurring in a public, mostly happy gathering, such fights are quickly stopped and mediated.  This would not be the case if the fights occurred on a dark night out in the watershed.  Better have them in the open, at the fiesta.

The astonishing level of honesty in these village systems would certainly be devastating to any disciples of Thomas Hobbes—the 17^th-century Englishman who saw humans as individuals in permanent conflict.  Honesty depends on several factors.  First, the water managers are vigilant.  Second, neighbors too are vigilant.  These would be inadequate, however, since all a water thief needs is a dark night and a spade.  It is very easy to turn the village canal into one’s own fields for a couple of hours.  This can help one’s own prospects greatly, but, of course, at the expense of others’.  Yet people rarely do it—intimidated not only by popular opinion and the revenge of gods and spirits, but also just plain honest.  Humans want to cooperate, and will sacrifice a lot to do so.

Paul Gelles’ village had to cooperate beyond usual levels back in the 1990s.  The Peruvian government built a water project that brought water to lowland cities, but, apparently inadvertently, preempted the water supply from Gelles’ field site.  The town faced disaster.  So the most intrepid young men went out and tore a hole in the water project canal, directing the village’s proper flow back to it.  They did not wreck the whole project or the canal.  The government came with warrants and police, but the entire village stood up against them.  Arrests, threats, cajoling, and bureaucratic foot-dragging all failed.  The village got its water back.

Quite a few similar stories could be told, from Spain to New Mexico; Chamberlain (2008) tells one from Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Another system maintained by religious organization holds in Bali.  Stephen Lansing studied this system over many years (Lansing 1987, 1991, 2006).  Irrigation on that Indonesian island is derived from water coming from the crater lake at the top of the island, which is a single giant inactive volcano.  The water is sacred.  The head priest of the island, the jero gde, lives at the lake outlet, and oversees the water system.  Apparently he is appointed more for his hydrological expertise than for his religious devotions.  A hierarchy of priests, progressively farther and farther downstream, oversees the breakup of this stream into tens, hundreds, and finally tens of thousands of channels.  These feed a vast system of rice paddies; the island is one huge farm, growing mainly rice but also dozens of tropical crops.  Water is timed so that there is no one pulse of irrigation.  That would not only take too much water; it would allow insect pests to multiply out of control.  Instead, each field has its schedule of irrigating and drying off.  The World Bank came in with sophisticated technology in the late 1980s to improve this system, and promptly caused disaster.  Their computer-assisted plans led to water shortages, local floods, and insect outbreaks.  Control promptly went back to the jero gde.  Lansing modeled the traditional system with his own computers, and found it to be about as perfect as could be achieved in the real world.  (Criticisms of this scenario exist [Vayda 2008], but are either minor or unconvincing.)

Similar, if less comprehensive and perfect, local systems of terracing and water control are well documented from elsewhere in Indonesia, as well as from the Philippines, pre-American Hawaii, New Guinea, and indeed most of Oceania and the world (Scarborough 2003).  Everywhere they are religiously maintained.  Often they are also maintained through kinship systems, as in Luzon and among the Toba Batak of Sumatera (studied by my former student, the late Richard Lando, in the 1970s).  Often they produce fish and other animal protein as well as staple plant foods.  India has countless religiously maintained irrigation systems too (a particularly superb account is by David Mosse, 2003, 2006).

The irrigation systems of south China are well known (the best descriptions are in Marks 1998 and Ruddle and Zhong 1988, but see also Anderson and Anderson 1973 and Wen and Pimentel 1986a, 1986b).  They too have religious representation, via the guardian spirits of the localities involved, but are largely secular concerns.  They are usually administered by village elders.  Typical in this area are lineage villages, where all males are related by direct descent from a single founding ancestor.  The lineage elders are then all kin.  Such villages can have thousands of people and be hundreds of years old.  They can thus manage irrigation on a substantial scale.  However, much more impressive were the vast water systems that the Imperial governments maintained.  The most famous was the one in the Chengdu Plain of Sichuan, designed by the Li family of engineers more than two thousand years ago.  Their advice—“keep the dykes low and the channels deep”—should be learned by every water manager.  They split the Min River into three channels, so that the river could be directed into two of the channels in order to allow local people to clear rocks and silt out of the other one to keep it deep.  This system has been maintained and repaired over the centuries, and is still in use.  A fine temple to the Li engineers has survived even Communist abuses.

Where water fails, people are incredibly innovative about doing without it.  The Chinese of dry north China were as sophisticated in water harvest as the south Chinese were in water management, and many incredibly sophisticated techniques were known more than 2000 years ago (Anderson 1988).  Dryland agriculture is a major field of study at the University of Arizona, and has been off and on at my former university, University of California-Riverside.  We are leaders.  Still, we have a lot to learn.  Some of my colleagues at UCR proudly and helpfully told a group of West Africans, many years ago, that UCR had developed crops that could grow on 12 inches of rain.  The West Africans calmly answered that their crops grew on four inches of rain.  We of UCR thought we would be the teachers, but we became the learners.  The Tohono Oodham of Arizona also had crops that grew on four inches of rain.  They also shared with the West Africans a trick of following recent runoff channels, making fields in areas recently flooded.  By the time the water has dried up and the soil is dry, fast-growing crops have yielded a harvest.  The Hopi had varieties of maize that were planted a foot deep to take advantage of soil moisture.  The Hopi and most other traditional maize cultivators hilled up soil around the growing stalks, saving yet more water.

This sort of agriculture did not develop in a lab.  Like other traditional, efficient management strategies for water, it required people to take water and crops very seriously.  It was religiously represented.  The Hopi, like almost all other Native American corn farmers, worshiped the maize god.  Saving water requires reverence for water, for the irrigation process, and for crops.  It will require planning based on respect for people and for water resources.

Can common property management work in today’s world?  It often does.  Elinor Ostrom (1990) studied water management in my home area, the Los Angeles basin.  She found that the dozens of cities sharing the basin had been forced to work together to manage the small rivers that provide water and carry away sewage.  I well recall the days when Riverside’s water was unsafe to drink and the city sewered into the Santa Ana River.  Orange County cities were richer and more powerful, however, and thus forced more and more treatment on Riverside, till its sewage was a lot safer than its drinking water used to be!

Without such powerful downstream users, however, upstream users can progressively degrade the water resource (Murphy 1967), and by ruining the downstream users they can de-fang their political power, and thus prevent any recourse from affecting them (see also Wilkinson 1992).  Elinor Ostrom also studied the Mojave River, just outside the Los Angeles Basin.  Here, powerful mining interests control the headwaters.  Next downriver are the relatively well-off towns of Hesperia and Victorville.  The river dies in the desert just past Barstow.  This unfortunate town, always poor, has become poorer and poorer as its water source is sucked away.  Having less and less political-economic clout, it progressively loses to the mines and the richer towns.  Barstow is slowly strangling to death.  It is not alone in its fate; countless towns in Africa and elsewhere are in the same situation.  The whole country of Egypt may soon be, as Ethiopia and Sudan take more and more of the Nile’s very limited water.  Turkey threatens to take most of the water from the Tigris and Euphrates, thus Barstowizing Syria and Iraq.  We need a worldwide jero gde.

Even people who do not plant or irrigate may have an important and valuable water ideology, religiously supported.  Katherine Metzo (2005) reports on the ideals of pure water among the indigenous peoples of the area around Lake Baikal in Siberia.  These ideals are now the main thing standing between this deepest and most copious of all lakes and its ruin by Russian pollution.

It is, indeed, hard to avoid worshiping water if one has any religious regard for nature.  One of the striking facts about humans is that, everywhere, they seem to honor and revere waterfalls.  Major falls are parks and pilgrimage spots in the United States and China and elsewhere.  Traditional small-scale societies everywhere seem to have worshiped them.  The Shuar (“Jivaro”) people of Ecuador and Peru call themselves the “people of the sacred waterfalls” (Harner 1972).  In my research in China and with Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest I found that these disparate peoples still have high religious regard for waterfalls, eddies, rapids, and other areas where the power of water is evident.  Native Americans often went on vision quests at such places.

The sheer force of the water at such points is hypnotizing.  One can stand looking in a sort of trance for minutes or even hours.

Lakes and deep pools, and above all the vast ocean, have a different kind of spiritual sense:  peaceful and calm, yet evidently extremely powerful.  The power is latent.  One knows that a storm or a break in a water barrier could unleash it at any moment.  Legends of lake monsters, maelstroms, and bottomless pools seem to express some of this feeling.  The Greek god Triton and the Roman Neptune are more explicit statements of it.  Yemaja, the mother goddess of the Yoruba of West Africa, is a sea goddess and can be stormy at times.

The Chinese see the ocean not so much as a god but as a vast universe in which or on which gods, dragons, and other supernatural beings play.  The Chinese were aware from very early times of islands forming from deltas, and of fossil seashells on mountaintops, so they early developed a story that the seas and lands had changed places many times.  The seas had been mulberry fields, as they expressed it.  They were aware that life-giving rains came from the sea, and were all too aware that these could come in the wake of typhoons (ta fung, “great wind” or “striking wind” depending on what character is used; incidentally, “hurricane” is from the Maya name of a storm god). The Chinese thought that dragons caused these storms.  Some of my fishermen friends had seen dragons in the rolling, boiling stormclouds.  Indeed, in the dim light and driving rain of a typhoon, one can easily imagine one sees these giant reptilian beings riding the wild winds.

It is also hard to avoid seeing the contrast of land and water, or land and sea, as one of those basic dichotomies around which people love to organize their thought.  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, 1963, 1964-1972) discussed this in great detail.  Often, such dichotomies symbolize the dichotomy of male and female, which in turn may involve wife-giving and wife-accepting groups.  The Northwest Coast peoples contrasted land and sea, and many of their stories turn on progress from one to the other.  This can symbolize creation, or marriage, or a hero’s journey to wisdom, or tribal trade and interaction, or anything else involving such moving through landscapes.  Of course, salmon and other sea-run fish are the staple of subsistence there, and they run from fresh waters to the sea and then back again.

Animals that easily cross the boundary between water and land, like otters, are sacred and powerful.  Otters are believed to lure humans to come into the water with them; the people then drown and are converted into otter-men, as scary to the Haida as werewolves were to medieval Europe.  The fear of otter-men has actually spread to some Whites on Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands).  Otters are playful creatures, and do, in fact, try to lure humans into the water to play with them.  This has happened to me several times.  I resisted the temptation.

Most powerful are those beings that can interact between water, land, and air:  the raven, eagle, and kingfisher (Jonaitis 1981).  The kingfisher nests in a burrow in the underground—or underworld, flies in the air, and fishes in the water.

Not only the Northwest Coast peoples attribute special power to anomalous creatures that are able to live in two different worlds.  It is a worldwide characteristic.  Consider the scary, uncanny nature of frogs, toads, and newts in Shakespeare.  African and South American peoples have similar attitudes toward lungfish.  And scientists show great fascination with the perfect intermediates between fish and land life-forms that have recently emerged from Chinese fossil beds.

Whales and porpoises are naturally uncanny, since they look and act like fish but breathe air and are obviously intelligent.  My fishermen friends on the Hong Kong waterfront would not touch them, for these reasons.  A recent fascinating book, Trying Leviathan by D. Graham Burnett (2007), tells of a trial in New York in 1818.  New York State enacted an inspection fee on fish oil.  Inevitably, a shrewd New York fish-oil dealer refused to pay on whale oil, since the whale had recently been declared by science to be a mammal.  This led to a trial.  The dealer called to witness the leading American ichthyologist, Samuel Mitchill, a genuinely great scientist.  However, the trial went against him, since it was pretty clear that the law had been intended to cover whale oil as well as other “fish” oils.  The law was, however, subsequently rewritten.

In any case, the controversy was not easy to settle.  This was long before Darwin, and there was really no obvious reason to privilege lungs and live birth over fins and aquatic lifestyle.  The trial played ordinary people, with their functional view of the world, over laboratory scientists, with their structural and abstract view.

The whale remains anomalous among water creatures.  Americans want to save whales because they are intelligent mammals.  Many Japanese still see whales as essentially fish, and see American attempts to stop whaling as an imposition on fish-eating peoples.  It is, however, worth noting that most Japanese will not touch whale meat any more, and the government has to store in freezers the whale meat its fleets bring home.

This fascinating byway is taking us farther and farther from actual water.  Let us return, and consider what to do about the current water crisis.

The world’s fresh water is exceedingly limited.  Almost all of it is used to capacity.  Much of it, including the Colorado River, is overcommitted.  Groundwater reservoirs are rapidly being exhausted.  We cannot easily get more water.  Towing Antarctic glaciers north and desalting sea water are the only possibilities.

This being said, more efficient use of water is imperative.  Sewage treatment is the most obvious and immediate need worldwide.  It would free up a great deal of water for better use.  You in Arizona all know the next most obvious need:  doing something about waste of water in irrigation.  Drip irrigation instead of sprinklers, natural landscaping instead of lawns, and control of golf courses are familiar themes here.  They soon will be elsewhere.  Arizona leads the world in problems, but it also leads the world in coping with them, especially in passing laws for dryscaping in place of grass lawns.  The total area of lawns and related water-demanding landscaping in the United States is greater than the area of Pennsylvania.  Lawns and ornamental gardens take a wholly disproportionate amount of water, pesticides, and fertilizers.

Few people seem to realize that human use of water for drinking and bathing is utterly insignificant relative to the use in agriculture and industry.  Personal use is about 1% of all water use.  We should all take short showers, but it won’t matter much compared to even very water-sparing industrial processes, let alone agriculture.  Meat and milk are the worst problem.  Cows are fed on irrigated feed, and demand huge amount of water themselves for drinking and washing; then processing their meat and milk takes yet more water.  I have seen a wide range of figures for the water requirements of this process, but all are in the range of hundreds to thousands of gallons for a pound of beef or bottle of milk.  We need to go back to eating cactus fruit, mesquite beans, and prickly pear pads.  Or at least feeding them to the cows—there are areas of the world, including south Madagascar, where cows get along with essentially no water by living on spineless varieties of prickly pear.  Cotton is probably second; it is grown in dryland areas by irrigation, and is an incredibly thirsty crop.

Water experts are now talking about “virtual water,” a concept developed by John A. Allen in the 1990s (Barnaby 2009; Smil 2008).  It takes into account the water needed to produce goods.  All agricultural commodities and all manufactured goods require large amounts of water.  My consumption of such goods uses water indirectly.  If I buy a cotton shirt, I am probably not using any American water to speak of, but I am using enormous quantities of Egyptian and Chinese water—assuming, as if often the case, that the cotton is grown in Egypt and the shirt is made in China.  The horrific case of cotton in Uzbekistan, described above, is entirely export-driven.  Whoever gets the good quality cotton items made from Uzbeki cotton is ruining that desperately stressed nation, but is probably quite unaware of the fact.  (I have heard from Gary Chamberlain about a book Globalization of Water [Hoekstra and Chapagain 2008].  I have not yet seen it.)

Smil (2008) reports that rice requires 2300 kg (liters) of water to produce 1 kg of rice; beans, 2000; wheat, 1300; corn, 500; vegetables, 100 up; chickens, at least 4000; pork meat (muscle tissue—not whole pig) 10,000; beef 15,000.  Cotton and coffee are in the range of pork and beef, not in the range of grain.  Smil also notes that Americans “waste” 35-45% of the food available in the US.  (This is a bit harsh.  A lot of the “waste” is spoilage and other storage loss, which could be avoided but only with difficulty.)  This is a huge waste of water.

On the other hand, Barnaby (2009) points out that a dry country can spare its limited water resources by importing food and not growing crops with high water requirements.

Most of the water used to produce grain and coffee comes from rainfall, but most of that used to produce meat, cotton, and many vegetables is irrigation or piped water.

Thus, by eating lower on the food chain, and by wearing clothing more economically, we could save enormous amounts of water.

Access to water should be about the most basic matter of environmental justice, and thus has been addressed in a particularly good article by Meena Palaniappan et al. (2006) in Gleick’s book.  They raise the usual cases of big dams, water privatization, and water waste by large-scale schemes, in the context of environmental justice, particularly for minorities and people of color (see esp. pp. 120-122, where a statement on environmental justice by these groups is presented).

Indeed, it would be very hard to imagine a moral or religious code that denied water to those dying of thirst.  Yet, modern governments do exactly that, by wasteful and corrupt development schemes, privatization of water, permitting contamination, displacement of impoverished people, and many other practices.

Gary Chamberlain (2008) reviews the status of water in all the world’s major religions, and finds that all of them are quite specific about enjoining us to treat water as a common good to share with all who need it.  Certainly, of all human needs, water is second in immediate importance only to oxygen.  Water is needed every day, in fairly large quantities, by every human.  It is needed directly for drinking and washing, indirectly in much greater quantities for food production and manufacturing.  It is irreplaceable; the economists’ notion of “infinite substitutability” breaks down totally here.  Water has to be reasonably pure to be useful—the purer the better.

This being the case, all religions have made a point of insisting that water be made available.  All seem, also, to have used it as a symbol.  Water is soft and flowing, yet wears away rock.  It is pure, yet can be contaminated.  It is meek and unprotesting and always ready to serve, yet it is arguably the most valuable thing in the world.  It is often ignored and devalued, yet is absolutely necessary to life—every faith seems to have made the obvious comparison with religion here!  Probably nothing else has been such a universally used symbol and metaphor, for so many things.  Rivers are goddesses in India, and had a human feminine form before they descended to earth.  (Chamberlain quotes a wonderful story of the sea and the Ganges on p. 17.)  In Indian art, rivers such as the Ganges, Narbada and other rivers are beautiful women in the prime of life.   Their long, flowing hair and supple bodies recall the flow of the rivers.  Maybe we should picture the Verde and the Gila as goddesses.

Water is most notable in religion for its cleanness and its purifying qualities and for its tremendous power, but Zena Kamash (2008) has recently emphasized its terrifying aspects.  Floods, whirlpools and fast rivers kill countless people.  Religions recognize this, and pray for protection, but also see water and the water surface as liminal.  They are boundaries between life and death, and water is both lifegiver and deathbringer.  Kamash’s own work is on the Roman Empire, and from Anatolia to England she has found Roman shrines that link these two aspects.  She finds similarities elsewhere, and I certainly saw plenty of this in China, where my fishermen friends lived by the sea but often died by it.  They loved it and feared it.  Cultivators in land villages had a similar view of fresh water; it kept them alive and irrigated their crops, but floods were frequent, and killed millions by starvation as well as hundreds by direct drowning.  Temples took full note of this, and so did prayers and ceremonies.  My own little boat was launched with full prayers to the spirits of sea and sky to save me from storms.  We survived a typhoon in the boat, so evidently the prayers had their effect.

Religions have also insisted on the moral necessity of giving water to those who need it. Chamberlain reviews a wide range of sources.  I have mentioned the most graphic—the Islamic injunctions—above.  Chamberlain goes on to give us a powerful call to renew our faiths, whatever they may be, and work to make water freely and universally available in today’s world.

Even if one is not religious, any concern for anything outside one’s own narrowest self-interest simply has to include concern for water.  Even one’s narrowest self-interest, in fact.  The future for all of us is bleak unless immediate action is taken on a global scale.

Indeed, we need to bring religion and ethics into the picture.  At the very least, we need to see that water is literally and figuratively the water of life.  Denying it is murder.  Polluting and wasting it are potential murder.  I doubt if anything short of a concerted effort by all religions will save the world from a water shortage that will be catastrophic beyond imagining.

Based on a talk at the Sharlot Hall Museum, Prescott, AZ, 2008; amended since.  Thanks to Sandy Lynch and Gary Chamberlain for help.

/1/  Irrelevant to my paper, but deserving of at least a footnote in a talk to scholars of Arizona, is Frank Russell’s study of the Pima.  Russell contracted tuberculosis in the early 20^th century and was sent to the deserts of Arizona in hopes of recovery, or at least longer life.  He became fascinated with the Pima, and produced what I personally feel was the most empathetic and deeply insightful study of Native Americans done by any Anglo-American writer up to that time.  He died before it could be published.  It was brought out by the Bureau of American Ethnology, and lapsed into almost total obscurity until republished by the University of Arizona Press in 1975.

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Abstract

In twenty years of research on the agriculture and forestry of the Yucatec Maya of southeast Mexico, I have seen many ideas come in from the great outside world.  Some succeed, many fail.  In spite of the anthropologists’ litany of “community participation” and “cultural sensitivity,” the predictor is usually supply and demand:  where there is a market, the Maya will work to develop supply capability; where there is no market, traditional subsistence methods are better than the introductions.  Government or international help is, however, needed to help develop markets and to provide expert knowledge of how to mobilize for them and connect to them.  When this has done, some important successes have followed.  Implications for realistic policies go beyond the obvious.

            Development schemes aimed at traditional small-scale rural communities rarely succeed.  Most accounts can be arranged along a line from those that blame it on stupidity or blind tradition to those that blame it on conspiracy.  Whatever the cause, the accounts usually agree on one thing:  The small traditional communities are passive victims.  Sometimes, both these attribution myths are combined into one romantic claim:  the suffering poor are only trying to maintain their sacred traditions.  Sometimes it goes with considerable blaming-the-victim. 

            Of course, in many, many cases the communities are indeed brutalized, often by outright violence that can include mass murder and genocide (as in Cambodia in the 1970s and Guatemala in the 1980s).  However, I fear that many writers have a vested interest in turning their subjects into pure victims—so beaten down and oppressed by the government or the donors that they cannot perform. 

            Fortunately, there are some situations in which outcomes are better in spite of everything.  For the last 20-odd years I have been visiting and studying the town of Chunhuhub, a Yucatec Maya community in central Quintana Roo, Mexico.  This town has managed to remain quite prosperous as rural Mexico goes.  One would never confuse it with Beverly Hills, but few go hungry and all have decent if usually home-made housing.

            In those 20 years, Chunhuhub has become more prosperous, but the process has been erratic.  Development plans have come and gone in the area.  Chunhuhub usually rejects them, and when it does try them they generally fail.  But, meanwhile, Chunhuhub, or its residents, have done quite a few things on their own initiative.  These also have erratic histories, but some of them succeed.  I apologize at the outset for lack of statistics.  I have not collected many, and the government collects no valid ones.  I have to go with my own observations and some aggregated household data. 

            Failed projects

            The grim litany of projects that never got off the ground is fairly long, but not worth considering in detail.  One idea popular in the 1980s was package loans for agriculture, involving loans that required the farmers to use pesticides and fertilizers according to what was supposed to be best practice.  There was a strangely close correspondence between the agrochemicals deemed “best practice” and the firms that supplied funds to relevant government employees.  The Maya were in no position to risk capital, did not trust the government (for the obvious reason among others), and found that the pesticides and fertilizers were counterproductive in their situation.  The packages disappeared by 1990 (when I began serious work in the area). 

Many other plans surfaced at local farmers’ fairs in larger towns.  These had some direct or indirect influence on Chunhuhub but had no real presence there.  Schemes to popularize local handicrafts were sensible, but Chunhuhub Maya do not make many.  Honey production, both from European honeybees and from native stingless bees (Melipona becheii), was a much better idea, since Chunhuhub produced huge amounts of honey, but Africanized bees and parasitic mites (Varroa and other spp.) invaded and ruined the industry. 

            An example of true developer cluelessness was rabbit growing (cunicultura).  This has often been tried in Mexico and elsewhere.  Thomas Dichter in Despite Good Intentions (2003) tells stories from West Africa, where the poor rabbits immediately died of tropical diseases.  They survive in Mayaland—there are native cottontails—but are less successful than the chickens, pigs, goats, ducks and turkeys that already make a Maya homegarden a meat factory.  Moreover, the Maya could not bear to kill and eat anything so cute!  The bunnies became children’s pets.

            Projects for commercial production of tomatoes, chiles, and similar vegetables got off the ground with initial success, but succumbed to the twin problems of pest buildup and distance from markets.  Chunhuhub is a very remote community, and there are many much closer to the urban markets that absorb commercial vegetables.  The population of Chunhuhub is around 6,000, but almost everyone grows their own vegetables, so there is little internal market.  Extremely successful vegetable gardening is practiced by several families in town, but there is no market for their surplus.  The pest problem was due directly and specifically to pesticides.  These wiped out natural predators of whiteflies, which carry viral diseases.  The whiteflies multiplied beyond all measure, ruining large-scale vegetable production in most of the Yucatan Peninsula.  Chunhuhub had many fewer problems with this, because it was isolated from contagion and above all because Chunhuhubians do not use much pesticide, but there were enough pests to keep production suboptimal. 

In other communities, such as Yaxcaba and neighboring towns in Yucatan state, attempts were made to develop velvetbean as a cover crop (Juan Jimenez-Osornio, personal communication) and, when that failed, to use chopped-up vegetation as mulch (John Tuxill, personal communication).  The Maya found little value in these techniques, which add dubiously useful but quite onerous steps to an already labor-intensive agricultural system. The green manure crops had worked very well in other areas of Latin America.  The Maya were lukewarm, partly because of project fatigue, partly because their homegardens were already fertile and bean-filled, while their fields weren’t really worth the added effort and expense. 

 On the other hand, I observed that they developed vegetable raising in those villages without much outside input.  Once again, the Maya are good at finding out what activities are actually worth the time and labor invested, while outside development agents rarely consider such tradeoffs.

            Medicinal herbs could be produced on a large scale, and they commmand a ready sale; many are illegally exported to the United States for the migrant south Mexicans working there.  Several attempts to raise medicinal herbs in Quintana Roo have failed, however, partly because of hurricanes, partly because it is still cheap to collect wild herbs, but mainly for the usual reason—no one thought to develop marketing channels.

The government is fond of bringing in a great new plan just before an election, handing out money to carry out the project, then dropping it once the election is over.  Naturally, a few iterations of this game lead to the situation reported by Ueli Hostetler (1996):  the villagers invest the donated money in beer and have a big party.  At least they get that much out of it.  Otherwise, the money is invested in (say) pigpens, then lost when the government abruptly cancels the project, half done.  A half-finished pigpen is no use; a party at least gets the community together.

At best, the government may stay long enough to get the plan up and running, but the people abandon it as soon as the funding stops.  This happens when the plan is just fine as long as some funding is coming in, but otherwise isn’t profitable enough to be worth doing.

All this has caused many people, from American inner cities to African savanna villages, to suffer from “project fatigue.”

            Successes

            By far the major planned success was the introduction of mechanized agriculture around 1980.  Most of the Yucatan Peninsula is limestone with very shallow soil, unsuitable for agriculture, but along the rim of the central hill country are valleys with deep, rich alluvial soils washed off the hills.  Only about 5% of Chunhuhub’s land is like that, but that 5% is concentrated in one broad level plain very near town.  With mechanical pumps to bring up underground water and a tractor to pull a plow, this land is incredibly fertile.  For the first dozen years of the project, however, the pumps or the tractor were generally broken, with spare parts almost impossible to find.  By the mid-1990s the situation was more reliable, and by 2000 the mecanizada was in full operation most of the time, producing vast amounts of maize, watermelons, tomatoes, citrus, mangoes, and other crops. 

            A major success, but not because of its plan, was the “citrus corridor” idea created in the late 1980s.  (This was a period of considerable activity since Mexico’s dominant political party, the PRI, felt seriously challenged for the first time in its history; it did indeed lose the presidency shortly thereafter.  The PRI was desperately trying to buy votes by extensive projects.  This worked well in Quintana Roo; the projects sometimes succeeded and the PRI stayed in power.)  A strip 1 ha wide was cleared along some of the highways in southern Yucatan and neighboring Quintana Roo, and the government funded local people to plant citrus there.  Water was developed where necessary.  Communities received funding.  The idea was to plant oranges and use the fruit to make juice concentrate.  A huge plant was set up at Akil, Yucatan, to make the concentrate.  As so often, the government had given no thought at all to marketing.  The juice concentrate cost twice as much to produce as that from Brazil.  Thus the project was hopeless.  However, on their own initiative, the Maya soon learned that there was a huge market for fresh oranges and orange juice in Cancun, Merida, and other nearby towns.  They developed this market by themselves.  Some towns already had fresh fruit marketing networks; others, like Chunhuhub, had to start from scratch, but did so immediately and successfully.  The people of Chunhuhub found they could also use these channels to sell watermelons, avocadoes, mangoes, bananas, and so on, produced from homegardens and increasingly from the mecanizada, and this is now the town’s major income source.

Finally, by far the most successful government plan in Quintana Roo in the last 30 years was the Plan Forestal.  I have reported on this at length elsewhere (Anderson 2003, 2005; Primack et al 1998) and in any case Chunhuhub did not participate in it, so I will merely mention here that from the point of view of Chunhuhub it was not a success.  In other towns, the plan worked stunningly well, mostly because there was a pool of highly trained biologists and administrators.  It extended to game conservation and ecotourism, on a limited and experimental scale, with enough success to make further efforts highly desirable.  One community, Nohbec, has even satisfied the exceedingly strict German standards for sustainable forest management, and thus can export mahogany and other woods to Germany at a premium price.  There are side benefits:  even communities that are not part of the plan see how successful conservation and sustainable management are, and now try to act accordingly.  However, the Plan Forestal ran into troubled waters as it aged; early commitment and enthusiasm began to be subverted by local dissention and political problems (Faust et al. 2004; Haenn 2005).  Many communities participated in it and developed forestry and related industries with great success, but the Chunhuhub citizens agreed overwhelmingly not to participate.  Instead, they went their own way.  At first they drastically overcut precious woods—mahogany, Spanish cedar, etc.—and faced an economic crash.  This taught them better planning, and as more precious-wood trees reached commercial size, Chunhuhub managed its forests in a more sustainable way.  Attempts to grow plantations of cedro did not work well; tip borers made the trees grow crooked, and anyway cedro grows so well by itself that plantation growing is hardly necessary.

            In the meantime, the ejido system of communal landholding and collective management has largely ended.  Changes in Mexican law in 1993 allowed privatization of ejido land.  The Maya of Quintana Roo resisted this for a long time, but privatization finally came to Chunhuhub from 2005 onward.  The effects of this are still not certain.  One thing that is clear is that many ejido families had largely given up farming to follow the computer or other technological dreams, and the families still farming wanted more chance to be flexible and independent in their land management.  This can only increase the rapidly growing disparity between rich and poor in the community.  The future will be interesting.

Indigenous successes

            While government plans were having mixed success, the Maya were busily doing their own developing.  This was most conspicuous in the case of fruit marketing noted above, but there have been many other changes.

            Particularly interesting was the evolution of the CEBETA school.  CEBETA is a string of technical schools roughly equivalent to American community colleges.  The Mexican government generously provided one to Chunhuhub, again in the late 1980s.  Assuming that a successful farm town like Chunhuhub would want agriculture, it provided only that.  However, the Maya were more aware of world futures than the developers were, and wanted computer training.  They insisted with dogged and indomitable persistence, and computer training went in.  The school and its programs survived a major scandal in 1996.  As so often, Chunhuhubians took matters into their own hands, forcing out incompetent leadership.  Later a hurricane that destroyed the computers; they were replaced, again at local insistence.

            This was part of a wider mission of education.  The Maya of Chunhuhub are self-consciously modernizing and education-demanding.  This sets them apart from many of the smaller communities in the area, which are far less education-conscious.  Chunhuhub is still reflecting its (re)settlement in the late 1940s by a particularly dynamic, intelligent, and upwardly mobile group of young men, largely of the Xool, Tun, and Pat families; these families are now well represented not only in local business ownership but in skilled work and professional circles all over Quintana Roo.  I was sure of getting good service when I took my Nissan car in for maintenance in Chetumal, because the head of the repair shop was a Xool from Chunhuhub.  Chunhuhub has become a major producer of teachers and similar educated workers, who have fanned out all over south Mexico.

            Otherwise, the innovations in Chunhuhub have focused on new products.  Most interesting was noni, a Polynesian medicinal plant (Morinda citrifolia).  It is used in Hawaii for almost everything, but the Maya know it especially as a diabetes reliever.  It appears to work; at least the Maya swear by it, but they always use it with Cecropia leaves and other local traditional remedies, so cannot really factor out which plant is really responsible for the truly striking relief they often enjoy.  In any case, noni was completely unknown in southeast Mexico till about 2004, since which it has exploded, and is now found in countless gardens and sold widely in towns.

            Other new crops, such as South American passion fruit, have entered the area and expanded since I began to work there.

            Another newcomer is sheep.  The Yucatec Maya did not traditionally keep sheep, which they call “cotton animals” (h-taman), in spite of Colonial Spanish introduction.  As of 1991, Chunhuhub had a few sheep, in the care of a shepherd who—like many village shepherds the world over—was a gentle, simple soul whose world hardly extended beyond his flock.  From the late 1990s, however, mutton was saleable.  There was both tourist demand in and around Cancun and demand by mutton-loving Central and North Mexicans who had moved to the area.  So more and more Maya have added tough, heat-resistant tropical sheep to their dooryard gardens. 

Sheep do not automatically succeed in the region.  Another, more remote town, Presidente Juarez, tried repeatedly to develop sheep-farming, but the sheep were eaten by jaguars. 

Cattle have also increased locally, though this is limited by Chunhuhub’s unsuitability for cattle production.  Good quality grass will not grow on the thin limestone soils and dense tropical clays that cover most of it.  Cattle flourish exceedingly several miles to the south, on natural savannahs.

Meanwhile, a slow but steady increase in local prosperity results from sale of fruit, ornamental plants, thatch, nonprecious woods, medicinal herbs, and many forest products.  Chunhuhubians are also extremely good at finding part-time jobs—from cake decorating to acting as clowns at parties.  I recorded about 60 such informal part-time occupations in 1996.  Obviously, the Chunhuhubians could do much more, and very often fail to succeed in their endeavors, but they have a good track record overall, especially compared to externally imposed schemes.

The Problems

            Thus, while the government brings in new plans that are rarely successful, the people of Chunhuhub find their own ways to succeed.  Among other things, they seem always able to come up with just enough capital, thanks to the extended family.  Everyone has a relative with a good job somewhere.  Capital was a serious limit on agricultural improvement when I started working in Chunhuhub 20 years ago, but from the early 1990s it was not a serious problem except during the recession of 1993-94.  Individual families, however, run short of cash, especially after the frequent hurricanes and droughts.  Microlending could be improved in the area.  The Mexican government’s intricate and enormous bureaucracy puts countless hurdles in the way of start-up businesses, and this is an enormous disincentive to enterprise, especially marketing.

            The government’s plans usually founder on one rock:  Marketing.  It simply does not occur to anyone in south Mexico’s development universe that a product needs a market, and that the market has to be lucrative enough to pay the costs of production and transportation with a little over for profit.  This is a common failing of government schemes and NGO plans everywhere in the world.  The Maya, by contrast, are amazingly good at finding the tiniest niche market that will actually pay well.  In other parts of Latin America, where Maya and other local communities produce products of global importance, international NGO’s that focus on marketing have really helped local communities.  This is true in regard to coffee, cacao, Guatemalan Maya weavings, and other products (for coffee see esp. Jaffee 2007).  Too often in the Yucatan world, questions of profitability are seldom raised.    

Similar stories of Maya vs. outside development abound (see Faust et al. 2004).  They can be matched from around the world (Dichter 2003; Stiglitz 2003).  Since WWII, billions of dollars have been spent on development.  Some $60 billion are now spent every year (Dichter 2003:104).  There is now widespread admission that the money has not solved the problem (Dichter 2003; Stiglitz 2003; cf. studies in Faust et al. 2004).

Thomas Dichter (2003) points out that part of the problem lies in the way development assistance is done.  Complex and often byzantine bureaucracies invoke complex and expensive procedures, often badly targeted.  Mistakes amplify through the system.  There are the usual problems of bureaucracy—lack of accountability, top-down control by out-of-touch administrators, and the like.  Dichter sees the rise of a huge “development industry” as the root of the problem.  Certainly, the data in the present paper support his conclusions.

One wonders.  There are too many signs that the agencies know all too well what they are doing to the world economy, and continue to do it anyway (cf. Ascher 1999).  The world does virtually nothing about the huge trade barriers invoked by the rich nations against the poor ones (Stiglitz 2003).  Above all, farm subsidies are enormous in the First World—the United States gives every American farmer an average of $57,000 a year in direct payouts, and at least as much again in indirect support.  European subsidy levels are similar.  Yet the international agencies do everything possible to eliminate subsidies in the Third World.  One also recalls the point above about agricultural “packages” and giant international firms.  Many development plans are not at all well-meaning foolishness, but are very clever and very evil.  They are intended to exploit the poor and keep them down, rather than to help them (Ascher 1999; Hancock 1991).

It seems a bit too neat that the cumulative effects of World Bank, IMF, and WTO policies are to keep the Third World addicted to commodity exporting and minimum-wage, low-value-added industry (Humphreys et al. 2007; Stiglitz 2003—with some reading between the lines based on my own interviews with World Bank personnel).  The First World has gone on to the information economy, hi-tech, and efficiency—all founded on a formidable education-and-research establishment.  The agencies do everything they can to discourage this, by forcing Third World countries to defund education, research, extension, and indeed all public services.  At the same time, they invest heavily in developing the most primitive and backward sectors of the economy: mining, plantation agriculture, oil extraction.  Whatever the intentions, the effect is to keep these countries as fiefs of the rich nations. 

Globalization has, of course, made all these trends and problems more dramatic and more intractable.  However, it has also greatly increased the options of ordinary people.  The Maya of Chunhuhub are an active, enterprising group with a large, rich land base, and are well positioned to take advantage of opportunities.  They have shown a striking ability to do this.  However, they have no way of accessing world markets for many of their products.  Their precious woods and ordinary standard-grade woods, in particular, have to be sent to the city mills for uncertain and often low-quality milling.  Quintana Roo’s wood industry has made attempts in the past to introduce high-quality curing, sawmilling, and production of high-end wood products, but all the fledgling firms have failed.  This has much to do with international marketing structures, including high standards in the developed countries.  However, precious woods are exported from one or two Plan Forestal communities to Germany under their sustainable tropical hardwoods program.  This will no doubt increase.

Basically, the point is that globalization and global development increase the options and opportunities of the global poor in the “global south,” but, unfortunately, globalization increases even more the options and opportunities of the First World and its giant multinational firms to exploit the Third World and keep its people prostrate.

If we actually want to see the rural people of the “global south” improve their lot, the way to do it is to encourage local initiative and to help with small-scale loans and with global marketing.  Local people are fully competent to do their own developing, but they cannot do it without some start-up capital and a lot of help accessing global markets.

Another bad idea that persists—this time unstated and unadmitted—is the old belief that wealth can come only from taking someone else’s money.  This idea keeps resurfacing because it is common sense.  The way we normally make money is to get it from someone.  Usually, this is through legitimate business:  I sell you a fish and get some cash.  Sometimes, robbery, theft, conquest, or deception are the means.  Either way, cash is transferred from person A to person B, and that is how person B gets rich.

            However, in the modern world, wealth is often created anew, rather than merely redistributed.   Turning raw materials into goods is only one way to do this.  More efficient production, more value added, more streamlined management, more knowledge, more rapid and smooth transfer of information, more streamlined ways of doing business (“lower transaction costs”), and more environment-friendly production techniques all make something out of nothing—or, at least, reduce costs, and therefore improve cost-benefit ratios.  The extent to which this is doable depends on the level of relevant education of the workforce.  (Note that word relevant.) 

            Fortunately, Mexico is more aware than many Third World countries of the need to improve people’s lives through overall wealth creation.  Education is universal and quite good.  An educated workforce is obviously more able to do hi-tech jobs, make new inventions, and go into high-value-added enterprises.  Also, rising wages force companies to modernize and become more efficient, to keep other costs down in the face of rising labor costs (Hayami and Ruttan 1985.)  

Money for more education has to come from somewhere; it is part of the nation’s labor cost.  A skilled workforce costs a lot.  But, as Mexico is aware, an unskilled workforce is even more expensive when opportunity costs are figured into the equation.  The problem is that opportunity costs are too dicey for the conservative economists to contemplate.

            Resource extraction is another case in point.  Mineral resources taken from Country A are lost to that country forever.  In today’s world of low commodity prices, they do not even bring in much money.  Resource extraction looks good only when one considers the world economy as a zero-sum game.  The rich get it (cheaply), the poor lose it; wealth is redistributed, not created.  To be sure, metals and some other goods are more efficiently and wisely used in a developed industrial system than in a nascent one, so there is good economic sense in taking copper from Papua-New Guinea and bringing it to Europe and America.  But the same can hardly be said for coffee, or sugar, or cattle, whose processing is still a fairly primitive matter even in rich nations.  The money spent developing cattle export would be better spent developing decent schools, or even meat-packing plants, in the exporting country.

            This sort of zero-sum thinking underlies what George Foster called “the limited good hypothesis” (Foster 1965).  Foster found that people who see the world in zero-sum terms come to assume that even things like affection and justice are limited goods.  People living in closed economies with widespread low-key competition, or people who have to strive for power (always a limited good), are prone to think this way.  So, it appears, are international bankers and development workers.

            What is forgotten is that, given a chance, the poor rural villages of the world could produce more scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, teachers, and (yes) developers than all the First World put together.  The result would be wealth creation on an undreamed-of scale. 

Wider Issues

            The more naïve environmentalists will, at this point, object that this would trash the planet.  If everyone consumed like Americans…!

            The truth is that a world of opportunity and fair dealing would be a more efficient world.  If commodity prices were at all fair, the rich would no longer have access to virtually infinite amounts of virtually free oil, minerals, sugar, and so on.  The huge SUV would no longer be competitive with the small economical car.  In fact, the car would not be competitive with public transport; people would not find it necessary to have their own cars.  If the metals columbium and tantalum were not extracted for pennies from a Congo torn by civil war over the ore—a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people—the American economy would not find it so cheap and easy to provide huge, overadequate computers on such a lavish scale; people like me, who use the computer merely as a glorified typewriter, would have much smaller, more efficient, longer-lived machines.  If Third World countries had decent wages and decent social support systems, the rural people, newly empowered and given a stake in their economy, would no longer be forced to cut down every bush for firewood or to pull up every tuft of grass for fodder.  They would be able to husband resources, control and manage them, use them sustainably. 

The problem is that almost nobody thinks this is an achievable goal.  Limited-good thinking is perhaps the major reason for such hopelessness.  Today’s widespread cynicism typically takes the form of a belief that people are instinctively wired to destroy nature or to think in zero-sum terms (e.g. Ridley 1996).  This flies in the face of common experience; it is only in genuinely limited situations (most often, struggles for power in hierarchic systems) that people develop limited-good thinking.  Yet this is enough to make constant trouble for this imperfect world.

In fact, an evaluation of over 11,000 World Bank development projects showed that those with conservation goals were as successful at producing economic development as those that ignored conservation and simply went for the money (Kareiva et al. 2008).

            It almost seems as if the world economy is not capitalist but feudalist.  We are back to the world of the robber barons in their castles on the Rhine.  Most of the world’s population is forced, by police or military violence and genocidal repression, to work for pennies.  They work in bare-subsistence farms, they live by their wits in urban slums, or they work in extractive or low-value-added industries that provide cheap commodities for the more affluent.  The affluent, having no economic incentive to conserve, use these commodities in a wasteful manner.  The resulting damage to the world’s ecosystem worsens yet more the plight of the poor.   Far from being capitalist, “neoliberal,” or some sort of new product of the mystical force of “globalization,” this economy is a throwback to an earlier age.

            The cure is to focus first on providing the bare necessities of life:  water, fuel, food, and health care.  In the desperately overpopulated contemporary world, this last has to include the full panoply of contraceptive techniques, made freely available everywhere.  Then we can begin to think about the long term:  education, efficient use of resources, development of whole new industrial systems.  This will require spending money not on quick fixes but on huge systems that have slow and uncertain payoffs—not only education systems, but ecological reserves, sustainable development, research and extension, and the like. Be suspicious of anything that pays off in the short term.  If it is a good idea, private entrepreneurs will rush to do it without help.  Otherwise, it isn’t worth doing.

There are lots of other ideas that really work.  Even just controlling crime, or providing a road to market, can work wonders in certain places. 

One need not—pace the anthropological establishment—totally revolutionize our views of the world or our political economy, though some revolution would surely be useful.  Anthropologists have done thousands of studies showing how foolish outside developers are, and how smart the locals are at surviving in spite of them (one that sums up a vast literature in one complex story is Tanya Li’s The Will to Improve, 2007; see also, again, Dichter 2003).  The anthropologists usually draw the perverse conclusion that what we need is for anthropologists to take over and end neoliberalism, or globalization, or some other meaningless mutisyllable nonsense.  No.  What we need is to give local people the simpler and more practical of the things they actually want, and then get the hell out of the way.

The one common denominator that all successful plans have, and that none of the failed schemes has, is that they actually give opportunities to ordinary people.  It is among the ordinary people of the world that we can and must seek and find salvation. 

References

Anderson, E. N.  2005.  Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press. 

Anderson, E. N., and Felix Medina Tzuc.  2005.  Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.

Ascher, William.  1999.  Why Governments Waste Natural Resources.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press.

Dichter, Thomas W.  2003.  Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed.  Amherst & Boston:  University of Massachusetts Press.

Faust,  Betty B.; E. N. Anderson; John G. Frazier (eds.).  2004.  Rights, Resources, Culture, and Conservation in the Land of the Maya.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood.

Foster, George.  1966.  “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good.”  American Anthropologist 67:293-315.

Haenn, Nora.  2005.  Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.

Hancock, Graham.  1991.  Lords of Poverty.  London:  MacMillan.

Hayami, Yujiro, and Vernon Ruttan.  1985.  Agricultural Development.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hostetler, Ueli.  1996.  Milpa Agriculture and Economic Diversification: Socioeconomic Change in a Maya Peasant Society of Central Quintana Roo, 1900-1990s.  PhD th., University of Berne, ethnology.

Humphreys, Macartan; Jeffrey D. Sachs; Joseph E. Stiglitz (eds.).  2007.  Escaping the Resource Curse.  New York:  Columbia University Press. 

Jaffee, Daniel.  2007.  Brewing Justice:  Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Li, Tanya Murray.  2007.  The Will to Improve.  Durham:  Duke University Press.

Primack, Richard B.; David Bray; Hugo A. Galletti; Ismael Ponciano (eds.).  1998.  Timber, Tourists and Temples:  Conservation and Development in the Maya Forest of Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico.  Washington, DC:  Island Press.

Ridley, Matt.  1996.  The Origins of Virtue.  New York:  Penguin.

Stiglitz, Joseph.  2003.  Globalization and Its Discontents.  New York:  W. W. Norton.

Currently, the Colorado legislature has seen fit to eliminate seniority (and other job security) for teachers, replacing it with purported measures of “effectiveness.”  Bitter experience proves that when politicians take over such matters, the measure of effectiveness is invariably cooperation with the ruling political party.  We can expect teachers in Colorado, henceforth, to toe the Democratic line when Democrats are in power, and the Republican one when Republicans are.  What this will do to education, and thus to Colorado’s future, is easy to imagine.

Part I:  K-12

1

Modern classroom education is very different from traditional teaching.  A teacher lectures, often in highly abstract terms, and often with no demonstration (though perhaps with “visuals”—not necessary very relevant or revealing ones).  Students copy facts and memorize them.  Testing does not involve making the students do what they’ve learned; it involves making them guess which one of four statements is most like what a testmaker would think was the correct answer. 

The lecture-and-examination system arose in the ancient world and was perfected in medieval times.  It evolved to teach philosophy and other highly abstract fields to high-level students.  It has persisted today largely because it is cheap.  One can hire someone, not always the most qualified person, to teach a very large number of people.  This works if all one wants to do is teach a bare minimum of information.

However, when actual usable knowledge is the goal, we revert to the old demonstration-and-imitation model.  This includes lab science, computer skills, typing, cooking, driving, sports coaching, and above all apprenticeship on the job. 

We are so cynical that we pretend not to know how to teach, but those things that really matters to us are taught perfectly well.  Young people are guided, in actual practice, by coaches and mentors.  Tell a sports coach or a construction foreman that he should teach his students by making them sit motionless and memorize random bits for a standardized test.  Preposterous! 

Lecture-and-examination education is, in short, not a good way of teaching.  It is too abstract, remote, hands-off, and impersonal.  It leads to rote memorization.  It discourages creative application of knowledge.  Recent letters to Science and the Chronicle of Higher Education have responded to this truism by stoutly maintaining that a professor who is a great speaker and actor can teach effectively through lecturing.  Sure, but this line gives away the store; if you have to have a movie star to do the job right, what hope is there for even good (let alone mediocre) lecturers?

Rote learning is far worse.  It is the method of choice for those who want to regiment citizens rather than enlighten them.  As such, it has become the darling of politicians, who want followers, not thinkers.  It has given us a generation many of whom who can’t write, can’t understand what they read (having been trained to read only to memorize random facts), can’t do scientific experiments, and don’t know the local environment. 

Even worse, many students come to believe that actual thinking and creativity are strictly for the outside-of-class world!  Students who are perfectly thoughtful and creative in their daily lives diligently turn off their brains and stop questioning when they get into class.

There is now an active culture among teenagers of writing short stories on the Internet for their friends.  They write stories and poems for their friends and posting these on their MySpace and Facebook sites—with no idea that students were once supposed to write such things.  Students have ceased to see education as anything but standardized testing.  They never get to write stories in class.  They appear genuinely unaware that writing short stories was once a part of education!  They are constantly online, learning and writing and sharing, but they separate these activities from formal education.

Unfortunately, many modern alternative methods do not work well either.  Creativity for its own sake, or “discussion” for its own sake, can become undirected and trivial.  Relying on children’s natural desire to learn is a fine and necessary start, but inadequate to get through the slogging of memorizing times tables and chemical elements. 

Education for the future has to empower children and strengthen them, and make them lifelong learners.  Recently, the trend has been all the other way:  toward dragooning, forced memorization, standardized testing, and every other thing that breaks a child’s will and ruins his or her mind for life. 

            Americans will have to figure out what they actually want from education.  Rote memorization of trivia?  Citizenship?  Understanding the world?  Job skills? 

2

            We have long known how to teach and learn.  Yet, a great deal of what we know has been forgotten.  John Medina has conveniently reviewed much of this in Brain Rules (2008).  His rules—as conveniently summarized on the back cover—are:

“Exercise:  Exercise boosts brain power.

Survival:  The human brain evolved, too.

Wiring:  Every brain is wired differently.  [Individual differences are far too great to ignore—yet we generally ignore them, wrecking the teaching process.]

Attention:  We don’t pay attention to boring things.

Short-term Memory:  Repeat to remember.

Long-term Memory:  Remember to repeat.

Sleep:  Sleep well, think well.  [Of all rules, this is the most forgotten.  We now know that learning is consolidated during sleep.  Rats learning mazes replay these in their dreams; Medina 2008:164.]

Stress:  Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.  [In fact, they barely learn—except for the blazing, brilliant memory for the major stressor in a given case.  One focuses.  Depression, being generally a form of long-term stress, is thus devastating to learning.]

Sensory integration:  Stimulate more of the senses.  [He highlights smell, often forgotten.  He also points out that humans cannot multitask; the brain simply cannot pay real attention to two things at once.  So one must be careful to keep the multimodality targeted.]

Vision:  Vision trumps all other senses. 

Gender:  Male and female brains are different.  [Trivially, however.]
Exploration:  We are powerful and natural explorers.”

            We may add that hard tests are crucial; people have to know what they don’t know.  Educators even advocate giving students tests on material they are about to learn, so that they will at least know what the hard questions are (Roediger and Finn 2010).  Of course the students fail the tests, but they don’t blame themselves, and then will work harder and with more focus.

            Of these, we may note that some were known to the ancient Greeks.  My high-school psychology course more than 50 years ago taught me that “frequency, recency, and vividness” were the keys to remembering, and the line was classic long before that.

            Play has also greatly declined.  Recess and physical education have been dropped from schools, to provide yet more time for mindless drills.  At home, fear of street violence, availability of TV and video games, and other factors have virtually eliminated actual play in the old sense.  This is clearly disastrous from a psychological and educational view (Winerman 2009).   Yet, everybody knows, at some level, that successful education has to involve physical activity, including a good deal of “fun.”  Without field trips, experiments, and personal experiences, it doesn’t work. 

            If one uses all these rules, or whatever variants of them one prefers, one finds a classroom with a great deal of multimodal teaching, a fair amount of moving around, a great deal of repetition in different ways and forms,  and not too overwhelmingly much presented at a time. 

            Yet, during my lifetime, most American education has been moving away from these goals.  The No Child Left Behind initiative in particular—coupled with the huge tax cuts that accompanied it—led to enormous classes, drilled endlessly in mindless and overpacked curricula, with no accommodation to individual differences, need for rest, need for exercise, need for multimodal presentation, or anything else human. 

3

The schools are one area in which government must do the job.  It is a necessary political and social service, not a matter of material production.

Inevitably, then, politics has invaded education.  One reason for the failure of American education in science is that it has become politicized in an unsavory manner.  

Taxpayers and governments are so indifferent to their responsibility to educate the young that America’s schools are typically in serious need of repair, paint, landscaping, and new equipment; many are falling apart and downright unsafe.  Computer facilities and libraries are in dreadful shape. 

Every American child can compare his or her school with the local shopping mall, and see very clearly which one gets the attention and the money.  That lesson in values outweighs everything learned in class.  Meanwhile, right-wing politicians and talk show hosts continually attack teachers, claiming they are overpaid, coddled, and so on.  Clearly, if the community makes its scorn for schools and teachers obvious, the students will not take education seriously.  Very different are traditional societies, from America 50 years ago back to ancient Greece and China.  Then, even if both children and teachers were penniless, elders and their teachings were respected.

The problem of school maintenance and budget is obviously worst in poor neighborhoods, but paradoxically they may have less problem with students making the negative comparisons, because the difference between the school and other local buildings is less.  This does not change the brute fact of extreme economic injustice.  Spending on schools in a poor southern community that cares a lot may be only a fraction of that spent in a rich northeastern one, even one that cares relatively less for education.

Government and private schools currently suffer from the belief that education is valuable only in so far as it is training for specific jobs.  No.  Education is essential to human development.  Humans are an end, not a means. 

Probably an even worse attitude, harder to spot today but much more open when I was young, is the idea that teaching is about making children learn discipline—“learning to mind,” it was called in my day.  My father (a Texas farm boy, educated in a tiny rural schoolhouse) quoted a mythical Texas farmer as saying “I don’t care what you learn ‘em so long as they don’t like it.”  This Puritanical attitude has made Americans focus on what children “should” learn and “should” do, and on making sure they don’t like it, rather than on what the children actually need.  We tend to teach whatever is the most grimly unpleasant and mind-deadening side of education, and abolish the pleasant or directly useful subjects as “frills.”  Really valuable subjects like natural history, nutrition, health, and exercise have thus gone to the wall.

All the above implies that saving American education at the grade-school level will take work.  It must involve, first, spending a great deal more money on actual classrooms and classroom teaching.  Rebuilding deteriorated schools is not only a matter of safety and common care for children, but a matter of community pride in education.  Teacher/student ratios much above 20-25 students per teacher in grade school and around 100 in big college classes make education simply impossible, unless rote memorization for standardized tests is dishonestly called “education.”  Teachers have to mentor, guide, and correct actual activities.  This cannot be done in mass batches.

George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy has been a total disaster.  Even the idolized standardized test scores have fallen since it was introduced—let alone the measures of real education, such as the ability of college freshmen to write and do research, or the ability of fledgling employees to do useful work.  It penalized teachers and principals for things over which they had no control, notably the number of non-English-speaking students in their districts.  It did nothing to reduce class size or provide better equipment.  It laid unfunded mandates on cash-strapped states and communities.  It favored private schools over public ones.  

By far its worst damage, however, has been its single-minded focus on standardized tests as the sole measure of quality.  The Educational Testing Service, which has a virtual monopoly on the tests, was a huge donor to Bush’s campaigns. 

“No Child Left Behind” certainly was designed to hurt public schools, thus giving private schools a leg up; one may even suspect a deliberate attack on education and learning in general, since the Republican Party has, statistically, become the party of the less educated (a striking reversal since the 1950s).

The result has been an enormous relative increase in testing and in teaching to the test.  Schools compete to see who can achieve the highest test scores; those that fall behind are savagely penalized.  Teachers and principals are evaluated solely by how well their students do on the all-important tests. 

Standardized tests are bad enough of themselves, but it is possible to construct multiple-choice tests that require creativity, originality and real thought.  I have seen it done.  Cleverly designed standardized tests are a blessing in many situations.  Moreover, it is possible to use even the more mindless sort of standardized test to advantage when all one needs to test for is straight declarative knowledge—memorizing scientific names or chemical elements. 

However, the mass tests used in schools rarely, if ever, even approximate this goal.  One must seriously wonder whether anyone ever intended that they should. Given the administration that designed the plan, one suspects that it was deliberately designed to reduce original and critical thinking as much as possible in the rising generation.

Education is thus reduced to mindless repetition.  We see the same thing in some traditional schools in Asia and Africa, where children learn to chant sacred books without understanding the words.  No standardized tests there, but the result is the same. 

The predictable results of No Child Left Behind include skyrocketing rates of cheating.  64% of high school students now cheat on tests, and 36% have plagiarized papers (David Crary, Associated Press, online article, Dec. 1, 2008).  Teachers and staff are too overworked to police this, and many schools look the other way in any case, since their funding and many jobs are on the line.  Bush has created a climate in which honesty and good education are penalized, cheating and mindless memorization rewarded.

4

However, it is unfair to single out Bush.  All segments of the body politic are guilty.  Liberals have rushed to embrace the anti-science rhetoric of the “postmodernists.”  Moderates have supported “professional” schools in universities at the expense of the liberal arts and sciences. 

Politicians of all stripes routinely campaign against teachers and school taxes, and even label them “special interests.”  Schools are blamed for all the faults of the young.  To hear politicians talk, parents have nothing to do with the kids’ problems, and have no responsibilities for their children.  This has something to do with the fact that parents vote, and are numerous.  No politician wants to blame a substantial voting bloc for anything.  Moreover, many politicians go on to say that public money spent on education is “wasted.”  They cut school funding, in spite of occasional lip service to education in general.  Open or slightly-covert support for private schools over public schools is official in the Republican party and not infrequent among other parties, though quality private schools are hopelessly inadequate in number and highly concentrated in a few cities. 

This has led to a steady escalation of conflict between the Republican Party and the teachers’ unions and associations.  The latter were formerly fairly conservative, and many teachers were Republicans.  The tensions of the last 20 years have changed this, and the resulting polarization is not healthy.  Even moderates now often blame the unions for failed schooling, especially because they protect “mediocre” teachers.  Conservatives such as David Brooks argue that what the schools need is the abolition of tenure, cutting teachers’ pay, and firing “inadequate” teachers—inadequacy to be determined on the basis of their students’ standardized test scores.  Obviously, many conservatives would dearly love to fire teachers for political reasons—and often try to do so.  But even if they fired teachers “fairly,” the result would be a massacre. 

Already, burnout and job dissatisfaction are costing the United States thousands of teachers every year.  Special-needs children are mainstreamed, class sizes are steadily expanding, and teachers’ aides are being eliminated by budget cuts.  Attracting the finest to teach school under these conditions is already an enormous challenge.

What would happen to teaching if the conservatives had their way?   No one seriously thinks we can attract better teachers by promising less pay, eliminating job security, and threatening them with summary firing if they disagree with the principal or have a run of poor students.

The right wing has proposed a “voucher system,” in which children would be given money for private schooling to escape the public school system.  This would provide a sterling excuse to defund the public schools and ultimately to end public education.  Experience teaches that the private schools would continue to raise their fees.  The voucher sums could and would easily be cut whenever fiscal problems struck a state, because there would be the obvious alternatives. 

One can only conclude that the real agenda of the conservatives is to end public education.  It is a huge consumer of taxes, and it is by far the most important leveling mechanism in the United States.  It is, in fact, the only surviving bastion against total takeover by the elites, and the only real source of opportunity for nonwhites and less than affluent families.  Would abolishing it accomplish anything except cutting off these opportunities?

The No Child Left Behind plan is openly racist; Bush and his advisors knew perfectly well that impoverished minority schools could never compete, if only because of the terrible health problems in the ghettos and barrios they serve.  One cannot possibly avoid the conclusion that penalizing these schools was meant to hurt minority children, not to help them.  The penalties, such as replacing principals and thus destroying any continuity (rather than—say—actually evaluating the principals on the basis of their administrative skills), make sense only if they were designed to hurt the slower schools, not to improve them.

Private education, currently, is hopelessly inadequate to take over the role of educating Americans.  Outside of the richer parts of the northeastern US and the Washington, DC, area, there are relatively few private schools that actually focus on academics.  The vast majority of private schools in the United States are religious, and many of those teach little beyond religious bigotry and six-day creationism.  The religious right, with the support of cynical politicians who know better but need the votes, has set itself unalterably against the teaching of evolution and environment in the schools.  They often claim that they want only “equal time for creation.”  This might not be bad (I think it would be good) if Native American and other creation stories were allowed as well as “literal” Judeo-Christian ones.  However, where creationists have taken power, or been able to frighten school boards, they have simply ruled evolution off the turf and out of the textbooks.  The basis of biology—Darwinian theory—is now not taught widely in the United States.  In some states, it is gone from grade school education.  In others it is still in the books, but so watered down that it is not even a shadow of its true self. 

The same people have attacked sex education in schools.  Evidently, many Americans are more interested in certain kinds of indoctrination than in actual study and assessment of evidence, or, for that matter, in morality.  American education has moved away from a focus on life skills and health; time spent on hygeine and health education, physical education, and relevant aspects of biology have all declined. 

Of course, multiculturalism is also under attack, though common experience confirmed by serious research shows that (at least for Latinos, and doubtless for all bicultural individuals) both involvement in one’s culture of origin and involvement in US mainstream culture are valuable (Smokowski et al. 2009).  Strong confidence in one’s own traditions is important for learning others’ traditions well.

Because of political controversies, time spent on civics and history has also declined.  Far-left and far-right parents feud with the schools over how these controversial subjects will be taught.   Ultimately, many schools shy away from teaching more than a bare minimum.  Fortunate are those states like California that have public university systems that make no-nonsense demands on the public schools:  no decent history courses, no entry to the universities.  But California’s funding crisis has now gutted even this.

Foreign languages, too, are generally required for college entrance, but anyone who travels in Europe or Asia is aware of the incredible deficiency of North Americans in this regard, and any American who is not ashamed is not paying attention.  Swiss children are expected to know five languages fluently, and most Europeans know at least three.  I have known totally unschooled individuals in Asia who knew five languages—they had simply picked them up—and have met more school-trained ones who knew over 20!  The human animal is biologically programmed to learn languages fast and easily (Hauser and Bever 2008; Pinker 1995).  Humans benefit by knowing more than one.  It makes learning further languages and other linear communication forms that much easier. Learning only one language is probably unnatural for humans, and certainly limits learning ability.  It probably leads to failure to develop key neural channels; inadequate learning of a single language most certainly does, as we know from a few tragic cases of isolated children (Pinker 1995).  Fluency in two or, better, three languages should be required.  As in every other case, the obsession with mindless standardized tests has ruined language teaching in America.  Also, however, many Americans defend their ignorance by claiming that learning a second language interferes with knowing the first one!  Immigrants and Native Americans have been constantly attacked for speaking their heritage languages, and attempts go on and on to force them to speak English only.  Science proves the opposite:  the human mind is designed to learn languages, and the more one learns, the better one knows one’s own.  Opposition to second languages is second only to standardized test mania as a proof that American education is far too influenced by irresponsible and ignorant people.

5

Right-wingers and the more extreme end of the business world consider teaching about ecology and the environment to be a threat to their interests.  Even the most innocuous references to air and water pollution have been forced out of textbooks.  Many dubious ideas surface in literature made available by coal, oil, and nuclear interests (Selcraig 1998; Stauber and Rampton 1995).  

Some of the right-wing writings on the subject are so extreme as to be chilling.  Facts Not Fear: A Parents’ Guide to Teaching Children about the Environment (Sanera and Shaw 1996, with foreword by Marilyn Quayle) manages not only to misrepresent both science and environmental politics, but goes on to imply strongly that all ecologists and environmentalists are actually Communists trying to destroy the capitalist system.  This is part of an even wider disinformation campaign by polluters and deforesters (Stauber and Rampton 1995; for more examples, see Rush Limbaugh’s See I Told You So [1993]).

Some environmental education has indeed been politicized in an overly anti-capitalist way.   Conservation biologists were stung into releasing a report in 1997 that found many problems with books for the public and school market: “some texts seem more interested in advocacy than science,” promoting errors and misrepresentations of their own (“Overhauling Environmental Education,” Science 276:361, 1997).   One observes that many such texts also blame “capitalism” or “the capitalist system” for the environment’s ills.  It is hard to understand what they mean by this, since they leave their terms undefined.  Certainly it does not square with what we know of environmental management in ancient Rome—1500 years before capitalism—or in the USSR or modern China.    

6

Teachers need much more freedom to teach as they will, and much more training in the actual subjects they teach, than they get in most public and private schools.  They need to study biology, as well as whatever may be useful in “education” curricula.

The current problems of the schools are greatly exacerbated by the layers of administration to which they are subject.   Many school systems, from grade school to universities, spend over 40% of their very limited budgets on administration.  “Local control” of education should mean not control by local politicians, but control by the teachers, subject to consultation with the parents.  The teachers need to be insulated from both politics and parental interference. 

Parents—but not politicians—need some recourse. We need to go back to a world in which teachers, students, and parents can interact, without having to deal with arbitrary, Byzantine, and frequently corrupt layers of administrative management.  This requires drastically cutting back on the power and funding of administrations. 

It also requires reforming the complex codes that make them unfortunately necessary in many polities.  The administrators and politicians have created a vast network of laws, rules, policies, conventions, and paperwork requirements that serve to keep administration necessary.  Whether they do it consciously or not, administrators (from NSF to the neighborhood school board) create policies whose ultimate result is to force teachers to do more and more paperwork and trivial nit-picking. This runs up the expense of education, again, since it means the university must hire a phalanx of lawyers and specialists.  It also keeps the teachers too busy to organize.  It also keeps them convinced that administrations are necessary.  Teachers have time either to teach and do research or to play politics; they can’t do both.  The honorable ones thus are more or less forced to leave politics to the rest.  Simplifying the rules and paperwork, again from NSF down to the town school district, is clearly a high priority for improving education.

            The worst problem with modern education is the one revealed by the universal, and increasing, reliance on standardized multiple-choice tests (SMCT’s) to evaluate anything and everything.

            It is possible, with extreme difficulty, to evaluate critical thinking and analytic ability with SCMT’s, but almost always they are used solely to test factual knowledge.  This, plus the savage competition between schools that No Child Left Behind has forced on us, has led to making education more and more a process of cramming students with random facts, as a Strassbourg goose is crammed with corn.  The facts are those tested on recent SMCT’s, rather than those students might actually need.

            On this altar, music, arts, serious science, physical education, and other “frills” have all been sacrificed.  More to the point, we have sacrificed critical thinking, originality, creative writing, and everything else a serious education is supposed to produce.

            All this depends on the increasingly popular American view of education as simply memorizing facts.  It is a passive, mindless process of assimilation.

In contrast, most of the skills we teach at the university, from laboratory science to engineering to archaeology, are like driving, or duck hunting, or farming.  They require both a huge amount of factual knowledge and a tremendous amount of hands-on physical experience, and they require, above all, critical thinking and good judgment.  None of this can be taught by rote memorization.  The factual knowledge can be appropriately tested with SMCT’s, but not the quick thinking for reasoned judgment under real-world conditions.  Physical skills have to be “embodied”—our muscles and sinews actually have to grow, shape themselves, and accustom themselves to particular patterns of movement.

Sports require more phyusical training, less knowledge, but even they require analytic thinking and quick judgment.  And of course no one would evaluate a swimmer or tennis player by giving her an SMCT.

            Research, leadership, cooperation, organizing, original and critical thinking, writing, and other basic academic skills depend on experience and practice.  They have little to do with memorizing facts, and cannot be tested by SMCT’s.  They do not depend on specific physical skills, but they do depend on the body being in reasonably good physical shape, a fact well known to the ancient Greeks but forgotten in modern classrooms.  We have sacrificed physical training and created a generation of children almost 40% of whom are obese. 

            Evaluating real skills by serious evaluative methods is a problem that will take some thinking.  We are not thinking about it.  In the meantime, SMCT’s should be restricted to a very small role—testing the minimal knowledge needed by people for specific activities.

            This is routinely done in driving:  we take brief SMCT’s on traffic law, but the serious tests are the driving test and the eye test.  Those are taken more seriously than the law test.  The same is true in sports; there is a little teaching of factual knowledge, but of course almost all evaluation is practical.

Part II:  College

7         

Another hotly debated field is university education (see Marc Bousquet’s excellent book, How the University Works, 2008; also Clawson 2009).  Here too, mindless rote memorization is getting rapidly commoner.  Almost as pernicious—and related—is the steady growth of the size of lecture classes.  Classes of several hundred or even more than a thousand students are common.  In these, the real teaching is done by graduate students or lecturers, who are usually very dedicated and hard-working, and establish fine rapport, but cannot always handle the job of transmitting expert knowledge to hundreds of students.  Worst, such classes are especially common at the freshman level, where they disserve students already overburdened trying to adjust to a system they do not yet understand.

The public, including college administrators, undervalues biology.  College biology departments sometimes are treated by administrators as nothing but premed training camps.  The courses are made as dull and difficult as possible, to weed out less gifted premeds (Greenwood and North 1999).  I have heard biology professors boast outright of doing this.  Prospective environmental scientists often become disillusioned and discouraged.  Moreover, among those who do go on, promotion goes to narrow specialists who publish highly technical papers, not to those who reach out to the public.  The public—including lawmakers and budget planners—concludes that field and organismal biology is unimportant and irrelevant. 

The university tenure system of a generation ago worked well to protect professors from administrative abuses, but has been undercut by administrative takeover and by rather astounding legal opinions to the effect that academic freedom does not protect whistle-blowing on administrative crime! 

Academia today bears the same relationship to scholarship that organized religion bears to religion.  Religions generally teach love, tolerance, fairness, and justice.  Organized religion, to the degree it is hierarchic, almost always ends up promoting hate, bigotry, oppression, and mindless obedience.  The similarities between a modern “multiversity” and the medieval church are not accidental or trivial.  Quite apart from the historic roots of the former in the latter, the current social dynamics are the same:  a top-down hierarchy, promoted by nontransparent internal means, and subject to every sort of vicious backroom politicking.

Organismal biology, if taught at all, is taught via lectures and textbooks.  My university is typical in having cut back steadily on field biology courses and training, in order to divert resources to molecular and cellular biology.  These latter are necessary and desirable, but the world simply cannot afford to lose the field courses.  The situation in the lower grades is similar or worse.  Biology is poorly taught, and is increasingly focused on non-organismal biology—partly because it is safer from challenges by anti-evolutionists.

            All the above led to a recent letter to Science, signed by 20 leading scientists (Bazzaz et al. 1998; the signers included leading ecologist Paul Ehrlich, and Jane Lubchenco, later a leader in the Obama administration’s team) from the United States and Mexico.  It called for training students “who will be ready and willing to devote part of their professional lives to stemming the tide of environmental degradation and the associated losses of biodiversity and its ecological services, and to teaching the public about the importance of those losses.”  It continued:  “We believe that such efforts should be rewarded as part of the process by which ecologists are considered for academic posts, granted tenure in universities, elected to membership in learned societies, and so on” (Bazzaz et al. 1998).  David Orr (1992, 1994) has written eloquently and movingly on the lack of real concern with life that is shown in much biology teaching.  He has advocated that we of the scientific community be more open about love for the world and for our fields. 

Modern electronics provide an escape.  With clickers, email, visual and multimedia displays, instant messaging, Blackboard and other classroom-related software, and other wonders of the 21^st century, highly interactive teaching is possible at a distance, and some of the excitement of hands-on education can come into a lecture hall.  This would bring back real teaching and learning to classes with a hundred, or a very few hundreds, of students. 

The bad news is that many indications suggest that these methods will be used as yet more ways to cut costs by reducing staff levels.  The online-education advocates seem to think that, with enough gadgetry, we could have a single professor teaching 10,000 students.

The good news is that sanity is not entirely lost.  Sarah Miller and others, writing in Science (2008), report finding that what works for elementary school students works for college students:  an hour spent in varied activities with full feedback beats lecturing out of the field.  They managed to get bits of lecture, brainstorming, data interpretation, a case study, a “think-pair-share” period, and some feedback via clicker or instant “paper” of a line or so into an hour.  (This seems incredible to an old college professor, but my daughter the high school science teacher does it all the time.)  Miller et al. found stunning increases in effectiveness when college science was taught this way.  Obviously, it takes an incredible amount of hands-on work by the professor, and is possible at all only because of clickers, text messaging, and so on.  No 10,000 here.  But it works.

Surveys show that most college students are concerned, first, with getting skills they need to find decently-paying jobs; second, with learning enough about society to make them informed citizens.  The older generation of professors decries the focus on careers and money, but fail to realize this is not the 1960s, when education was free, jobs abundant, and a house cost $25,000.  Today’s students face high and fast-rising tuition costs.  They graduate with five- or six-figure debts.  They face a world where good jobs are few and houses start at $400,000.  Blithely ignoring career issues and filthy lucre is not an option. 

Universities are badly strapped themselves.  Harvard’s endowment is in the billions, but most universities are not so lucky.  As of 2005, average endowment per student in the top quartile of schools was $376,000, in the bottom quartile a mere $32,668; as a result, the former spent $13,069 per student on actual instruction, the latter $3,290.  The former figure had risen dramatically since 1995, the latter hardly at all (Selingo and Brainard, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2006, p. 13).  Social justice is not a part of American education.

Educating an undergraduate at a typical public university costs about $7,000 a year minimum (Schwartz 2007).  In a good public university the figure is closer to $14,000; private universities can run three or four times that.  Currently, tuition has risen to that level at most American colleges.  Some charge even more, making the students support research that has only indirect benefits to them and that is more important and relevant to state business interests.

This increase in costs is not just boodling (though there is plenty of that).  The biggest “good” reason is the new information technology.  A university now has to spend thousands of dollars per student per year on new hardware and software.  Education, especially in the sciences, can no longer take place without the latest computers, programs, security software, licenses, and so forth.  The costs of books and journals have also skyrocketed in the last 20 years, largely because giant firms have acquired a virtual monopoly on key publications, especially in the biomedical field, and charge accordingly.  A major medical journal now costs over $10,000 a year, virtually all of which represents profit for the publisher.  (On top of that, many of these private journals reach truly outrageous heights by forcing the contributors to pay the publication costs, thus making a clean 100% profit!  Grants often cover the costs; a researcher not on a grant is virtually ruled off the turf.)

Professors’ salaries have not moved much, in constant dollars.  My father’s salary at the University of California in the 1950s was higher in buying power than mine in the same position at the same university in the 2000s.  Professors’ salaries have increased 5% in real dollars since 1970, but that is due mostly to the aging and thus increasing seniority of the faculty.  Salaries actually decreased for assistant and associate professors (Clawson 2009).  This is bad enough, but worse is the spectacular inflation of book, journal, and lab equipment prices since 1970.  The tools of our trade have been priced out of our reach.  On a less serious note, the old symbols of the professoriate, sherry and tweed jackets, are now out of many a younger faculty member’s reach.  

The universities have further saved money by replacing professors with “temps”—graduate students or temporary postdoctoral staff—to teach beginning courses.  These are notoriously exploited, the temporary staff being paid less than a living wage because they are doing it in hopes of getting experience toward a “real” job later (Bousquet 2008 has a thorough discussion of this problem; I am proud to say that the temps unionized at UC, with help from the professors and students).  Most professors are now nontenured, a new development, and  CHECK ALMANAC ISSUE 2009

One problem for the universities has been the natural tendency of professors “climbing the ivy” to fall into highly specialized and professionally-popular topics.  It is always depressing to see a scholar who began as a genuinely curious, broadly interested person slowly narrow down into a hyperspecialist, desperate to stay au courant with an insignificant field, caught up in academic politics.

8

Far more serious is the convergence of universities on the giant corporations (Washburn 2005).  Overadministration is now common (see Birnbaum 2000 and Bousquet 2008 for merciless looks).  Most of the administrators are well-meaning, though often shortsighted, but many are cynical, corrupt careerists.  I could name names and pin down literally billions of dollars stolen.  The Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual “almanac issue” for 2006 (Aug. 25, pp. 3-4) included an appalling list of presidents and high administrators caught red-handed in financial scandals, usually involving “liberating” university resources for their own indulgence.  They were acting like their role models, the executives of corporations such as Enron.  The list goes on for two pages of fine print, and names names all over the country.  Whole university administrations, including my own (the University of California’s), were caught.

Many of these individuals are career administrators trained in business management, rather than academics.  Others are academics corrupted by the Enron model in academic circles. Both groups go by the book—regulations when possible, administrative manuals and books otherwise.  My wife once served under a dean who made everyone read a management text based on case studies of several “successful” firms; unfortunately for the model, half the firms were in court within a year or two!  Alas, my wife’s school copied them all too well.   

However, these “rotten apples” are not the real problem. They can be handled.  As Max Weber taught us in his classic studies of bureaucracy (see Weber 1946), administrators do not have to be evil to do harm.  Weber classified leaders as traditional, charismatic, or legal-bureaucratic.  Tradition and charisma survive in the modern university, but no one would question the point that modern universities are overwhelmingly led by the last of Weber’s types.  This is inevitable in a world where assigning classrooms, allocating budgets, and setting up anti-cheating policies are the common tasks and where charismatic speechmaking is confined to commencement exercises.

Academia during my lifetime has made an insidious shift from a broadly democratic organization to a bureaucratic one.  In the age of faculty governance, individuals did research and teaching, and competed with one another to do the best job (or at least an adequate job).  They ran the universities, and managed them to maximize the amount of knowledge generated and transmitted.  This created a “wisdom of crowds” situation (Surowiecki 2005):  the more independent minds worked on a problem, the more it was effectively addressed.

Over time, the job of governing the modern college became too much.  Today’s mass-education facilities and huge research universities simply cannot be run by professors in their spare time.  Alas, this meant a shift to the worst type of organization:  one managed by an oligarchy of faceless bureaucrats who are paid only to manage.  They are not accountable.  In particular, they have no stake in the actual output of the university.  They do not teach, and they do not do research. 

They love simple outcome measures that are wildly inappropriate:  number of students enrolled and graduated (as opposed to amount taught to said students), or number of pages published (as opposed to quality of work).  Silliest of all is evaluation by the number of citations an article receives.  Quite apart from the perverse incentive to create mutual-citing clubs (now routine), this measure ignores the number of papers and books that are so bad that everyone attacks them.  In anthropology, several books over the years have accumulated fantastically high citation indices because they were everyone’s examples of how not to do it.  Some straw men are real, and they get cited accordingly.  As well measure a person’s driving by the number of traffic citations!

Bureaucrats are driven by the nature of administrative systems to pass the buck, dodge accountability, fear change, drag their feet, stick with mindlessly administered policies, and resort to meaningless managerial doublespeak when challenged.  Everyone in large hierarchical organizations knows this from countless experiences.  The more overworked and underpaid the bureaucrats are, the more they act this way, and thus the progressive budget cuts suffered by universities in recent years have extremely counterproductive effects. 

The nature of bureaucracy selects for a certain type of person.  One has to be personally ambitious to tolerate such conditions.  This can be good.  Teachers are generally dedicated people who live to help others, and thus their ambition may be of the noblest sort.  Unfortunately, teachers who want to teach are not usually fond of administration, since it takes them from teaching and dooms them to a round of managerial tasks which they often find maddening and trivial.  They see this (often all too correctly) as a move from telling devoted students how to save the world to dealing with cheaters, backbiters, and squabblers over tiny pockets of money.  Many still get into administration, and do well, but administration becomes “over-enriched” with people who are either failures as scholars or personally driven to individual success rather than teaching per se.  In the business-imitating climate of today, the slick, suave, manipulative individual with no scholarly pretensions but much personal charm tends to succeed.  Such individuals can actually be good administrators, but often are simply there to rip off the system for selfish benefits.  Others—the worst—are passive-aggressive souls who “climb the ivy” because they are driven by a sense of personal inadequacy.  These are the ones most likely to turn into bullies, oppressors, and harassers. Again, these are fortunately rather rare, and the usual conflict is between the idealists and the more ordinary careerists.

The modern administrator dodges responsibility at all times.  The result of a failed policy is not admission of a need for change, but—usually—a move to another school and another attempt at the same policy.

Once again, I am not saying that administrators are an evil lot, or that administration is bad.  The administrator who redirected the library money to redecorating his office and the one who followed a shady model did much damage, but they were really rather exceptional.  Far commoner are the well-meaning souls who are mindless regulation-followers, or slick self-promoters, or simply overwhelmed bureaucrats trying to do what they can.  I am saying, following Weber, that a bureaucratic system selects for certain types of people and certain types of behavior, and that we have made it far worse in America by consciously adopting the business-management model for academic administration.  We have to get rid of the bad apples, but far more important is changing the system.

Tenure, and thus academic freedom, is seriously threatened, and indeed the whole idea of professors as independent scholars is being replaced with the business concept of professors as low-level workers who produce a product defined by higher-level administrators.  Inevitably, such a product must be whatever produces immediate benefit for the administrators—whether high enrollments, big donations, or large research grants.  Actual education and research are sidelined.

Obviously, the immediate and necessary cure is the same as it is in all bureaucratic situations:  accountability and recourse.

However, it would not be enough.  We also need to teach leadership.  Teaching “management” only makes things worse; business management and its “educational administration” imitator are notorious, for reasons too well known to need elaboration here. 

Leadership was once taught in many contexts in American society.  Some of these contexts, notably sports and the military, were not necessarily those that liberals love, but they did their job.  More ordinary civic and educational venues (possibly more acceptable to the liberal mind) worked well also.  The result was an age of administrators like David Starr Jordan of Stanford, Robert Hutchins of Chicago, and somewhat later Franklin Murphy of UCLA.  Where are their like today? 

If anyone wants to revive leadership training, the basis of it is listening to everybody and getting all possible input, then acting decisively according to one’s own best sense of what to do, and finally take full responsibility for the result.  Then duly thank everyone for their input (whether it was used or not).  The courage to take advice, then come to a rational decision, and then carry it through to conclusion and bear the brickbats or roses, is what academic administrators lack today.  In my experience, and in accounts in the Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere, high administrators listen to faculty only when forced, and rarely take the advice forthcoming. 

Leaders also make decisions for all their followers, not only their own core group.  Academic administrators naturally develop a sense of unity, often against the professors and other employees of their universities.  They then make decisions to benefit administrators at the expense of the rest.  Leadership training in the old days paid special attention to this natural tendency and did everything to teach leaders to avoid it.

Leadership does not just happen.  It comes from training and practice.  All graduate students should get both.  Being a teaching assistant does not do the job.  In my field of anthropology, archaeology students who supervise field “digs,” lab-science students who get and manage their own grants, and field workers who do not just do ethnobgraphy but have to develop and manage field teams involving local people do get the necessary experience.  Their only problems are that they are not always well taught, and their professors are not always good role models. 

In short, fairly simple lessons, learned in real apprenceships with real practice, are what we need.  Turning students loose to sink or swim, or giving them brief “educational administration” courses, do more damage than help.

A solo player can be a genius, limited only by individual ability.  A string quartet, even a quintet, takes coordination, but can manage itself.  Beyond that, the human conscious mind cannot handle more than seven things at once, and usually tops out at five.  Any group bigger than a quintet needs a conductor.  Then we can hope someone like Arturo Toscanini, who could weld a huge orchestra into one single organism and get that organism to play beyond anything one would think possible even from a soloist.  Not everyone can become Toscanini, but the more we can approach that sort of leadership, the better we do.

9

Possibly the biggest single area where leadership, not bureaucratic management, is needed is core curriculum:  required courses, and overall course and department offerings.

Sclerotic bureaucracy and lack of leadership guarantees an outcome in which the biggeset departments have the most political power, and use it to stay big.  Staying big usually means that they make sure their beginning courses are the required ones for the university.  This makes change almost impossible.

The business-school alternative is to fire the faculty, hire “temps” instead, and go with “consumer demand,” i.e. student choice.  This guarantees that fads will prevail, and that above all the parents’ delusions about what is the “most saleable degree” will be all-important.  Anyone who has spent a year in a college or university knows all too well that the younger students are all going to be doctors, computer programmers, or whatever else the TV set tells the parents is the safest, surest way for their helpless young to make money in the near future.

In so far as this ideal is achieved, it is even worse than the frozen state.  The big departments at least reflect some kind of accumulated wisdom.  They generally include English, history, and similar classic fields.  The pre-professional philosophy, by contrast, guarantees a wild swing from one fad to another.  Students concentrate in the “hot” area, oversupply it with qualified people, and thereby crash it as a sure source of employment.  Engineering is particularly notorious for this.  Engineers were seriously short in the American economy in the 1960s, leading to overproduction in the 70s, which led to students avoiding that major and causing another shortage in the 90s, which led to another glut and round of firings in the 2000s.  Doctors have prevented such cycles by making an MD extremely difficult to get; hoops to jump through range from the shortage of good medical schools to the savage and unnecessary hazing of the interns. 

Long-term planning for the future of both students and the American economy would require leadership, because it would require major change.  As to the students:  it should be obvious to anyone, but is not, that—whatever they do in their lives—all students need a few skills.  The most obvious are good writing skills, critical thinking, some knowledge of economics (including the math), and, yes, leadership ability.  I would add some serious knowledge of American and other cultures, past and present.  I would certainly hope for some serious knowledge of ethical philosophies—not debate over the idiotic ethical dilemmas that infest “Phil 1” textbooks, but serious readings of Kant, Mill, Rawls, and their peers.

As for the future, environmental education is clearly the most desperate need now.  A country where global warming and Darwinian evolution are still seriously doubted by many educated people is obviously headed for self-destruction, and richly deserves it.  The basic concepts of ecology, including the importance of biodiversity and wild lands, are totally absent from the standard curriculum, and totally lacking in the minds of most Americans. 

Some other obvious problems include the failure of health education.  This gives us the current rapid increase in obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, and similar lifestyle problems.  It also gives us the incredible shortage of nurses—indeed, of all non-MD medical personnel—that is crippling American health care and driving up its costs.  The United States is a million nurses short, if our goal is to provide medical care with proven adequate staffing rates for all citizens. This gap is growing exponentially, as overall population increases and baby-boomers age.  Rather ironically, one of the main reasons is the success of women’s liberation, which targeted nursing as an old-fashioned “women’s profession.”  The media duly portrayed it—till recently—as a lowly, servile occupation.  A very feisty book, Saving Lives (Summers and Summers 2009), pointed this out in no-nonsense terms, and turned the media at least partially around, but the problem remains.

One could go on:  the failure of political education, the decline of knowledge of history….  Suffice it to say that neither the frozen-tradition model nor the business-management model work.  In fact, their continuance will be devastating to America and the world in the near future.

Most professors cling to an ideal of “liberal education,” the content of which is under constant and hot debate.  Not much meeting of the minds comes out of all this.  The problem in this case is not lack of discussion, but lack of any good way to resolve it.

We are having enough trouble maintaining any vision of liberal education in the old sense.  “Liberal” education referred, originally, not to a “liberal” political position but to the liberating power of curricula based on the sciences and arts.  Nobody seems even to remember that now, let alone advocate it.

            In the Good Old Days, there was a “canon” of texts that had “made” the culture in question.  The students would read these texts and would thus know their culture, or at least the elite literary representation of it.  Unfortunately, if those Good Old Days every really existed, they vanished long ago.  Something like them appears to have existed in ancient Greece, Rome, and China.  However, we of the Euro-American educational world really got our idea of the “canon” from religious education.  The “canonical” readings were the Bible (the Hebrew Bible for Jews, that and the New Testament for Christians) and the orthodox commentaries on it.  The Islamic world had the Quran, Hadith, and commentaries.  China had a similar, but less overtly religious, canon: the Confucian classics.

            This had the advantage of giving everyone the same background.  All “educated persons” knew certain things.  The Chinese, especially, saw this as a basic necessity of civilization; they were sometimes less concerned with the actual content of the canon than with the fact that every educated person should share a common heritage.  The downside of this was the fearful snobbism often involved.  Canonical texts, especially literary works, tended to be by elite older males, in China and in the West.  And the “educated” who knew those texts looked down on the poor fools who did not.  Such prestigious knowledge has recently gained the name of “cultural capital.”

            Since the Renaissance in the west and the later coming of Western culture to China, this sort of canonical education has been a nostalgic memory in both west and east.  Higher education has seen almost continual fights over content.  The Renaissance scholars fought to re-introduce the Greek and Latin classics, to the horror of the older generation, who saw them as filled with paganism and sin.  By the time the old churchmen had finally caved in, a new horror had arisen:  vernacular education in the various European languages.  As recently as the mid-19^th century, many English educators held that Shakespeare and Milton were far too uncouth and gross to be part of proper education, which could only be the Greek and Latin classics, and, of course, the Bible.  Shakespeare and Milton were “canonical” by 1900, but then came the whole fight over modern literature and, worse, modern art.  This fight was still hot and vicious when I was a student, with a strong rearguard of educators seriously maintaining that James Joyce was too obscene for the young, and modern art was communist and sinful and should be banned.  However, in the end, Joyce and Picasso became canonical.

In the late 20^th century, another fight arose as women and minority authors and artists found places in literature and art curricula.  Conservatives objected, usually—alas—on purely sexist and racist grounds, but sometimes out of sheer love for the earlier canons.  Of course, women and minorities won a place in the canon.  The fights at the time I am now writing are over the inclusion of films, TV plays, and other media forms. 

            The previous brief history shows that the old guard always crumbles, and has since 1200.  The real problem now is that the “canon,” by any definition, has exploded beyond anything any student could possibly read or see.  Even by 1900, few indeed were the students who got through all the English literature they were supposed to know (Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, and on and on), let alone the Greek, Latin, French, German, Russian—in the original languages, of course….  Today, it is a well-educated student who even knows the names of all the kinds of media that have their own canons! 

            Obviously, the goal of giving students the True Basics of their culture has become an impossible dream.  This is especially true in the United States.  In spite of the nonsense about America being a product solely of English or of West European civilization, the United States has been profoundly influenced by all Europe, and Europe in turn received much from the Middle East.  The United States also learned much from its Native American heritage, its Chinese contacts, its (tragically involuntary) African immigrant streams, and much else.  Imagine trying to understand American music without admitting the African presence.  American culture has now diverged far from west European; students in England do not know Twain or Scott Fitzgerald, let alone Amy Tan or Toni Morrison.

            Moreover, American freedom, which in the case of higher education verges on a hilarious and fermenting anarchy, guarantees that nobody can impose an arbitrary, or even a reasonable, canon on anyone else.  A very small college can sometimes manage to agree on a set of books every student should read.  Getting even one state’s public education system to agree on this would be, in the endlessly repeated phrase academics use, “like herding cats.”  Typically, each department of literature or arts has its specialists.  Knowledge becomes more specialized over time.  One English department may specialize in Shakespeare (and a professor may specialize in only one play), while the English department at the next university down the road specializes in nineteenth-century fiction, and the next one farther on specializes in Black American authors.  Students read accordingly, and learn very different things in different colleges. 

Liberal education now does not usually seem to give students much idea of what “good” literature or art means—why Sophocles and Shakespeare really are better, in important ways, than the general run of Hollywood offerings. 

When students from different schools meet, their cultural common ground is popular film and TV—not the material they learn in classes.  Because of this and many other changes in western culture, movies and TV have taken over from literature the role of giving people a common cultural ground.  Movies and TV provide the reference points for discussion of morals, social codes, and worldviews.  The Chinese were right:  people need a shared set of cultural knowledge, and it helps if what is shared is the very best.  We of today fail notably in the latter regard. 

No obvious solutions come to mind.  One possibility would be a core curriculum of books that really shaped American political thinking and through that the American political system.  This might be manageable.  Certainly, it would include Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s ethical and political works, Hobbes’ Leviathan, John Locke’s writings on government, and the major writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States.  I would guess that most authorities would further agree on John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and perhaps his other writings, and on a few other books.  After that, though, we would see a terrific political fight that would probably never resolve.  Moreover, some of the above works require a great deal more training in history and politics than most students today receive.  Hobbes and Locke, in particular, assumed when they wrote that the reader knew the Greek and Latin classics.  They also assumed (reasonably enough) that the reader knew everything important about English and Continental politics of the time.  Moreover, writing in the 17^th century, they used the English of their time.  The language has changed since—more than some readers realize.  This is one reason they are both horribly misinterpreted today. 

            All this led to the end of the “canon wars” of the 1980s and 1990s.  Even the most conservative gave up hope that anyone could come up with a selection that would be clean, concise, and universally accepted.  We are left with sets of “breadth requirements.” These are often chosen with less attention to student needs than to guaranteeing big-enrollment classes to key departments.  At my university, in fact, the latter seemed to me to be the only factor considered.  Seeing no rhyme or reason to the requirement structures, some students cynically conclude that the “breadth requirements” are required to keep the students in college, and thus paying tuition, for an extra year or two.

So, what should we do with higher education?  Let it become strictly specialized job training?  Make it cover these political writings, to explain where the United States is coming from?  Provide necessary information for survival in the 21^st century, including health and environmental knowledge?  Provide enough “great art” to give students some idea of what the standards are?         

Accumulated anthropological wisdom suggests that not only should we change the methods to more hands-on ones, and the locations to more prestigious and well-maintained settings, but that we should change the content to reflect what we as a society really want to share.  This would certainly include minimal civics—for example, in the United States, some understanding of the Constitution and Bill of Rights and their immediate origin.  It would certainly include basic reading and writing skills, including analytic and creative skills.  I would add that we really do need, desperately, to show students and others that there is indeed a difference between Shakespeare and TV soaps.  We also need to expand even the minimalist canon to include the great writers of the world, not just those of the English language.  If we raise a generation without self-conscious understanding of the deeper currents of human emotion and thought, we are doomed as a civilization.

One nonproblem is the alleged domination of education (at least in America) by “liberals,” whatever they are.  American campuses display an incredible range of opinions, and a very large percentage of professors are anything but liberal.  The complaints seem concentrated strictly within a segment of society that wants to impose their own brand of “conservatism” on the ivy, outlawing not only liberals but traditional conservatives.  This segment represents an extreme right-wing fringe, and what they want to impose includes six-day creationism, denial of global warming, Holocaust denial, and other views that simply are not true.  For them, even traditional conservatives are dangerous leftists.  This is why the far right feels that the universities are taken over by “liberals”; in their twisted world, Milton Friedman and even George W. Bush are liberals.

Actually, academia serves as the last home of lost causes, and in fact all these long-disproved notions are taught somewhere.  No need to demand more.  What is much more amazing is that neither the self-styled conservatives nor their self-styled liberal antagonists spend any effort looking at the real problems of academia:  bureaucratization, topheavy administration, standardized testing, huge class sizes, mind-numbing boredom in many classes, and lack of intellectual challenge.  Far better if the critics were to unite against those. 

10

This leads to something more radical, and dearer to an anthropologist’s heart:  serious concern with indigenous, local, and small-scale societies and their traditions.  The small, local societies of the world almost all manage resources better than we moderns do.  They all have music, art, and literature, often world-class and certainly worth recording for posterity.  They all have their own unique and wonderful variations on the basic theme of humanity and the human experience.  Their works are creations of the human spirit, and deserve consideration as such.

Early anthropologists realized this, and recorded traditional cultures and their creations with meticulous care.  We have now dropped this emphasis.  To some extent, it falls between the chairs.  Anthropologists have increasingly abandoned the field to scholars from the relevant societies—indigenous scholars and scholars from minority groups. 

Yet, such scholars are almost inevitably concerned with their groups’ more immediate and pressing problems.  They are worried about health care, legal rights, economic justice.  They have little free space to document cultural riches.  Those that do often have sadly limited opportunities to make them available to a wider audience.  Countless wonderful dissertations, reports, and collections gather dust in university archives, unpublished and often not even catalogued. 

Also, there are still far too few scholars from the groups in question.  Racism is legally dead in the United States, but obviously nowhere close to dead in actual practice.  One need only contemplate the college completion rates of Native American or Black students compared with whites.  In many other countries, bias is not even legally defunct.

The result is that of 6800-7000 languages in the world, the vast majority faces imminent extinction.  About 20% of North America’s Native American languages are extinct.  Over 20% of the rest are spoken by one or a few elderly people.  All are declining, and only a tiny handful (including Navaho, Hopi, and Cherokee) seems secure for the foreseeable future.  Even the isolated communities of Alaska are losing their languages.  The situation is similar in Australia, Latin America, and elsewhere.  European minority dialects, and even languages like Breton and Savoyard, are fading away.  Even though Africa is no longer dominated by European powers, it is losing local languages.  When a language dies, a whole culture is reduced. 

Obviously, we cannot expand the canon to include all 7000 languages and their works, but we need to be more sensitive to the problem.  We desperately need to preserve the languages of the world and the arts and useful knowledge systems that go with these.

11

Learning is itself a good—one of the highest goods.  Having an open mind and wanting to learn more about anything and everything is about the most valuable trait one can have, and is a basic personality disposition (the “openness” of personality theory). 

Individual experience in dealing with the world also provides strength to those lucky enough to have some strength at the start.  They can deal with progressively tougher problems and thus become progressively stronger.  Rural people in the United States in my youth had these characteristics; they were tough, independent, and resourceful.  They were emotionally strong, creating the great folk music of those days. 

This classic “building of character” is rare today for three reasons.  First, there are hurts that are simply impossible to overcome; most obvious, perhaps, is massive brain damage due to fetal alcohol syndrome or to early physical abuse.  Second, our society, in which even entertainment is provided to passive individuals, encourages and implicitly idealizes passivity and discourages self-help.  Most important is the third reason: few are there to provide the backup support and encouragement that is necessary for a child trying his or her wings. Unsupported children become weak, and the weak, ill-prepared, and vacillating have major problems with learning.   

The dynamic of oppression can play out in a family, a small community, a nation, or the world.  A rich man from a powerful family can be reduced to utter wretchedness if that family is harsh enough.  An impoverished woman from a despised minority can rise to the top, if a strong family with a strong and supportive religious tradition is behind her (Werner 1989; Werner and Smith 1982).  I have known such cases; probably most people have.  They are, however, uncommon; they should not be used (as they often are) to excuse the wider community from all responsibility for the poor.  Poverty, and especially decline relative to others, dispirits and disempowers most people.  And schools notoriously train people for the lives they are expected to face.  Even with good intentions, teachers often convey messages that tell students exactly how low the expectations are for them.  The effects are widely studied and known to be devastating (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1992; Willis 1984; this is well portrayed in the film “Stand and Deliver,” about the career of Jaime Escalante in successfully breaking the pattern). 

            There was a time when education was about teaching people deeper and wider emotional experiences—or at least exposing them to art and literature that would give them the chance to learn.  Such depth and breadth of sensibility should (should, but often do not) inform coping responses, and teach people to cope rationally rather than with reactive defensiveness. 

Unfortunately, that sort of education seems lost today.  Besides the problems of overspecialization and technical narrowness, we have too often succumbed to negative views of humanity.  People are seen as entirely the playthings of circumstance: as automatons or as mere victims (or mere oppressors).  This latter view, basically the “postmodern” one, is intensely dehumanizing and insulting. 

There was a time when social science strove improve the world, and to bring good things to a wider audience.  Anthropologists shared the good ideas of small-scale, traditional societies with the world.  Transmission, translation, and explanation were basic to this enterprise.  Valuing people and valuing diversity were goals; understanding the full range of human phenomenological experience was perhaps the highest goal.  All this was based on respect for people in general and for individuals in particular.  I hope we can recapture that.

References

Birnbaum, Robert.  2000.  Management Fads in Higher Education:  Where They Come From, What They Do, Why They Fail.  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass.

Bousquet, Marc.  2008.  How the University Works:  Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.  New York:  New York University Press.

Clawson, Dan.  2009.  “Tenure and the Future of the University.”  Science 324:1147-1148.

Limbaugh, Rush.  1993.  See I Told You So.  New York:  Pocket Books.

Medina, John.  2008.  Brain Rules:  12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.  Seattle:  Pear Press.

Miller, Sarah; Christine Pfund; Christine Maidl Prebbenow; Jo Handelsman.  2008.  “Scientific Teaching in Practice.”  Science 322:1329-1330.

Pinker, Stephen.  1995.  The Language Instinct.  New York:  HarperPerennial.

Roediger, Henry L., III, and Bridgid Finn.  2010.  “The Pluses of Getting It Wrong.”  Scientific American Mind, March-April, 39-41.

Rosenthal, Robert, and Lenore Jacobson.  1992.  Pygmalion in the Classroom:  Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development.  New York:  Irvington Publishers.

Sanera, Michael, and J. Shaw.  1996.  Facts Not Fear:  A Parents’ Guide to Teaching Children about the Environment.  Washington:  Regnery.

Schwartz, Charles.  2007.  “Old and New Thinking about Financing the Research University.”  Posted Dec. 18 to website: webfiles.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz.

Selcraig, Bruce.  1998.  “Reading, ‘Riting, and Ravaging.”  Sierra, May-June, 60-92.

Selingo, Jeffrey, and Jeffrey Brainard.  2006.  “The Rich-Poor Gap Widens for Colleges and Students.”  The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 7, pp. 1, 13.

Smokowski, Paul; Rachel Buchanan; Martica Bacallao.  2009.  “Acculturation and Adjustment in Latino Adolescents:  How Cultural Risk Factors and Assets Influence Multiple Domains of Adolescent Mental Health.”  Journal of Primary Prevention 30:3-4:371-393.

Stauber, John, and Sheldon Rampton.  1995.  Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!  Monroe, MN:  Common Courage Press.

Summers, Sandy, and Harry Summers.  2009.  Saving Lives:  Why the Media’s Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk.  New York:  Kaplan.

Surowiecki, James.  2005.  The Wisdom of Crowds.  New York:  Doubleday. 

Washburn, Jennifer.  2005.  University, Inc.:  The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education.  Basic Books. 

Weber, Max.  1946.  From Max Weber:  Essays in Sociology.  Ed. and tr. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Werner, Emmy.  1989.  “Children of the Garden Island.”  Sci Am 260:4:106-111.

Werner, Emmy, and Ruth S. Smith.  1982.  Vulnerable but Invincible:  A Longitudinal Study of Resilient Children and Youth.  New York:  McGraw-Hill. 

Willis, Paul.  1981.  Learning to Labor.  Columbia University Press.

Winerman, Lea.  2009.  “Play in Peril.”  Monitor on Psychology, Sept., 50-52.

This paper concerns education in ecology, environment, and science.  The argument is that current formal education is getting farther and farther from traditional methods, and in consequence less and less successful in these areas. 

Culture is about learning; children absorb it from parents and peers.  However, children bring their own skills to the process.  The human brain develops in a predictable way, and learns accordingly.  Thus (for example), children learning language go through a striking and very distinctive process.  They first use a word to correspond to a single object or person.  Mommy and Daddy are just the infant’s own mother and father.  “Dog” is the family dog.  Then, suddenly, around 7 or 8 months, they get the idea, and suddenly generalize the words out of all normal usage:  all female humans are Mommy, all males Daddy, and all four-footed creatures are “dog.”  Then, more slowly but still fairly fast, they learn to restrict these words to their proper meanings.  But restriction normally follows from learning new words for things previously covered by overextended words.  My first daughter learned “leaf” at 8 months, with reference to a single leaf.  She soon generalized it to cover all soft colorful things, including flowers, clothes, and sheets of colored paper.  Then she learned “flower,” which took a huge bite out of “leaf”; then “clothes” and “paper” took more bites.  Soon “leaf” meant what it means in normal adult English.  Children are programmed to learn this way, and it is exciting to watch.  They do not learn by stimulus-and-response or by simple copying.  They learn by extrapolating a definition or a rule and then vastly overgeneralizing it.

Culture consists of useful knowledge—data and rules—that we learn and then use in adapting to daily challenges and opportunities.  It includes countless alternatives that we can invoke and reinterpret at will.  If I want to pluralize “sheep” as “sheeps,” or even “sheepen,” I can do it, in spite of cultural rules to the contrary.  Moreover, I will be understood by standard-English-speaking hearers.  They will correctly assume I am playing language games.  If they are young enough, will be amused.  Children love to see adults deliberately playing with the rules—it feeds right into the learning process.  Creative use of knowledge and rules is what life is all about, and any culture that imposed a rigid crust of “constructions” on its bearers would immediately die out.

2

A culture, like a biological organism, has to reproduce itself—its working knowledge, its social organization, its hierarchy, its belief system.  Just as reproduction of the species occurs through mating and birth, reproduction of culture occurs most typically through formal and informal education of the young.  This process is fraught with social meanings and consequences (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). 

Surprising uniformity emerges from studies (admittedly few in number) done on informal working education in traditional societies.  Everywhere, learning is by doing—but doing things while being guided by elders (Anderson 1992, 1999, 2007; Lave 1988; Stafford 1995). 

Everywhere, such learning is supplemented by stories the elders tell.  Some of these stories are hallowed myths that provide a sacred charter for conservation or other ethical behavior (the vital importance of serious myths in education is discussed in Cajete 1994).  Almost always, such mythic texts are told in special contexts:  During ceremonies and rituals, during long winter nights around the fire, or during long periods of work at the particular activity the myth concerns.  

In no case is teaching done through formal lectures in a neutral, alien environment.  The stories are graphic, dramatic, exciting, and personally compelling—partly because they are either sacred traditions or part of the life experiences of known and (hopefully) respected individuals. 

Usually, of course, it is the practice that matters.  The myths and tales supplement knowledge gained through experience.  The knowledge is then not merely verbal; it is learned by the whole body and the whole mind.  One learns with one’s entire being—hands and feet, emotions and cognitions, ears and eyes.  The more total the body and mind involvement, the more learning.  It is truly embodied, but it is more than that:  it is part of the whole dynamic process of using one’s body and mind in practice (cf. Gibbs 2006).

The results of such training are truly striking.   Both lowland and highland Maya of college age, and even of early teens, know hundreds of plants and animals by name and use (Stross 1973; Zarger 2002; Zarger and Stepp 2004).  They have an encyclopedic knowledge of farming (Kramer 2005) and forest management.  Chinese fishermen know hundreds of fish, how to catch them, and how much value they have in the market; they can handle boats, predict weather changes, and deal with coordinating crews (Anderson 1999, 2007; Stafford 1995).  Northwest Coast Native peoples have, by adulthood, gone through initiations that provide guardian spirit visions; in the course of these, they learn ceremonies and myths.  They also learn the expected encyclopedic amounts about fish, game, and plants, but from actual hunting and gathering practice rather than from rituals. 

The working knowledge bases of these traditional peoples are not greater than those of an extremely well-educated American young adult, but they are far greater than those of the typical product of American schools:  barely literate and almost completely ignorant of science.  The American young adult may know much, but most of it will be about consumer products and popular celebrities.

Wider reading in the anthropology of education confirms this as a general case.  Serious research in educational anthropology began with Maria Montessori, who put her findings to good use by starting the Montessori school movement.  Alexander Chamberlain’s The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought (1895) opened the topic for research in the United States, but Chamberlain died shortly after this book appeared, ending a promising career.  More important and visible, but still without discernible influence on the field, was a striking article by J. W. Powell (1901) on “sophiology,” his term for the art of instruction; he anticipated much of what is below, and one wishes his article had had its intended effect of starting a whole field.  If it had, American education would be far, far better than it is today.

Studies of traditional nonschool education were few and far between for a long time.  The Sioux writer Charles Eastman (1902) reminisced about his boyhood in an extremely interesting and detailed review.  Many Native Americans since have contributed importantly to knowledge of traditional education (Cajete 1994 gives an excellent general discussion; among many autobiographies, Reyes 2002 is outstanding).  The Berkeley education professor George Pettitt became seriously interested in the whole issue and produced outstanding (if now seriously dated) studies, first of the Quileute people, then of Native American education in general (Pettitt 1946, 1950). 

More recently, important research was started by John and Beatrice Whiting (Whiting 1951, 1994), of Harvard’s Social Relations Department, on how culture, via education and training, influences personality, and vice versa (see valuable review by Munroe and Munroe 1975).  Much of this dealt with emotional development, especially aggression and gender issues.  The Whitings’ most famous finding was a strong correlation between the degree to which boys are raised only by women and the level of pain and drama in male initiation rites.  Cultures where women raise the boys (because the men are off working, fighting, or whatever) have much more dramatic and painful rites—circumcision, scarification, and worse. 

As psychologists turned to studies of cognition in the 1960s, most of the Whitings’ students flocked to that area.  Their work on emotion is outside my view here, but the peak of their activity and influence occurred just as the “cognitive revolution” (H. Gardner 1985) was sweeping Harvard’s social sciences with major transformative effect.  The Whitings’ more cognitive-oriented students were swept up in the moment.  Kimball Romney, arguably the leader of cognitive anthropology for the next 40 years, got his start studying children under the Whitings’ direction (Romney 1966). 

Eventually, ethnographic and psychological research under the Whitings’ direction produced a fairly concrete set of findings on how non-classroom education normally proceeds (summary surveys include LeVine 2007; Munroe and Munroe 1975; Whiting 1994).

The Harvard Social Relations Department also included Evon Vogt, whose enormous Chiapas Project trained two generations of anthropologists (Vogt 1994).  Inevitably, interest in education and child life was part of this, leading ultimately to the recent work of Patricia Greenfield (Greenfield 2004; Greenfield et al 2003; Zambrano and Greenfield 2004), Eugene Hunn (2002, 2008), Brian Stross (1973), J. R. Stepp, Rebecca Zarger (2002; Zarger and Stepp 2004), Felice Wyndham (2009), and others (myself included).  Of these, Hunn, Stepp, Zarger and I were students of Brent Berlin, who had gotten his start on the Vogt project. 

Independently, Hilaria Maas Colli (1983) studied Yucatec Maya child life with special reference to the role of ceremonies and rituals in reinforcing gender-role training; one of the very best studies of traditional child life ever done, this work remains forlorn and unpublished in the University of Yucatan anthropology library.  Karen Kramer (2005) observed Yucatec Maya child life on the farm, and though her work is more concerned with the role of child labor in farming, she provided excellent observations on what tasks are learned first and which ones later.  All this has made the Mexican Maya by far the best known traditional small-scale societies in the world in traditional nonschool education.

Closely related in approach was Jean Lave (1988), who, though not part of the Whiting or Vogt projects, was trained in the cognitive revolution days.  She later worked with psychologist Barbara Rogoff (Rogoff and Lave 1984; Rogoff 2003), training Greenfield, as well as Mary Gauvain (2001), who has provided broader psychological overviews.

 There were, meanwhile, a few—a very few—independent efforts to understand traditional training.  By far the most impressive was the work of geographer Kenneth Ruddle with the education specialist Ray Chesterfield (Ruddle 1993; Ruddle and Chesterfield 1977).  Much of what follows is based on their work.  Several other, largely isolated, studies appeared, but none has been followed up so far (Franquemont 1988; P. Gardner 2003; Quisumbing et al. 2004; Stafford 1995).  Pelissier (1991) provided a very valuable review of child life studies in anthropology as of 1991, but, alas, the main thing her review shows is that most research has been done in and on school environments.  There has also been some attention to what and how children really learn in modern schooled society, notably the superb and underappreciated prospective research of Emmy Werner (1989; Werner and Smith 1982) and the much more famous work by Paul Willis, Learning to Labor (1981; on youth and learning, see also Bjorkland 2007.  Peter Kahn and his group have studied nature learning in modern America:  Howe et al. 1996; Kahn 1999; Kahn and Kellert 2002.)

From all of the above, a conclusion emerges:  Whether one is a Hadza learning to hunt antelope, a Trobriander learning to play cricket, or an American learning to swim or fish or ride a bike, the process is broadly similar. 

The sooner and more often one retrieves and uses a piece of information, the better one learns and remembers it (Karpicke and Roediger 2008).  Traditional societies teach in context and get the learners to repeat endlessly.

Studies of education also show that the higher the motivation—emotional, social, economic, or otherwise—the more the learning.  Salient facts are stored easily. 

Typically, one learns in a family context, or at least in the community and from well-known community members.

A surprising amount of non-classroom learning is from only slightly older children, cross-culturally confirming Judith Rich Harris’ (1998) findings about the importance of peer groups.  Earlier, thinkers and educators had overemphasized the importance of adults.  Most had hardly noticed the great importance of slightly-older peers.  Yet it is doubly important, because as the younger ones learn by doing, the older ones learn by teaching.  Explaining what one has learned is well known as a particularly valuable way of organizing and cementing knowledge (Siegler 2005).  As the proverb says:  “the best way to learn something is to teach it.” 

In some cultures, learners receive minimal guidance, especially from adults; people are supposed to be able to copy anything they have seen, or at least to try it and then work out any bugs by trial and error (Eastman 1902; Gardner 2003).  In other cultures, adults or older children model the behavior many times over (Greenfield 2004).  Still other cultures instruct the trainers to provide some verbal explanation along with the modeling (this is what I have seen among Chinese and Maya). 

Modeling-with-words is appropriate for tasks like computing; most of us learn our basic computer skills this way—some peer shows us, with verbal and physical guidance, and we try to emulate.  For motor and mechanical skills, where words are often inadequate, modeling-without-words is often the rule.  You can go only so far in explaining how to swim or ride a bike. 

Children tend to begin by intently watching the process.  Few words or direct teaching is involved.  Then they try it, with more or less guidance from older children (for simpler, more “kid”-level learning) or from adults.  The best account I have seen is Patricia Greenfield’s (2004). 

When words are necessary, as in language learning, people in ordinary daily life (as opposed to formal schooling) embed the words in ordinary conversation.  Often, they use requests:  “Get me the ixi’im,” “go out and find a k’uum and bring it in,” and so on.  If the child does not know the word, the parent shows him or her the item in question (corn, and squash, in the Yucatec Maya examples above).  Or the word is simply embedded in conversation and the child is expected to pick it up:  “See, I’m going out to bring in the ik, come help me, OK?”  The child follows, sees the parent harvesting chile peppers, and thus learns that ik means those painful green or red items.  

Gathering firewood, medicinal herbs, and flowers all provide “teachable moments.”  What matters is not only the learning opportunity, but the child’s increasing realization that these are important skills—in fact, the very core of necessary knowledge.  Being an adult Maya means being able to raise corn (first and foremost!), find good firewood, treat one’s illnesses. 

Much of this learning takes place without punishment or major reward.  Children are not beaten when they fail and not given candy when they do well.  Motivation is a combination of intrinsic interest and validation by elders and peers.  Children everywhere want to learn what is culturally important.  This approach to motivation often shocks westerners, who cannot imagine raising a child without physical punishment.  In Hong Kong, British parents were always telling me that Chinese parents “spoiled” their children, in spite of the very obvious fact that the Chinese children were better behaved than the British ones.  The Jesuits in Canada in 1648 recorded it as a great triumph of their teaching when a mother beat her four-year-old child form some minor slip; the Jesuits could not imagine Christian childrearing without beating, but the Huron people they were converting never used physical punishment, feeling it was disrepectful to the child (Blackburn 2000:94).

Finally, older children teach younger ones.  This not only helps the younger ones; it helps the older—possibly more, in fact.  The truest proverb I know is “the best way to learn a subject is to teach it,” and these older children are doing their most important learning.  Current research suggests that the faster a learner (of any age) actually applies his or her learning, the better the understanding and retention.  Today we get children to take tests (as soon and as often as possible; Glenn 2007; Karpicke and Roediger 2008) or write down (hopefully with some thought) what they have learned.  How much better to get them to go right out to teacher the younger ones!

This works.  Working, again, with Maya highlanders, Brian Stross’ classic study of Tzeltal Maya children showed that they knew an enormous number of plants, learning the names often from peers and especially in older childhood (Stross 1973; and Janet Dougherty 1979 found that United States children knew far less).  A recent replication of this study by Rebecca Zarger and collaborators found that knowledge has been passed on, the same way, for yet another generation (Zarger 2002; Zarger and Stepp 2004).  Salient, culturally important plants are also learned first and best, as Felice Wyndham (2009) found working with highland Maya.  Children learn almost from birth to attend to things their parents and older peers stress and emphasize, and this is clearly one of the most important—probably the most important—variable in determining what is learned.  Wyndham also stresses the total experience—bodily, emotional, and cognitive—and thus takes a phenomenological approach to learning.  This is an important development; the artificial and arbitrary splitting of experience is one of the major reasons for the catastrophic failure of education in the modern United States, and phenomenology offers a needed corrective.

Learning is thus highly social, and is characterised in these traditional societies by being a full, rich experience with actual real-world choices to make.

Similarly, Eugene Hunn found that Zapotec children know an enormous amount about the plants in their environment—and, by inference, everything else in it too—at an early age; almost all children in the village knew dozens of plants well before the age of 10 (Hunn 2002, 2008; documentation and photographs in the latter work are outstanding and important).  Hunn (personal communication) has found a surprising amount of knowledge of nature among American college students, but it is learned from television and zoos, and is more apt to concern large African animals than small American ones!  Colleen O’Brien (2010) found that children in the isolated desert community of Ajo, Arizona, know a good deal about the desert, and could know a great deal more if anyone worked with them; but elders often know little themselves, and in any case have given up on the children, maintaining that “they know nothing” and are hopeless.  This attitude is not confined to Ajo (Louv 2005).  Obviously, giving up on the young is no way to teach them.  (College professors take note.  Many of my colleagues claim that “students these days” are hopeless—uninterested, illiterate, etc.  Of this more anon.)

One other set of studies informs our search:  participant observation on traditional specialized education.  A large literature on traditional training of religious and visionary practitioners (such as shamans) is too hard to evaluate for our purposes here.  Many traditional religions seem to teach largely through rote memorization of texts and rituals, but good descriptions of the actual process are few and far between (though see e.g. Boyce 1979 on Zoroastrian lay and priestly training).

Studies of traditional survival arts abound (e.g. Campbell 1999).  They rarely go into detail on learning, but they say enough to make it clear that the writers learned by watching and imitating.  Partly because it is the best way to learn, and partly because their consultants always taught that way, these survival-skills scholars learned by quite traditional methods.

A more important and deeply researched body of research is found in studies of traditional medicine.  Among those particularly good, and useful to us here, are two books by western Sinologists who studied Chinese medicine:  Knowing Practice by Judith Farquhar (1994) and The Transmission of Chinese Medicine by Elizabeth Hsu (1999).  Both apprenticed themselves to Chinese doctors.  Teaching was largely by apprenticeship.  In this case, there was a solid body of textual knowledge which had to be learned, but it greatly underspecified and underdetermined actual practice.  Farquhar spent much time learning to be a Chinese medical worker.  Hsu spent a year in Kunming, Yunnan, studying traditional medicine and qigong exercise.  Her  deeply insightful book covers the relationship of text, teaching rhetoric, and practice.  Both came to similar conclusions:  Chinese medicine is an art, learned by actual interaction with patients, not a craft learned from books.  The books are at best unclear and at worst incomprehensible; they never specify enough to determine practice clearly.  One has to work under a doctor’s direction for a long time. 

A few other such medical memoirs from other cultures exist, though many do not tell us much about learning the trade (see e.g. Leighton and Leighton 1949, which pays more attention to a Navaho healer’s inferred personality problems than to his practice).  However, it seems clear from all studies that most traditional and folk medicine is learned by doing, as in the case of Chinese medicine. 

My own experience is relevant.  I learned Maya healing largely from Don José Cauich Canul, a jmeen (healer) of Polyuc, Quintana Roo.  He consciously took me on as a trainee.  He took me out looking for herbs, demonstrated massage and other techniques on me, got me to do the simpler standard routines he used, and wrote up a manuscript with his favorite cures (see Anderson 2003).  There was, thus, a combination of apprentice practice, modeling, verbal instruction, and use of textual material.   

What works best is apprenticeship—or, more broadly, what Jean Lave (1988; Lave and Wenger 1991) calls “legitimate peripheral participation.”  We learn by helping.  Think how you learned to cook, or work on a car engine, or do any environment-related thing from backpacking to restoring habitat.  Almost certainly, you learned by actually working with a senior and more experienced person, and you gradually came to do more and more of the work by yourself.  If you did learn some of it from books, you are aware how much better participation is than book-learning.

In short, across a very wide range of skills and societies, surprisingly little discussion and virtually no lecturing takes place.  Much learning takes place through interaction, negotiation, and discussion, but often this is the kind of unconscious learning that goes on all the time, especially in language learning by young children.  Learning through discussion seems to be significantly commoner among modern large-scale societies, in both Asia and the western world, but we lack a wide enough sample to be truly sure of this.  Moreover, in these developed worlds, physical skills like sports playing and woodworking seem to involve less discussion than more purely language-based matters, and thus approximate to the typical learning situation in small-scale societies.  However, even in teaching physical skills, verbal coaching is still the rule in North America and parts of west and south Asia, though not so much in of East and Southeast Asia (at least in my field work days). 

As mentioned earlier, the one really important traditional way of verbal teaching in most of the world’s cultures, including out-of-classroom America, is through stories (Cajete 1994; Cruikshank 1998; Eastman 1902; Gardner 2003; Gould 1968; Goulet 1998; C. Laird 1976; Rose 2000; many others).  An exciting story, whether an ancient myth or a personal story told by the teacher, packages knowledge in a memorable, exciting way.  Aesop’s ancient Greek fables remain popular today.  Native Americans still tell their folktales, even among groups that have lost their language and most of their traditional culture.  Not only social skills, but everything from hunting to water hole location and from the highest religious ideals to the lowest sexual practices, is passed on in stories.  In non-literate cultures, stories are often the only teaching texts.  Cultures that have writing will add books and manuscripts, but often only for highly technical lore (be it math or theology).

Notably important are two very different kinds of teaching stories:  myths and personal stories.  Myths are a great way to make knowledge seem sacred, super-important, and God-given (see e.g. Cajete 1994).  Cultures as far apart as the Southern Paiute (Laird 1976) and the Australian aborigines (Gould 1968; Rose 2000) encode knowledge of water hole locations, hunting grounds, and food plants in racy stories about the animal beings in the mythic time.  Lots of adventure, sex, and danger, plus the advantage of being sacred, make these stories memorable.  Children learn the water holes thoroughly and in order.  Memorizing a bare list of water holes would not be as effective, and in the desert such relative lack of knowledge would be certainly fatal.

Personal stories often are used to pass on information, but are also well adapted to telling children what not to do.  In many cultures, one cannot criticize another person openly.  So, if a young person is goofing off, an elder will say:  “When I was young, I used to….  Here is what happened….”  The storyteller does not need to say that his foolish actions were the same things the young person is now doing, and does not need to point up the moral after humorously recounting the painfully instructive consequences.  This sort of indirect warning is usually highly effective!

Other stories are reminiscences and circumstantial tales by the elders about their own experiences (see e.g. Hunn 1991).  These are told around the fire or during actual work.  Hunting tales are traditionally told while going to or from the hunting grounds.  Tales of farming are told while going to or from the fields. 

Most of us in my generation learned our life skills in these ways:  participation and stories.  We remember them better than most of our classroom learning.  Psychologists and anthropologists have demonstrated that knowledge packaged in concrete and specific stories is more memorable than knowledge presented abstractly.  The better-told and more exciting the story, the more it sticks. 

In traditional cultures, teaching by myth and story is usually done by respected elders.  They are well known to the learner, and are people who are highly regarded in the community.  Teaching simple skills by modeling, however, is the parents’ and peers’ job.

Teaching by rote memorization and formal instruction occurs widely, but usually it is confined to sacred songs or texts.  Normally, the traditional communities of the world place such teaching in a dramatic context—typically as part of a religious ceremony.  This involves everyone in the process, emotionally, and makes the knowledge more memorable because of that.  Often, elders teach the most important rote-learning during initiation ceremonies, often painful and difficult ones.  Knowledge comes with adulthood, and adulthood is hard-won.

Teaching is individualized (Cajete 1994), since normally it is done by elders working with their own family or community members.  It is also total-person training, involving body and mind together, and it is normally applicable immediately in daily practice.

Guided teaching of the traditional kind—copying of behavior modeled by the teacher, supplemented with stories—seems to remain the most effective method.  That is why it is traditional.  It worked well enough to be propagated. 

Modern derivatives, including lab science, hands-on activities, guided practice, coaching, interactive learning, and just plain learning by doing, work very well (McGinnis and Roberts-Harris 2009) but require a good deal of effort, including one-on-one teaching.  The cost of this could be substantially diminished by doing what all traditional societies do:  getting older children to teach younger ones.  The rigid age-segregation of American education appears, from cross-cultural evidence, to be an extremely bad idea.  Programs of mentoring by older children have succeeded extremely well in some places.

Such training is extremely effective in teaching practical skills.  It is not necessarily so good at teaching the kinds of analytic and interpretive skills that are expected in higher education today.  But neither is the lecture-examination system; modern higher education at the graduate level, relies on one-on-one teaching, apprenticeship in writing, and, in the sciences, hands-on lab work—in short, something very much like traditional informal education.  There is a deep human truth here.   

            The same applies to moral training:  students have to learn to care and be responsible.   People learn to be moral by dealing with actual life experiences (Kohlberg 1981, 1983).  A few philosophers may get their ethics from grave tomes, but the rest of us get ours from doing something—often something helpful, but often something “bad”—and getting set straight by our parents or other respected figures.  This is supplemented by stories, especially the rueful reminiscence stories noted above, which seem to be universal. 

Whatever the philosophers may say, morals are not abstract principles.  They are pragmatic coping rules for dealing with others.  They are learned not from abstractions but from interactions.

3

Several important general points behind all this have been made by Karim-Aly Kassam (2009:75-81).  He cites Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowing how and knowing that.  In more formal terms, this is a contrast between procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge.  Children in traditional societies basically learn how.  Learning that is a part of this wider agenda.  Children must learn a great deal of declarative knowledge, including all those plant names, but they learn this as part of the wider process of learning how to make a living, run a household, and act as responsible citizens of their communities.  Declarative knowledge is reduced to its proper place:  a subsidiary branch of procedural knowledge. 

Traditional ecological knowledge, in Aristotle’s terms, is phronesis.  In Kassam’s very useful treatment of traditional knowledge, phronesis is practical, applied learning in general, made up of “knowing how” with enough “knowing that” added in to provide the basic useful information.  Aristotle distinguished techne—the word that survives in our “techniques” and “technology”—and episteme, basically declarative knowledge; actually, traditional wisdom includes all three, as Aristotle knew, but (again) techne and episteme are subordinate to phronesis in traditional work and environment.  (However, in other realms, such as religion, cosmology, and myth, episteme often dominates, and of course things like stone tool making are strictly techne.) 

Following Argyris et al. (1985), Kassam sees phronesis—and action research—as nesting in “communities of social practice,” while “knowing that” nests in “communities of inquirers” (Kassam 2009:166).  This has clear implications for teaching, and indeed for all aspects of organizing, acquiring, and transmitting knowledge.  We need to get working knowledge out into the field, and work with local people; keeping it in the academy won’t do.  A lifetime of experience in applied anthropology and (via my wife) global public health makes me very sensitive to this point.  Public health projects are constantly wrecking on the same rock:  academics plan and organize them, without awareness of what the people on the ground will make of them.   

Kassam applies to traditional learning a stage model that leads from novice through advanced beginner, competent performer, and proficient performer, finally reaching expert level (Kassam 2009:77-79).  Greenfield and others cited above found, but did not so clearly distinguish and name, similar stages.  Kassam also brings out the point that this all involves learning morals along with practical knowledge.  Morals are part of the work. 

The idea of separating ethics from practice is rather new even in the modern west, and is certainly not typical of modern international science, where both the goals and the practice are morally defined.  A medical researcher is working toward a moral goal (healing the sick), hopefully in a moral way (not plagiarizing, not hyping his funder’s product).

4

Probably the most striking difference between traditional education and ours in the United States today, however, is in the developmental process.  Children in traditional societies generally grow slowly and steadily into adult roles.  They begin by helping in small ways around the house, and are given increasing responsibilities as they get older.  Teenagers are given adult privileges and prerogatives in direct proportion to the adult responsibilities they have taken on.  No privilege is given without prior proof of a proportionate advance in reliability at increasingly demanding adult roles.

Charles Stafford (1995) and I (1999) have described in some detail the order this takes among Chinese fishermen.  I have seen it among the Maya as well, and indeed most of the above-cited sources mention it.

Exceptions are largely in matters of ceremonial knowledge and practice, where a grand initiation into adulthood may suddenly change a boy to a man, a girl to a woman, in a matter of days.  Such “liminal” initiation rites (see van Gennep 1960) usually overdraw a process that is really rather less dramatic, but indeed there is a real difference here from the learning of practical everyday knowledge.

Emotional and personal development similarly is socialized gradually over time, and here our modern society is closer to the traditional.  However, we treat children as children—little kids—until they are in college, or even until they have graduated from it.  Hence endless problems with teenagers, who desperately need to be treated like young adults and made to shape up and act like young adults.  Infantilizing them is seriously harmful to emotional development. 

We have also created a consumer culture that sells to children and uses peer pressure relentlessly, with serious and dangerous results for education and for childhood in general (Pugh 2009).  Families need to stick together and act as a unit to combat this (Hofferth 2009; Pugh 2009), but usually do not, because of work demands and because parents too are caught up in consumerism.  The desire to “do what’s best for the child” now too often involves both buying brand-name items and hovering over the child in school and even in university, never allowing the child to develop any independence or self-reliance.  This is not a good context for environmental education.

5

The contrast between traditional and contemporary education is obvious.  One of the reasons for the widespread ruin of the environment by irresponsible individual actions is the abysmal state of environmental education.  Indeed, there is, worldwide, an incredible ignorance of science, especially biology (Greenwood and North 1999).  This is true especially in the United States (among developed countries).  Half of Americans believe the world was created by God in six 24-hour days.  American children score among the lowest in the world in science and math.  They do worse and worse, by comparison with Europe and east Asia, as they go through the grades /1/.  

Yet, interacting with nature has major beneficial effects on cognitive functioning, both improving performance and reducing stress (Berman et al. 2008).

Paolo Freire’s class Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1984) directed us to teach for liberation.  Modern American education teaches for passivity.  The schools are not explicitly “teaching the kids to mind,” as they were in my childhood, but they are effectively doing exactly that.  The independent citizenship necessary for environmental concern is increasingly harmed rather than favored.  Above all, teaching has become a process of drilling huge classes in mindless rote memorization for the purpose of answering machine-scored standardized tests.  One could not design a better way to make inquiring children and young adults passive and ignorant.

Students of indigenous societies speak of a “hidden curriculum,” a term which “reefers to the social relations in the school system and the taken-for-granted values that uphold the social relations valued by…society”—which, in most of the world, means “a hierarchichal, gendered society…[with] systemic racism and sexism” (Fiske and Patrick 2000:240).  This is not just a problem for indigenous people; it is exactly what Willis (1981) was describing in Learning to Labor.  The only comment to make is that this curriculum is not at all hidden.  It is not usually stated upfront in the school curriculum plans, but even if it is not (and it often is!), everyone knows about it.

The problem requires an entire book of its own, and some books do indeed exist (e.g. Louv 2005; Nabhan and Trimble 1994; Orr 1992, 1994).  Richard Louv, in a superb book, Last Child in the Woods (2005), points out that contemporary American childhood is very different from the childhood my generation knew.  Television and electronic gadgets get all the attention.  Children learn very well what they see as salient:  Hollywood shows, mechanical devices, sports, brand name clothing, and so on.  They learn these by the time-honored route:  interaction, peer activity, stories.  These things also have prestige.  No American child misses the contrast between our huge, flashy, brilliantly lit shopping malls and our wretched, collapsing schools.  Thus many children now have a fantastic knowledge of popular culture while being almost completely ignorant of school learning.  The combination of peer judgements of what is “cool” and actual living engagement beats out lectures in shabby, overcrowded classrooms every time.

Environmental education requires that children be exposed to a significant extent to reasonably wild nature.  Yet urbanization and environmental degradation make it impossible for most children to get anywhere near a natural area.  Exposure to wild nature is harder and harder to get these days, as urban sprawl and industrial-style farming take over all the landscape.  Children in much of the United States, to say nothing of the rest of the world, have no opportunities at all.  Even in areas near wild mountains and waters, children rarely get out into the wild for more than a few hours of sunny daytime.  The difference from my childhood is startling.  Visits to national parks and forests, as well as hunting and fishing, have sharply declined; outdoor recreation has been declining at 1% a year since the 1980s, for a total decline of about 25%  (Biello 2008).

Experience with virtual nature, tamed environments (like zoos and gardens), and books does not give children the same degree of feel for or concern for the environment (Peter Kahn, ongoing research). 

Excessive caution makes parents and schools restrict and scare children.  Young people often develop a real terror of anything beyond a manicured lawn.  In inner cities they have genuine worries, notably drugs and random gunfire.  But even suburban children are terrorized.  They are afraid of imagined snakes and spiders, unlikely tree-falls, and such.  They are not afraid of the real killers:  automobiles, home poisons, falls, and common illnesses.  The result is that children frequently know nature only from TV wildlife programs. 

Louv labels the syndrome “nature deficit disorder.”  He addresses its real risks in terms of health (starting with obesity), mental state, community life, knowledge of vitally important public issues, “feel” for the need for a decent environment, and much more.  He presents a comprehensive review of strategies to fix the problem, but there is, at present, neither the funding nor the public will to do much about it.

            Many programs have arisen, partly in response to Louv’s book (Novotney 2008), but the problem continues to worsen as more and more electronic devices seduce a more and more urbanized youth.

            The general de-funding of education—private as well as public—in the United States has led to the elimination of  field trips and hands-on experiences.   Also, specialists in education have been resistant to input from scientists.  In California, a group of scientists volunteered their time and effort to design a science curriculum for the grade schools.  It was challenging, exciting, and full of hands-on experiences.  The state rejected it in favor of a curriculum designed by people with “Education” degrees, and based on rote memorization of terms, with minimal hands-on work (Laura Anderson, high-school science teacher, personal communication). 

Incredibly, there is a large segment of the education community that believes that interacting with flashy teaching-machines and then taking standardized tests is the only way (Meltzoff et al. 2009; Pianta et al. 2007.)  Their plans would banish nature, labs, and creative writing, and would do nothing for the vast majority of schools that are too poor to afford the flashy machine-teaching gadgets.  One is regrettably reinforced in one’s suspicion that the worst enemy of education is “Education.”

We are now betrayed even by our kids’ dictionaries.  The Oxford Junior Dictionary as of 2009 has replaced “wren,” “dandelion,” “otter,” “acorn,” and “beaver” with “MP3 player,” “blog,” “cut and paste,” and other hi-tech words (Keisman 2009).  (“Cut and paste” doesn’t mean what it did when I was in grade school!)

Fortunately, there are much better plans afoot, that either draw on traditional learning methods or have independently invented them.  I do not know which, but I am happy either way!  National Academy of Science papers advise schools to use hands-on methods, discovery procedures, teaching for understanding, and other traditional methods  (National Academy of Sciences-Kindergarten… 2007; National Academy of Sciences 2007).  This advice and other similar counsel from other sources has led to changes in Advanced Placement courses in the high schools (Mervis 2009).  Instead of drill on rote memorization for mindless tests, “new courses will emphasize conceptual knowledge, updated legularly and learned by doing, along with teaching how scientists ask and answer important questions” (Mervis 2009:1488).  Students will, hopefully, have to understand and explain, rather than guessing at one of four machine-scored answers.  Change comes glacially slow in classrooms.  One hopes this will proceed more rapidly than most grade-school processes.  

Pursuant to this, Newcombe et al. (2009) have written a major programmatic article, with a long review of the literature, on how to teach science in the schools.  Their suggestions are appropriate, indeed excellent, for environmental matters.  Their recommendations are in line with the above.  Among other things, they include being more attentive to young children’s knowledge.  Children enter school with both natural predispositions to think in certain ways and a great deal of cultural baggage; by 5 years old they are fluent in their languages, and inevitably in many teachings (religious and other) that those languages carry.  The panel also advises practical approaches—examples, problems and solutions, concrete representations, and deep explanations.  They advocate graphic as well as verbal approaches, and more generally adapting to particular students’ learning styles.  (This is quixotic in a world of 30 students to a class, but maybe in future….) 

On tests, they are fortunately sensible: 

“In the worst scenario, tests  have the unintended consequence of motivating unproductive curricular changes such as increased test practice or elimination of curricular acitivities that are not directly measured by the test.

“Analysis of state mathematics and science tests, for example, shows that they rarely measure important abilities such as using evidence to form arguments, interpreting contemporary dilemmas, or comprehending the nature of science.  As a result, tests deter teachers form teaching the skiill that are valuable for science-literate individuals.  Some teachers infer that practice on test items would be the best way ot improve performance, and textbooks regularly include standardized items as part of class tests.  When they are evaluated on standardized test performance [of their students], many math and science teachers abandon inquiry goals and teaching for understanding and substitute memorization and drill on multiple-choice questions requiring the recall of facts….”  (Newcombe et al. 2009).

Of course, as they know full well, this is not the choice of “some teachers” but a behavior essentially forced on the schools and thus on virtually all teachers by the No Child Left Behind policy and its state-level counterparts.  If schools, principals, and teachers are all evaluated solely on the basis of student performance on the most mindless and rote-drill of tests, with teachers and principals being relocated or fired outright if their students perform low, the results can only be one thing.

AP biology in high schools has also received considerable recent attention, with the same goals and recommendations.  William Wood, a biologist who chaired the National Resesarch Council’s Biology Subpanel and edited reports that broke the logjam, reports that current thinking is for the high school curricula to look at evolution, biological systems, information, and interaction of systems components (Wood 209:1627).  He lists the recommendations for science practicies AP students need to learn:

“Use models and representations

Use quantitative reasoning

Pose hypotheses…

Plan experiments and data collection strategies

Perform data analysis and evaluate evidence

Work with scientific explanations and theories

Integrate and transfer knowledge across scales, concepts, domains, and disciplines” (Wood 2009”1628).  Of course this is all done through hands-on, interactive leraning—the apprenticeship model again /2/.

Considerable further material has appeared in the science journals.  Science, 23 April 2010 (section “Science, Language and Literacy”), has a review of some recent ideas, including a valuable article by Pearson et al. that savages the standardized test mania and other perversions.  The editors of Scientific American, in an editorial of 2010, note that kindergarten students in the United States have already developed fear of science, though they know nothing of it and normally get no education in it until much later.  Math and science phobia is common, particularly among girls—even at that tender age.  This is, of course, disturbing, and the editors make the obvious recommendations, noting the existence of a few (very few) programs to remedy the lack of science in early years.

Another development that would enormously help environmental education is teaching children about probability, risk, and uncertainty (Bond 2009).  We have always before put science in the form of settled “facts.”  Real science, and above all environmental problems, often turn on probabilities, yet we have neglected education in this area.  Such leading experts in the psychology of uncertainty as Gerd Gigerenzer are now working on this issue (Bond 2009).

Making science relevant to ordinary children’s lives greatly increases interest and performance (Hulleman and Harackiewicz 2009).  The amazing thing is that the education establishment sees this as a revolutionary new finding!

The move to make traditional teachings and teaching methods relevant has recently received a huge boost in a superb book by Gary Holthaus, Learning Native Wisdom (2008).  It makes most of the points above, and many more about sustainability and spirituality that are outside my scope here.

Finally, Native American educator Gregory Cajete (1994) has written a book on incorporating traditional ideas and methods into modern education.  It deals largely with content, especially worldview and philosophy, but also stresses the methods discussed above:  hands-on training, use of myths and personal stories, development of individual character and ability, embodied learning, and grounding in the environment.  Cajete gives some specific ideas and methods in the last parts of the book.

Teaching conservation and environmental responsibility must be a very broad-based and broadly accepted activity if it is to have even the slightest chance of success.  We have few “green campuses” and “green curricula” at the present time.  Administrators and many professors are too specialized, too committed to the bottom line, and too concerned with linking universities to big business.  Even professional meetings seriously need to be “greened.”  Brian McKenna, Paige West, and several other environmental anthropologists are conducting research on these matters as of this writing.

The right wing must give up its opposition to the whole concept, but the left wing will also have to think seriously about some of its positions.  Broad-brush attacks on “capitalism,” “greed,” “Western civilization,” and even the entire male gender (Merchant 1996) do not get us far. 

            We should be exceedingly cautious about frontal attacks on all of western or eastern civilization.  It seems better to stress the ecological and environmentalist streams in the great religious traditions, as Baird Callicott (1994) has done.  It seems better, also, to place environmental thinking within the classic traditions of scientific and cosmological thought, rather than trying to attack and discredit 3000 years of science because (for example) Descartes can be misinterpreted as saying we should not care about animals (Merchant 1996).  I am not suggesting this solely for cynical tactical reasons.  As an approach, it seems more intellectually honest and humane, quite apart from its tactical value.

/1/  The journal Science is concerned with the matter, publishing inputs from some of the most distinguished science writers (Greenwood and North 1999; Gould 1998; Miller et al. 2008; Wheeler 1998).  Noting that this was an issue of national concern, for scientists and others, these authors lament the general decline of science in the public eye.

            Some of the reason is captured in another Science report, this one on the lack of employment opportunities for biology Ph.D.s (Holden 1998).  Clearly, there is a feedback loop.

            More recently, there are excellent recommendations by Trombulak et al. (2004) in Conservation Biology.

/2/ “Student-centered teaching” is now becoming deservedly popular; it involves a return to small groups, real-life problems, group projects, multiple drafts of written work, student evaluations of each other’s work, reflective writing or journaling, electronic quizzes with immediate feedback in class, and real papers (Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 23, p. A4). 

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Food

“Hunger claims the lives of 20,000 children a day.  Worldwide, one of every three children is underweight and malnourished” (Gitlin 2006:1252).

Even so, at least the general worldwide availability of food is one of the few problems that have been solved—at least temporarily—in the last 50 years.  The residual problems of impoverished children are serious, but could be eliminated quickly and totally by simply providing access.

In 1967, the United States Government issued a report, The World Food Problem, involving contributions by dozens of leading experts.  They painted a grim picture:  widespread starvation and famine, hopelessly inadequate food resources, and rapidly increasing populations.  Humanity was falling farther and farther behind in its efforts to feed itself.  A book in the same year was titled Famine—1975!  The authors, William and Paul Paddock, confidently predicted worldwide starvation by that date.

            The date rolled around, and no famines happened.  By 2000, for the first time in all human history, there was actually enough food produced to give everyone on the planet a fully adequate diet.  A billion people were still hungry, but not for absolute lack of food; their problem was that they were too poor to afford it, even at the lowest prices.  They were balanced by a billion overfed people, many of them in Third World countries.  Technology of production had outrun social justice.

            Actually, even as the 1967 report was being written, the seeds of change were sown.  These were not metaphoric seeds, but literal ones.  In the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Banos, Philippines, and in the Center for Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) in Mexico, scientists had developed high-yield strains of those crops.  IRRI began with the tough, adaptable, highly productive Taiwanese rices, already bred for higher yield by Japanese and Chinese scientists.  CIMMYT built on the spectacular developments that occurred in the United States in the early 20^th century, transferring ideas and techniques, developing new ones, working with creative drive to raise the yields of Latin American grains.  Maize proved hard to work with; Mexico’s incredibly hard-working indigenous farmers had already developed it to a high point.  Wheat, however, went through the same transformation that wheat had recently undergone in the temperate zone: from a crop yielding a mere few hundred pounds per acre to one yielding many thousands of pounds.  The Green Revolution had begun.  A conference in Bellagio in 1969 made it official:  the world had decided to breed better crops to feed more people (L. Hardin 2008).

            The first efforts of these two centers did not bring perfection.  The new varieties needed so much fertilizer—and, often, pesticides—that poorer farmers could not afford to grow them.  These farmers were, inevitably but ironically, the ones who most needed the food.  Moreover, many of the poorest farmers did not grow the three “highline” crops at all; they grew barley, manioc, potatoes, sorghum, millets—less desirable and often less nutritious foods.

            Back to the drawing board.  The centers were widely copied; centers for potatoes, for tropical roots, for beans and lentils, for millets and other grains arose around the world.  Meanwhile, the two original leaders kept at work, developing high-yield strains that needed less and less fertilizer, less and less pest control.  Crops were developed for deserts, marshes, mountains, bogs.  At the same time, local and commercial breeders were at work, developing more productive or nourishing varieties of soybeans, cucumbers, apples, and hundreds of other food crops.  By the end of the century, the human species had the potential to feed its six billion living members with ease.  Problems of access remained, but they were largely due to local government policies that discriminated against poor farmers, not to Green Revolution technology (this claim has been challenged, but see e.g. Vaclav Smil, Feeding the World (2001)—the best current book on the world food problem (see also environment references below:  Daily 1997; Daly 1997; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2004; Ehrlich et al 1995; Farley and Daly 2003; Hardin 1968, 1991; Ostrom 1990; Ponting 1991; Van Dieren 1995).

            However, getting food to the hungry involves much more than growing it.  Somebody has to harvest it, get it to market, store it, process it, distribute it, sell it to consumers.  These consumers have to cook it and share it among family members. 

Half a billion people in south Asia, and a third of a billion in Africa, live on less than $1 a day.  Some of them can raise their own food, but some are urban, or are landless rural poor, and must buy food—at roughly US supermarket rates.  Clearly, they will not be well-nourished; a quarter to a third of the people in those areas are under-nourished, as well as about 10-12% of the rest of the world (Seattle Times 2006).  About 20% of humanity—almost 1 ½ billion people—live in poverty.  This is far more than the total population of the world in 1900.

At every stage, there are problems.  Consider storage:  a large figure—estimates range from 15% to 25%–of the world’s food is simply lost to weevils, rats, and spoilage.  Of course, the worst problems are in the hungriest lands, where storage facilities are of the cheapest and least adequate order.  Consider also sales.  People have tastes.  Most Europeans think maize is fit only for animals.  Chinese hate sweet potatoes (a traditional poverty food).  Americans reject barley (except for beer!) and millets.  Sharing with the family is another problem.  When food is short, the most productive workers get the food—or sometimes just the strongest person at the table.  In much of the world, women and girls are routinely shortchanged (see Elisabeth Croll, Endangered Daughters, 2000). 

            Much more serious is the problem of government irresponsibility.  Some governments simply don’t care.  Amartya Sen has argued for many years that no natural famines have occurred since the Depression; all recent famines have been due to war or to outright governmental intransigence (as classically shown by Amartya Sen; a recent famine in Ethiopia is an exception, and may mean trouble for the future—Ethiopia is so ecologically devastated that not even peace and relative democracy can save it).  Spectacular examples have been China’s “Great Leap Forward” (a misnamed campaign that claimed tens of millions of lives); Ethiopia’s famine due to political meanness in the 1970s and 80s; famines following the successful breakaway of Bangladesh from Pakistan and the unsuccessful attempt of Biafra to break away from Nigeria.  More recently, famines have accompanied civil war or genocidal violence in Afghanistan, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and several other countries. 

Even if famine is averted, governments may not do much for the poor.  It is hard to believe that people are starving in the United States, a country which throws away millions of tons of high-quality food every day.  Yet, approximately 1,000,000 children live in extreme poverty, their parents unable to afford decent food.  A comparable (but unknown) number of old people live in equally desperate want.  Isolated communities in Alaska, South Dakota, and the Appalachians are short of food. 

The desperation is proportionately worse in the marginal parts of India, Brazil, or the Sahara Desert borderlands.  These areas have no food to throw away; they cannot feed themselves.  They rely on uncertain aid from elsewhere.

In short, humanity has solved the world food problem.  It has not, however, solved the world food distribution problem.  Technology of production has run far ahead of the social mechanisms that should ensure that every farmer has access to that technology and that every hungry person has access to the result.

            As of 2007, 800 million to a billion people are hungry and lack food security.  Most live in the rural parts of the Third World.  Africa has the worst problems, but the Indian subcontinent has the most people in trouble, since it has more people than the whole African continent; of the 146 million underweight children in the world, 57 million are in India, another 8 million in Bangladesh, another 8 in Pakistan.  Similarly, 11.4 million underweight babies are born every year in that subcontinent, as opposed to only 4 in Africa (Pinstrup-Andersen and Cheng 2007). 

            Famines, and indeed most food shortages, are due to political mismanagement, not sheer lack of food.  Both low production and lack of transportation from more fortunate regions are political, not agricultural, problems, as shown by Amartya Sen long ago (Sen 1973, 1984, 1997; see also, for this and the following sections, Sen 1975, 1992, 1993, 1999a, 1999b, 2001).

Development

At every stage of the process, anthropologists were involved in the efforts to feed the world.  Robert Rhoades, for instance, was director for 16 years of the International Potato Center in Peru—the world center for developing that crop, which is one of handful of staples that feed most of the world.  (The world’s most important food crops, by far, are wheat, rice, and maize.  Another tight cluster—barley, potatoes, sorghum, and manioc—comes next.)  

Botanists, farmers, and anthropologists fanned out over the world, seeking local strains of rice, manioc, bananas, lentils, ocas, ullucos—anything that would feed the starving.  Indigenous crop varieties, sometimes grown by only one or two farmers, held all manner of rare genes for high yield, for insect resistance, for immunity to plant diseases, for nutritional superiority.  Finding these strains and bringing them to the centers was hard detective work.  Harder still was finding appropriate compensation for the local farmers who supplied these crops (often worth thousands of times their weight in gold).  Thus, for example, the good folk of Chiloe Island, Chile, made a good living from their wondrously diverse potato patches.

 More important was the role of anthropologists in understanding the plight of needy farmers and needy consumers.  Anthropologists were probably the most important single group emphasizing this in the early Green Revolution days, when growing the high-yield strains required money to buy seed, fertilizer, and pesticides.  Tougher strains and better government programs for farmers were the result.  (These are still inadequate, though improvement has been spectacular; anthropologists keep up the fight.)  Anthropologists such as Johan Pottier (The Anthropology of Food, 1999) and Elisabeth Croll have written at length on food security, storage, and the local effects of national policies.  Anthropologists have concentrated on the issue of food distribution in families, emphasizing, for instance, the tendency to shortcount the female side of the household (Croll) or the children.  The result has been a flurry of programs, conferences, and resolutions, around the world.  People are much better fed than they were even ten years ago.

In all these cases, anthropologists worked with biologists, crop scientists, sociologists, public health workers, economists, or other scientists.  Never is one discipline enough.  Each has its special areas of competence.  Anthropologists are best at assessing local situations, especially in small communities, and perhaps most especially in the least affluent ones.  It is not that anthropologists have some special affinity for the poor; the problem is that few individuals in the other fields, with the signal exception of public health, ever visit the poor at all.  The financiers who administer the World Bank and other international financial institutions, for instance, spend their time in marble halls, and rely on staff anthropologists for what they know of life in the hills of India or paddies of Laos.

Anthropologists are best at learning good local ideas for working the land and using resources.  All cultures include huge amounts of excellent, accurate knowledge of their traditional landscapes, including plants and animals.  Drawing on this knowledge is vitally important for development; without it, plans fail, but with it, plans can succeed very well indeed.  Thus a huge industry has developed to find and use such local ideas (Bicker et al. 2004; Gonzalez 2001; S. Laird 2002; many references therein).  There are, however, unresolved problems of how to take these ideas out of their traditional cultural context—very often religious—and how to deal with the intellectual property rights questions involved.  If a local community has an idea or a crop that revolutionizes world farming, the community must be compensated somehow, but how to do this presents difficult problems (see the same sources).   

The major result of this work has been a revolutionary change in attitudes toward the world’s small farmers.  It has been slow in coming, and thus has been often unnoticed, but it has been none the less dramatic for that.  In the early 20^th century, most planners and governments agreed that small farmers were conservative, tradition-bound, “superstitious,” “ignorant,” and even “backward” and “stupid.”  Anthropologists were rapidly learning otherwise.  By the late 1960s, it had become obvious to all anthropologists working in the area that small farmers are, by and large, a very clever and aware group of people.  They leap at any chance to improve their lives.  Their conservatism, when it indeed manifests itself, is due to two things.  First, they have a healthy fear of risk.  Trying something new involves uncertainty.  Failure, for a small farmer, is apt to mean starvation not only of the farmer but of the whole family.  It is not surprising that the poorer the farmer the less likely he or she is to take chances—though middle-income farmers may be less risk-averse than more established ones (Cancian 1979).  Second, small farmers have little money.  Anything new and expensive cannot be tried, unless the farmer can borrow money at reasonable rates of interest.  Many small farmers not only lack money, they have to borrow it at usurious interest rates—up to 100% in three months.  This makes innovation virtually unthinkable.

Armed with this new knowledge of small farmers, the architects of the Green Revolution targeted them, and tried to get them into credit programs that would provide low-interest loans.  This in turn paid off in spectacularly rapid adoption of the new technology.  Critics had previously said that the Green Revolution would never fly because small farmers were too tradition-bound to accept it.  Very soon, the criticism was that farmers were adopting it too fast—without enough consideration of the costs.  These included environmental damage caused by fertilizers and pesticides; nutritional damage caused by improved crops displacing more nutritious food crops such as lentils and vegetables; and, perhaps most serious, social damage caused by rapid change.  The worst social damage occurred—predictably—where cheap loans did not keep up with needs.  In such circumstances (South India was a classic case), only the rich could modernize, leaving the poor literally in the dust.  Once again, anthropologists were the ones finding out most of this.

Anthropological findings about the sophistication of small farmers are really paying off as we move into the post-Green Revolution period. 

The Green Revolution was a quick fix.  It massively and dramatically increased world production of staple foods.  But it was a one-time thing, and it is absolutely not adequate for the future.  For one thing, “man does not live by bread alone” (as the Bible says).  Not only do humans need the things of the spirit (which is what the Biblical verse is saying), but they also need protein, vitamins, and minerals, far beyond what is found in grains and potatoes.  As we have seen, Green Revolution crops tended to displace the low-yielding but nutritionally necessary crops that provide those nutrients.  For another thing, the Green Revolution in its initial form carried environmental costs that could not be sustained.  Fertilizers and pesticides poisoned water supplies and killed valuable fish.  Soil erosion and exhaustion followed intensive planting of grain.  Deforestation occurred as people planted more area.  Irrigation vastly expanded, leading to desperate shortages of water in many areas.

Thus, by the 1980s, technologies were being developed that could manage to produce more nutrition with less input of chemicals and water.  Anthropologists and other village-level investigators found countless traditional and local techniques, crops, and social arrangements that were valuable in this agenda.  One dramatic finding, by anthropologists James Fairhead and Melissa Leach (1996), involved tree-growing in West Africa.  Indigenous people had been accused of deforesting the land.  Fairhead and Leach were able to show that the land had previously been grassland with a few groves, and the residents had actually increased the forest cover, by protecting or planting trees.  Another dramatic finding came from Bali.  Green Revolution planners tried to take over irrigation from the religious-based subak associations that managed water there.  Disaster ensued.  Stephen Lansing (1991) showed that in fact the subaks were managing water about as well as could be done.  For instance, they knew how to control water to drown out pests—or, alternatively, to kill them by drying them off.  Lack of knowledge of these techniques had led the Green Revolution planners to create an unwanted pest explosion.  So control went back to the subaks, and order was restored—thanks to anthropologists bringing the value of the traditional system to world attention.  Similarly, Gene Wilken (a geographer, but anthropologically knowledgeable) showed that traditional techniques of cultivation in Guatemala and south Mexico were ideal for local purposes, and had to be maintained if development was to work (Wilken 1987). 

In short, anthropologists were particularly important in three ways:

First, bringing valuable local crops, varieties, and techniques to world attention.

Second, showing that local people knew a great deal and were excellent planners.  They would quickly adopt good ideas, if they could.  They even had their own good ideas to give in exchange.

Third, and most important of all, anthropologists could find out how to manage programs at the local level so that local people actually benefited.  Too often in this world—and not just in food production development—the best of intentions lead to the worst of outcomes.  Anthropologists can find out what is wrong, or (better) what might go wrong, and suggest appropriate actions.

Today, literally thousands of projects around the world draw on anthropological expertise in working with local small-scale farmers. 

The world food problem continues.  As world population rises, more and more pressure is being put on farmland, water, forests, and indeed all natural resources.  A radical increase in use of traditional crops and techniques is seriously needed.  Yet, also, there must be increases in use of innovations.  Not only new technologies, but new economic and social arrangements, are necessary.  Anthropologists become more and more valuable as these pressures build.

From this story of relative success, we learn several things.

First, the world is in trouble.  Food is only the most obvious and immediate of a whole class of problems.  Far more serious and intractable are social problems.

Second, problems are not insoluble.  As of the 1960s, the world food problem seemed so overwhelmingly massive that many people gave up all hope.  Global famines were confidently predicted.  A relatively small number of scientists and planners carried on in the face of incredible odds.  They won.  Victory is not forever—each generation must fight its own war on hunger—but victory has been very sweet, while it lasts.

Third, anthropologists were effective only when they worked with other experts: geneticists, technicians, agricultural extension workers, economists, on-the-ground people such as Peace Corps volunteers, and so on.  Sometimes the anthropologists worked directly with these other specialists; more often, contact was through publication and electronic communication.  The point is that the information got passed around.  Anthropologists were particularly useful when involved in planning programs for local development.  When anthropologists were not involved in such plans, the plans very often failed.  (Then, often, anthropologists were called in to do a post-mortem—thus gaining an unfair reputation as “mere critics.”) 

Fourth, problems can be solved only if the billions of ordinary people on this planet are involved in the solution.  This requires anthropological effort.  Anthropologists are the people who specialize in finding out what is happening in small, isolated, remote, or impoverished communities, and bringing this knowledge to the wider world.  They find real problems, and also valuable knowledge.  The former guide planners in making wiser plans.  The latter—the indigenous and local knowledge—is what is really valuable, however.  The world depends on the accumulated wisdom of those billions of people in thousands of communities.  We do not have time to learn everything from scratch, nor are most laboratory scientists interested in the questions involved.  We have to depend on what we as humans have found out in the last millennia.

Let us consider a few case studies.

Cooperatives in Hong Kong

Producer cooperatives were introduced in the early 20^th century, to bring producers together in associations that could eliminate middlemen.  The coop would do the assembling, warehousing, and marketing, thus rendering unnecessary the middlemen, who tended to buy at low prices and charge high fees.  Producers’ coops worked very well in many places, including southern California:  Calavo for avocados, Sunkist for citrus. 

In the 1940s through 1960s, British developers often thought that coops were the gold standard for development, and many of their coop schemes worked quite well.  In Hong Kong, the colonial administrator and biologist G. A. C. Herklots was identified especially with building up vegetable and fishery production and incomes through coops. 

In 1965-66 and again in 1974-75, I studied the fishery at Castle Peak Bay, in the western part of the New Territories of Hong Kong.  Hong Kong was then a British colony (Anderson 1970 and in prep.; Anderson and Anderson 1978).

During this period, cooperatives flourished at Castle Peak.  They were just coming in as of 1965.  They then involved only a few small-scale fishermen.  However, the government pushed them enthusiastically, mainly through their tireless, honest, and politically savvy local agent Choi Kwok-Tai. 

The situation as of 1965 was this.  About 18 large-scale fish-buyer firms, known as laan (roughly, “warehouse”), virtually monopolized fish assembling and dispatching to urban markets.  The fishermen not only depended on the laans for selling their fish, but also for capital; they borrowed from the laans against future catches.  The laans formed a tight association—informal but rock-solid—and agreed to charge exceedingly high interest rates while paying minimal prices for fish.  A free, competitive market would have changed this, but the laans resisted any such idea.

The fishermen’s coops were designed to get around this by providing capital.  Fishermen could pool resources, loan money, and pay back the coop at low interest rates.  This took advantage of a pre-existing pattern of small informal credit rings of the sort found in many small producer communities worldwide. 

Naturally, any fisherman who took out a coop loan endangered his ability to get loans from the laans.  This was a real problem at first, because the coops were small and poor (the richer fishermen stayed with the familiar laans), and thus had insufficient capital to deal with needs for a new boat or engine.  However, persistence paid off.  The coops grew until, by 1974, they were formidable competitors with the laans.

Meanwhile, the fishermen agitated for a government market, and that was built in the early 1970s.  By 1974, it was in full operation.  The competition of the coops and the market humbled the laans, who stayed in business by providing much better terms.  Development worked; the fishery flourished.

Unfortunately, success was ironically short-lived.  Overfishing and pollution wiped out most of the Hong Kong fishery, and all the Castle Peak Bay fishery, before 2000. 

Moral:  It’s a waste of time to carry out even the best of deck-chair rearrangements on the Titanic.  Better watch for icebergs.  The coops were a wonderful, successful idea—but someone should have been watching what was happening to the fish.  No one was.

Cooperatives in Malaysia

Between stints in Hong Kong, I studied Chinese fishermen in Penang, Malaysia, in 1970-71.  Here, the same cooperative plan was attempted.  It failed totally.  Why? 

First, as shown by my friend and helper, the brilliant local economist Ooi Sang-kuang, the fish buyers were in full free competition in Penang.  Competition had forced the price of capital down to a hair, and the prices of fish were forced up to fairly decent levels.

Second, now it can be told (I didn’t dare say it at the time):  the head of cooperatives in Penang was thoroughly corrupt—a crook if I ever saw one.  He was in league with whoever had power and money, and that did not include the fishermen.  He did not serve their interests well.  He and his local agents acted mainly to maintain government power, not to make the coops work.  Fortunately for the fishermen, the government’s Dept. of Fisheries was as honest and hard-working as the cooperative agents were in Hong Kong, so the fishery stayed in business.

Third, the same problems with overfishing and pollution surfaced.  In this case, however, people really were trying to fix them.  Local communities had defined areas of sea tenure—exclusive zones where only they could fish.  They maintained these with ferocious zeal, sometimes even killing poachers.  The government marine police also tried to stop overfishing.  Unfortunately, there were too many poachers, and the overzealous communities that killed poachers did not make themselves popular with the government by their vigilante tactics.  More seriously, the government was not interested in the fishery, partly because it was ethnically Chinese at a time when the government wished to build up Bumiputra (Malay-speaking) economies.  So regulation broke down, and the fishery collapsed, helped not at all by the coops.

Agriculture in Maya Mexico

Since 1987, I have been more or less involved with Maya agriculture in southeast Mexico.  Since 1991, I have spent a total of a year and a half in the delightful town of Chunhuhub, a sleepy but wonderful and warm community of Maya farmers.  I have seen many plans come and go.  I have also had the advantage of trading ideas and findings with such veteran investigators as Betty Faust (1998) and Ueli Hostetler (1996).  What follows draws on their work as well as on mine.

The Maya find themselves in charge of an incredible wealth of forest resources.  However, as indigenous Native Americans, they are de facto second-class citizens, subject to a good deal of discrimination in some quarters.  (This is more a problem for Faust’s friends in Campeche state than for mine in Quintana Roo, for QR is heavily Maya, and the Maya there are politically active, fighting for their interests.) 

Government plans, however, are constantly in play, to develop the Maya communities.  Some work, some do not. 

Starting with the good news:  two programs have revolutionized Maya life in central and southern Quintana Roo in recent years.  One is the “citrus corridors” project.  The federal government pays for clearing forest in a strip along major roads.  Local communities have to agree, plan, and provide the labor.  This land is then developed for citrus farming, under easy terms and with some government help.  Help has varied a great deal, off and on including nurseries and nursery stock, pesticide and fertilizer packages, and easy-term loans; at present, only the nurseries are in play, for various good reasons (there is a learning curve here).  In any case, many of the highways in central Quintana Roo are now lined with magnificent citrus orchards, providing a very good living for a lot of Maya farmers; fresh fruit fetches sky-high prices in the tourist cities along the coast, such as Cancun.  A side benefit is protection for the forests farther from roads; the citrus corridors act as a barrier to further development or cutting.

Even more successful, and in fact now world famous (Freese 1997; Primack et al 1998), is the Plan Forestal (Forest Plan).  This is a federal and state project to work with Maya communities to manage their forest resources.  Quintana Roo’s forests are full of valuable woods, such as mahogany.  They also have game animals, medicinal herbs, and a wealth of flashy birds and lizards that tourists love to watch.  The Forest Plan focused on the valuable woods.  Government biologists work with Maya villages and individual ranchers to develop management and conservation plans; the communities pay a small fee, the government provides top-quality biological advice and some help with accounting and with enforcement. 

The plan worked stunningly well, mostly because there was a pool of highly trained biologists and administrators.  It has extended to game conservation and ecotourism, on a limited and experimental scale, with enough success to make further efforts highly desirable.  One community, Nohbec, has even satisfied the exceedingly strict German standards for sustainable forest management, and thus can export mahogany and other woods to Germany at a premium price.  As in Hong Kong, there are side benefits:  even communities that are not part of the plan see how successful conservation and sustainable management are, and now try to act accordingly.  However, the Plan Forestal ran into troubled waters as it aged; early commitment and enthusiasm began to be subverted by local dissention and political problems (Haenn 2005). 

Some failed plans of the past now need consideration.  Many communities, in Mexico as in the US and elsewhere, have developed a huge cynicism about government plans in general.  The government is fond of bringing in a great new plan just before an election, handing out money to carry out the project, and then canceling the whole thing once the election is over.  Naturally, a few iterations of this game lead to the situation reported by Ueli Hostetler (1996):  the villagers invest the donated money in beer and have a big party.  At least they get that much out of it.  Otherwise, the money is invested in (say) pigpens, then lost when the government abruptly cancels the project, half done.  A half-finished pigpen is no use; a party at least gets the community together.

At best, the government may stay around long enough to get the plan up and running, but the people abandon it as soon as the funding stops.  This happens when the plan is just fine as long as some funding is coming in, but otherwise isn’t profitable enough to be worth doing.

All this has caused many people, from American inner cities to African savanna villages, to suffer from “project fatigue.”

Many specific plans fail because of biological and agronomic ineptness.  First and foremost are the endless attempts to convert land to cattle.  This is the curse of Latin America in general (Painter and Durham 1995).  Millions of acres of highly productive forest have been converted to poor-quality pasture land, which often degrades into desert.  One main reason is the high prestige of cattle ranching in Hispanic culture.  In Quintana Roo, there are actually natural grasslands that are excellent cattle-raising country, so the idea has its merits.  However, someone should have realized that there was a reason why grass was not everywhere.  Attempts to convert forest to grassland have quickly led to the realization that it doesn’t generally work.  Grass requires moisture-holding, non-acid soil.  Excessively drained areas, excessively acid areas, and excessively wet areas don’t work for grass, but produce superb and very valuable forests.  Many such areas were cleared for pasture, and became desert instead, until the forest could regrow.  The Maya clear and burn small cornfields, which promptly regrow to healthy forest, but the huge areas cleared for pasture are more problematic.  They burn too easily (partly because of pasture grass, if it establishes at all).  They are too big for easy seed-settling.  They were usually cleared too thoroughly—scraped with bulldozers or the like. 

All manner of crops have been tried in Quintana Roo, with varying success.  Sugar does all right, but not well, in the most fertile areas.  Rice failed because of poor soil and high costs.  Sesame failed because of low yields.  Chiles and tomatoes failed because large-scale plantings become targets for every pest and disease in the tropics.  The grim roll goes on and on.  Fortunately, tropical fruit grows as if it had found its true paradise, and several vegetables do well too.  Maize, the staple food, does fairly well—not by Iowa standards, but at least by local ones.  So there is plenty of success in farming, if it is carefully done, on a small scale, with mixed crops.

A former student of mine got involved in a plan to bring “green manure crops”—nitrogen-fixing legumes that hold and improve the soil—to the Maya.  The green manure crops had worked very well in other areas of Latin America.  The Maya were lukewarm, partly because of project fatigue, partly because their homegardens were already fertile and bean-filled, while their fields weren’t really worth the added effort and expense. 

The biggest problem after simple biology has been marketing.  South Mexico has only recently acquired an international urban sector.  Marketing to well-to-do people in, or from, other countries was not a normal part of life until very recently.  Thus, it was not a concept.  (Mahogany and other precious woods were not an exception, because they were absorbed within the Mexican economy until the 1990s.  Only honey was a major exception; the Yucatan Peninsula produces superb honey, and the Maya love beekeeping.  Yucatan provided fully 15% of the honey in international trade until recently.  Tragically, parasites, African bees, and Chinese competition have now devastated the honey economy.)  Realizing that American tourists want fresh fruit and will pay almost any price for it came as a total, and totally delightful, surprise to the Maya—but they were on it right away, trucking oranges and watermelons by the million to Cancun and the other tourist ports.  Slower to come is the realization that there is an almost infinite export potential here too.  Still slower is the realization that the international market will pay top dollar for well-seasoned tropical woods and wood products, for medicinal herbs, for local exotic vegetables, and, above all, for a chance to see a tropical rainforest up close and personal.  But all these things are coming, from quality woodwork to ecotourism.  The future depends on the degree to which Quintana Roo’s many entrepreneurs can develop sophisticated marketing skills.

Zapotec rugs

My “research” in Teotitlan del Valle was confined to one pleasant day, so I will draw largely on Lynn Stephen’s classic research there (Stephen 1991).

When I was young, the Zapotec of the mountains of Oaxaca wove coarse wool blankets for the cold nights.  (The Zapotec are a Native American group, speaking a cluster of closely related languages.  The name “Zapotec” was given them by their Nahuatl neighbors, and means, roughly, “fruit growers”—which they are.)  These blankets were delightfully rough:  loosely woven of hand-spun wool cut from half-wild sheep.  No one bothered to card the wool much, so the blankets were full of the most fascinating seeds, burrs, and leaves. 

At some early point, the Zapotec found they could sell these, and Mexican market people found tourists would buy them.  Naturally, prices were low.  The Zapotec learned within a decade that better-carded wool and tighter-spun blankets would bring higher prices.  Then they found that designs popular with tourists made the rugs sell even better.  A mass of pseudo-Navaho rugs followed.   (Some Navaho took to buying them and reselling them in the US as “genuine Indian rugs.”  Of course they were—the Zapotecs are Indians.  But the Navaho dealers implied that the rugs were Navaho, which would make them much more valuable.)  Oriental designs, and even designs from Miro and Picasso paintings, followed.  Quality bootstrapping continued.  Today, the finest Zapotec rugs are produced under contract for European art museums, and cost many thousands of dollars.   Literally millions of cheap, ordinary ones flood the tourist market, and many of these are superb buys.

The center of the industry is the Zapotec town of Teotitlan del Valle, near Oaxaca city.  Here, Lynn Stephen reported that women weavers were impoverished and exploited, but she also quoted a number of them who said they were doing very well indeed and were proud of it!  I wondered at the contradiction—hence my foray to the town, where I spent a day nosing around talking to people.  It turned out, unsurprisingly, that a few women and men had done very well indeed, while many others were still poor, often living by doing poorly-paid piecework for the successful ones.  So Stephen and her sources were both right.  On balance, the rug industry was stunningly successful.  A desperately poor, hardscrabble community had bootstrapped itself into what, on average, was modest affluence.  However, many ordinary people had been left behind—weaving endlessly for small profits.

The lesson here (as in many other cases I have studied) is that the easiest and best route to affluence is value-added bootstrapping.  Start with a poor-quality, mass-sale product.  Reinvest your profits in making a better product, often costing more to make but bringing higher profits per item.  Reinvest those profits in yet further upgrading.  After four or five rounds of this, you’re rich—if you scrimped and saved to reinvest, and kept exquisitely sensitive track of what the market wanted.  You have to remember to reassess this at every step of the way, because as you break into higher-quality goods, the consumers are a different set, with different wants.  The Zapotec—as well as more than a few other ethnicities that have gotten into the act–have proved incomparable at this.  (For one thing, they knew enough to follow advice from well-meaning First World marketers.)  They knew that peasant buyers just wanted a striped blanket.   Ordinary tourists want flashy, bright-color, simple designs.  Rich tourists often want Picasso and Miro designs that the ordinary tourist would find bizarre.  And European museums want elaborate “Indian art,” often inspired by Pre-Columbian themes.  The Zapotec find all this amusing, but are glad to oblige! 

Oaxaca is Mexico’s poorest state, in large part because of the poverty of its large Native American population.  The rug industry, as well as the woodcarving industry (Chibnik 2003), shows that this is not because of lack of enterprise!  Few people can touch the Zapotec and their neighbors in that regard.  Centuries of racism, isolation, and poor market development are to blame for the poverty.

Coffee has also proved amenable to successful development through help with international marketing (Jaffee 2007).

Development Problems

Several conclusions about developing Third World areas follow from the above.

First and foremost, the local people are no fools.  They are smart.  They are good hard-working entrepreneurs (or they’d all be dead—given Third World realities).  Above all, they know the local area better than any outsider can.  They know what works and what does not.  The worst, and commonest, mistake of developers is thinking that the local people must be stupid, because they’re poor.  The truth is:  these people have been making a living under conditions of hardship and oppression that would kill a First World development bureaucrat in about two days.  Obviously they know something. 

What they do not know is how to market to a sophisticated urban clientele.  They may find out, by trial and error and sensitive watching, as the Zapotec did.  Usually, however, they have neither the expertise nor the capital nor the infrastructure to do marketing.  This is where governments, NGO’s, and businesspeople can really help!  However, any development agent has to be creative, imaginative, and flexible. 

Merely telling local people what to do is a waste of time.  They have heard it before, and learned that they know what works on the ground, much better than any outsider.  Developers have to work with them and listen to them.  Local people know what they want, and it usually includes not only economic improvement but also community solidarity and the traditional festivals that preserve same.  Assuming they want what you the development agent want is a guarantee of trouble.  Even if you have what you know they want, you have to let them plan and decide and talk things out, or their natural distrust of projects (see above!) will take over.

Of course, as everyone knows, doing-things-for people is frequently devastating to their self-esteem and initiative, just as forcing people to memorize mindless lists of facts for standardized tests is devastating to their actual education and learning.  The anti-welfare lobby has exaggerated these points over the years, but they are still true enough (Ellerman 2005). 

On the other hand, leaving them to their own devices isn’t going to help.

Thus, working together is the only hope.  Usually, this works only if the local people do their thing, taking the initiative and doing the entrepreneurial work, while the outside helping agency does what the local people cannot do:  marketing, providing capital, providing infrastructure, providing certain kinds of expertise.  If the local people don’t want to take the initiative and do the basic work, find another project to do!  They have their reasons—probably including cynicism caused by a long, long history of being betrayed.

            Since WWII, billions of dollars have been spent on development—on trying to lift humanity out of poverty.  Some $60 billion are now spent every year (Dichter 2003:104).  There is now widespread admission that the money has not solved the problem (Ascher 1999; Dichter 2003; Easterly 2006; Ellerman 2005; Stiglitz 2003; see also studies in Faust et al. 2004).

            The globalization of the world economy has probably been beneficial, on balance (Bardhan 2006).  Sweatshops are living hell, but the alternatives are often worse; Bardhan quotes cases of sweatshop closures throwing workers out on the streets, to live by peddling or the sex trade.  And most internationalized jobs are above the sweatshop level.  Freer trade, other things being equal, means more jobs for everyone, especially in countries where labor is cheap.  Value-added bootstrapping allows many of these countries to work their way upward.  This has been especially true of East Asian and south European countries, that have well-established business traditions, but it has happened even in some African countries.  Anyone can do it. 

            At the individual level, street children and urban slum dwellers may have few options, but the rural poor usually have real opportunities.  Everyone who has worked in rural communities agrees that these communities have enough industrious, intelligent, hard-working people to support any level of development.  Poor communities lack resources, but they usually have enough land to provide a base for hope—if there were only capital, or water, or extension services, or some other good whose shortfall produces a bottleneck.

            The vast majority of the world’s people, rich and poor, are hard-working, intelligent, enterprising, reasonably honest and reliable, and, in short, “most likely to succeed.”  They want to get ahead and they try terribly hard to do so.  It takes an enormous effort to hold them back.  It is not just that they have no opportunity.  Holding back those billions of anxious entrepreneurs takes an incredible amount of time, effort, money, and above all military repression. 

As of 2000, half the human population subsisted on $2 a day or less; over a billion managed on less than $1 (Dichter 2003:26).  The total number in both categories has risen with the population.  Meanwhile, the rich get richer.  “In 1999 the assets of the world’s two hundred richest people were greater than the combined incomes of the lowest 40 percent of the world’s peoples” (Dichter 2003:1).  There are over 100 million street children and over 1 billion people in urban slums (Dichter 2003:1), but most of the poverty is rural.   What has gone wrong?

            One problem is the policy history of the major development organizations.  Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (2003) has described the policies of the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in less than glowing terms.  He maintains that these agencies are well-meaning but too dedicated to their extremely conservative fiscal ideology.  They enforce on poor nations an iron discipline: minimal public expenditure, minimal trade barriers (such as protective tariffs), minimal economic incentives to local industries.  Stiglitz sees this as the product of an economic policy that grew from traditional economic theory and was confirmed in the eyes of its backers by the spectacular failures of opposing policies.  From Communism to Latin American populism, government-led development and fiscal gambling on uncertain futures led to ruin.  Tight-money capitalism seemed the obvious alternative.  Stiglitz should know; he worked with these agencies for years.

Similarly, Thomas Dichter (2003) points out that part of the problem lies in the way development assistance is done.  Complex and often byzantine bureaucracies invoke complex and expensive procedures, often badly targeted.  Mistakes amplify through the system.  There are the usual problems of bureaucracy—lack of accountability, top-down control by out-of-touch administrators, and the like.  Dichter sees the rise of a huge “development industry” as the root of the problem. 

There are many anthropological studies of particular development projects that make related points.  David Mosse (2005) describes the slow, insidious divergence of on-the-ground happenings from policy, and the resulting complex relationship between policy and effects.  Tania Murray Li (2007) blames top-down, insensitive planning that takes little note of local realities or wants.  Arturo Escobar (2008) points out the oppression that is involved in “modernization.”  In his field area in Colombia, it is often concealed and insidious, but often breaks into outright murder and other savagery.  Like the other authors cited here, he advocates grassroots organization and initiative.

Yet, one wonders.  There are too many signs that the agencies know all too well what they are doing to the world economy, and continue to do it anyway.  Consider the following:

The agencies do virtually nothing about the huge trade barriers invoked by the rich nations against the poor ones (Stiglitz 2003).  Above all, farm subsidies are enormous in the First World—the United States gives every American farmer an average of $55,000 a year in direct payouts, and at least as much again in indirect support.  Yet the international agencies do everything possible to eliminate subsidies in the Third World.  I have seen in Mexico the result of dumping subsidized United States maize on the market:  Mexican small farmers are ruined.  Ironically, their only recourse for survival is then to immigrate illegally to the United States—there to work on the very farms that ruined them.

The world environment continues to be harmed by World Bank projects.  Big dams are still built (Scudder 2005).  An anthropologist who had been highly placed in that agency (he must remain nameless here) told me years ago that he and many others had been involved in studies showing that all such dams had poor cost/benefit ratios; even without taking long-term environmental damage into account, they cost more than they produced.  They also displaced millions of people, mostly poor and almost never given any meaningful help in restarting their lives.  Yet, in spite of the reports of these studies by its own staff, the World Bank goes on building big dams.  The only believable reason I have heard (somewhat informally—shall we say) is that the development agents are not uninvolved financially and otherwise with the giant international construction and utility firms. The benefits of the latter outweigh, in the bureaucratic mind, the far greater costs to the nations that suffer the dams.  Other environmentally damaging megaprojects share the same sorry record.  To their credit, the World Bank has recently refused to be involved in such projects as China’s Three Gorges Dam; their most optimistic studies showed poor prospects. 

Much more directly and obviously evil is the World Bank’s and IMF’s support for  evil dictators.  This scandal goes on and on, never changing and never ending.  Graham Hancock (1991) pointed out at length that the World Bank and IMF had poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Marcos government of the Philippines, the Mobutu government of Zaire, and other dictatorships, even after everyone had known for years that all the money went either into Swiss bank accounts and luxury consumption or into weapons to suppress internal dissent.  In the “development decade” of the 1970s, the outflow of money from Mexico into numbered Swiss bank accounts equaled the foreign aid received by Mexico.  Moreover, the agencies then insisted that the countries pay back the debts incurred, even after they had known for years that the governments would do it by defunding basic health and education services.  The Philippines’ once-superb educational system was reduced to poverty to pay for Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection.  Hancock’s book had no effect.  The agencies—not just the two mentioned, but others from aid and health agencies to environmental NGO’s—continue to behave this way in dozens of countries, even when they know their money is supporting outright genocide (as in Sudan in the 1990s and Guatemala in the1980s).  Most of the recent critics of the agencies are oddly silent about this issue.

Finally, it seems a bit too neat that the cumulative effects of World Bank, IMF, and WTO policies are to keep the Third World addicted to commodity exporting and minimum-wage, low-value-added industry (Stiglitz 2003—with some reading between the lines based on my own interviews with World Bank personnel).  The First World has gone on to the information economy, hi-tech, and efficiency—all founded on a formidable education-and-research establishment.  The agencies do everything they can to discourage this, by forcing Third World countries to defund education, research, extension, and indeed all public services.  At the same time, they invest heavily in developing the most primitive and backward sectors of the economy: mining, plantation agriculture, oil extraction.  Whatever the intentions, the effect is to keep these countries as fiefs of the rich nations. 

Ultimately, a country reduced to living by exporting its wealth must run out of wealth.  If it has been locked into an economy based totally on such export, it is then absolutely ruined.  Haiti, El Salvador, and a few other small countries have already reached this state, and now live on aid, remittances, and crime (El Salvador’s international crime rings are famous).  Honduras, Guatemala, and several African countries are almost to this state.  Several much larger and more important countries, including the Philippines, Indonesia, and Egypt, are on the ragged edge, and their collapse into Haiti-like poverty could destabilize the world economic system.

            Stiglitz (2003) and his World Bank associates William Easterly (2006) and David Ellerman (2005) admit that the agencies’ policies have been frequently distorted by the foreign policies of their major funders, chief of whom is the United States.  American politics has shaped both overall policies and choice of target nations.  The heavy investment in Marcos and Mobutu was directly due to American friendship with the former and desire to outbid the Communist world for the friendship of the latter (Hancock 1991; Stiglitz 2003).  Of course it is no accicdent that the World Bank and IMF are based in Washington.  It is hard to argue against the strong suspicion among anthropologists that these agencies exist to ensure the continued economic dominance of the United States and the continued failure and subservience of the Third World.

            In charity, we can assume that Dichter and Stiglitz are right; a great deal of bad development policy is just foolishness at high levels.  (No one who works for a large university system will minimize this possibility.)  But when we know that the higher-ups are fully informed and are not at all fools, we may find it difficult to  continue in this charitable assumption. 

In any case, the policies of the giant international agencies have made the plight of the poor far worse.  It seems likely that the damage done by the big dams alone outweighs every mite of good the agencies ever accomplished.  (The full figures are not available—a  suspicious fact in itself.)

On the other hand, Dichter and Stiglitz can argue that there are certainly some assumptions, or defaults in thinking, that set development against itself even without any malicious intent.  In addition to the problems of bigness and accountability, amply discussed by both authors, there are two concerns of particular importance.

First and most obvious is the natural desire for quick results.  There must be some immediate economic payoff, to make backers feel comfortable.  This is counterproductive.  The quickest way to increase the “bottom line” in a Third World country is to open a mine or develop cash-cropping, often of an “industrial agriculture” sort.  This leads, in virtually all cases, to a dead-end economy, where people are paid minimum wages in hopeless, dead-end, back-breaking jobs.  Large extractive enterprises notoriously go with dictatorships and corruption; the powerful and rich owners of the enterprise, relying on uneducated and barely paid labor, have every interest in supporting governments that offer nothing to the general populace and that provide security for the extractive firms.  Most of these owners are giant multinational firms based in the First World; they have no commitment to the nations where they dig, farm, or drill.  If a nation collapses, they can move on.  Yet, all this may seem the best possible option to a development agency, or a government, that is under pressure to show results in a year or two.  A giant mine looks impressive right now.  The future can take care of itself.

            Conversely, in the contemporary world, there is little hope for real development in a country without good education and at least minimal health care.  Yet it is precisely these sectors that have a slow and uncertain payoff.  This is at least part of the reason why the IMF has forced nation after nation to run down these systems.  It is true that anyone in international development can name nations whose educational systems ran ahead of their economies, leading to massive brain drain or to university graduates driving cabs and working in gas stations.   (Egypt is one infamous case.)  The same people can name nations with strikingly long life expectancies and dismally declining economies (most of East Europe, for example).  But can anyone think a nation in today’s world can make any genuine economic progress without a highly educated and reasonably healthy workforce?  A few oil countries manage it now, deluding developers into thinking that exporting wealth can actually produce development.  But what happens when the oil runs out?  Contemplating that dismal thought has led several oil countries (such as Kuwait and Oman) to investing a great deal in education and social progress.  The others have a bleak future. 

            Related to the “quick results” delusion is the main problem addressed by David Ellerman (2005): the “vaccination model” illusion.  This is the belief that developing a country is like making kids brush their teeth and get their shots.  You force them to do it because they have to do it when they are too immature to choose it for themselves.  Ellerman goes into considerable detail in showing why this is a hopeless model for developing a community of intelligent adults.  He points out that it fails not only in development but in education, management, and other fields.  The great innovative thinkers of the 20th century advocated working with people to help them achieve their own goals using their own creativity and good sense.  Paolo Freire and John Dewey argued this for education, Carl Rogers for psychotherapy, Douglas McGregor for management, and Albert Hirschman, E. F. Schumacher, and others for the economy; Ellerman quotes these and other thinkers at length, and shows that the points are made all across the political spectrum from far left to far right with striking lack of dissent.  (Escobar 2008 provides strikingly similar arguments citing another whole galaxy of stellar thinkers.)

            Another bad idea discussed by Ellerman is the “one size fits all” theory.  Little need be said about this—the line is self-deconstructing—but Ellerman notes that even the people who insist on gray flannel suits admit that different men need different sizes.

            These problems segue into the wider structural problem of a bureaucracy.  As we have known since Max Weber made the term famous (see Weber 1948), bureaucracies reward inaction, unaccountability, nontransparency, and above all social game-playing.  The successful bureaucrat spends maximal time schmoozing and minimal time working; one gets ahead by playing social games, not by achieving anything.  It is possible for a ferociously goal-directed organization to avoid this, through carefully managing motivation and reward; Google and Adobe and some universities show this.  But the great international aid and development agencies, and, alas, even many conservation and environmental NGO’s, have failed dismally (as I can testify from much personal experience; see also all the cited sources above).  The less clearly goal-directed the organization, the more trouble it has.  Given the World Bank’s fluffy mandate and inadequate specification of how to assess results, it is no surprise that it is a particularly dismal case.  Ellerman is not alone in advocating abolishing it—what he calls “decentralization with extreme prejudice” (Ellerman 2005:245), i.e. breaking up its functions and locating many (if not all) of them in bottom-up agencies in the developing countries.

            Another bad idea that persists—this time unstated and unadmitted—is the old belief that wealth can come only from taking someone else’s money.  This idea keeps resurfacing because it is common sense.  The way we normally make money is to get it from someone.  Usually, this is through legitimate business:  I sell you a fish and get some cash.  Sometimes, robbery, theft, conquest, or deception are the means.  Either way, cash is transferred from person A to person B, and that is how person B gets rich.

            However, in the modern world, wealth is more often created anew (rather than merely redistributed).   Turning raw materials into goods is only one way to do this.  More efficient production, more value added, more streamlined management, more knowledge, more rapid and smooth transfer of information, more streamlined ways of doing business (“lower transaction costs”), and more environment-friendly production techniques all make something out of nothing—or, at least, reduce costs, and therefore improve cost-benefit ratios.  The extent to which this is doable depends on the level of relevant education of the workforce.  (Note that word relevant.) 

            Yet, when policies are set, many governments act as if they believe wealth is never created, but only redistributed.  They therefore seek after lower wages, less education, less public expenditure, and lower welfare levels among workers.  This is exactly the reverse of the experience of successfully developing countries.  Those countries developed in step with the improvements in people’s lives due to overall wealth creation.  There are many good economic reasons for this.  An educated workforce is obviously more able to do hi-tech jobs, make new inventions, and go into high-value-added enterprises.  Also, rising wages force companies to modernize and become more efficient, to keep other costs down in the face of rising labor costs (Hayami and Ruttan 1985.)  

Money for more education has to come from somewhere; it is part of the nation’s labor cost.  A skilled workforce costs a lot.  An unskilled workforce is even more expensive—when opportunity costs are figured into the equation; the problem is that opportunity costs are too dicey for the conservative economists to contemplate.

            Resource extraction is another case in point.  Mineral resources taken from Country A are lost to that country forever.  In today’s world of low commodity prices, they do not even bring in much money.  Resource extraction looks good only when one considers the world economy as a zero-sum game.  The rich get it (cheaply), the poor lose it; wealth is redistributed, not created.  To be sure, metals and some other goods are more efficiently and wisely used in a developed industrial system than in a nascent one, so there is good economic sense in taking copper from Papua-New Guinea and bringing it to Europe and America.  But the same can hardly be said for coffee, or sugar, or cattle, whose processing is still a fairly primitive matter even in rich nations.  The money spent developing cattle export would be better spent developing decent schools, or even meat-packing plants, in the exporting country.

            This sort of zero-sum thinking underlies what George Foster called “the limited good hypothesis” (Foster 1965).  Foster found that people who see the world in zero-sum terms come to assume that even things like affection and justice are limited goods.  People living in closed economies with widespread low-key competition, or people who have to strive for power (always a limited good), are prone to think this way.  So, it appears, are international bankers and development workers.

            What is forgotten is that, given a chance, the poor rural villages of the world could produce more scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, teachers, and (yes) developers than all the First World put together.  The result would be wealth creation on an undreamed-of scale.

            The more naïve environmentalists will, at this point, object that this would trash the planet.  If everyone consumed like Americans…!

            The truth is that a world of opportunity and fair dealing would be a more efficient world.  If commodity prices were at all fair, the rich would no longer have access to virtually infinite amounts of virtually free oil, minerals, sugar, and so on.  The huge SUV would no longer be competitive with the small economical car.  In fact, the car would not be competitive with public transport; people would not find it necessary to have their own cars.  If the metals columbium and tantalum were not extracted for pennies from a Congo torn by civil war over the ore—a war that has killed hundreds of  thousands of people—the American economy would not find it so cheap and easy to provide huge, overadequate computers on such a lavish scale.  People like me, who use the computer merely as a glorified typewriter, would have much smaller, more efficient, longer-lived machines.  If Third World countries had decent wages and decent social support systems, the rural people, newly empowered and given a stake in their economy, would no longer be forced to cut down every bush for firewood or to pull up every tuft of grass for fodder.  They would be able to husband resources, control and manage them, use them sustainably. 

The problem is that almost nobody thinks this is an achievable goal.  Limited-good thinking is perhaps the major reason for such hopelessness.  Today’s widespread cynicism typically takes the form of a belief that people are instinctively wired to destroy nature or to think in zero-sum terms (e.g. Ridley 1996).  This flies in the face of common experience; it is only in genuinely limited situations (most often, struggles for power in hierarchic systems) that people develop limited-good thinking.  Yet this is enough to make constant trouble for this imperfect world.

In fact, an evaluation of over 11,000 World Bank development projects showed that those with conservation goals were as successful at producing economic development as those that ignored conservation and simply went for the money (Kareiva et al. 2008).

            It almost seems as if the world economy is not capitalist but feudalist.  We are back to the world of the robber barons in their castles on the Rhine.  Most of the world’s population is forced, by police or military violence and genocidal repression, to work for pennies.  They work in bare-subsistence farms, they live by their wits in urban slums, or they work in extractive or low-value-added industries that provide cheap commodities for the more affluent.  The affluent, having no economic incentive to conserve, use these commodities in a wasteful manner.  The resulting damage to the world’s ecosystem worsens yet more the plight of the poor.   Far from being capitalist, “Neoliberal,” or some sort of new product of the mystical force of “globalization,” this economy is a throwback to an earlier age.

            The cure is to focus first on providing the bare necessities of life:  water, fuel, food, and health care.  In the desperately overpopulated contemporary world, this last has to include the full panoply of contraceptive techniques, made freely available everywhere.  Then we can begin to think about the long term:  education, efficient use of resources, development of whole new industrial systems.  This will require spending money not on quick fixes but on huge systems that have slow and uncertain payoffs—not only education systems, but ecological reserves, sustainable development, research and extension, and the like. Be suspicious of anything that pays off in the short term.  If it is a good idea, private entrepreneurs will rush to do it without help.  Otherwise, it isn’t worth doing.

            Above all else, in development as in medicine, remember the first principle of Hippocrates:  First, do no harm (Ellerman 2005, among others, quotes this famous precept).

This now sounds like a radical plan, but it is more or less what the United States and every other developed country did.  Moreover, it is notorious that they did it behind high tariff walls, and often ran up huge debts spending public money on it (cf. Stiglitz 2003).  The United States did indeed help certain extractive industries, and build some big dams, but it usually had the same problems with them that Third World countries have today.  We should have learned.

What We Should Be Doing Instead

There are several things that work particularly well in development.

Obviously, first and foremost is doing everything possible to let local people do their own thing, with appropriate help in areas they cannot handle, like international marketing.  Mostly, local people need, above all, protection from external harm—usually meaning their own governments first and foremost.  Aid that supports repressive governments is clearly counterproductive; aid should begin with the sort of “capacity-building” that invovles getting corrupt and oppressive officials to cool it, not neglecting the possibility of self-protection in courts and elsewhere by the local people (Escobar 2008).  Beyond that, anything that builds local initiative, grassroots organization, and local co-work is all to the good.  Ellerman (2005) and Escobar (2008) have many long and detailed lists and instructions, rendering further comment unnecessary here.

            More specific ideas include microlending.  In the early 1970s, Mohamed Yunus of Bangladesh was an economics student in Kentucky.  He went home to teach econ at Chittagong University, way off in down-country Bangladesh.  One day a peasant woman came up to him and asked him for a dollar “to start a little business.”  He gave her the dollar without thinking—he assumed she was just begging, and he could afford a little charity.  Well, a year later, a woman came up to him, and he realized it was the same peasant woman, a good deal better fed and better dressed.  She paid him the dollar back with interest, and said she’d used it to buy a couple of chickens, and now had quite a chicken and egg farm. 

The proverbial light bulb lit in Yunus’ mind.  He tried more tiny loans, got more little farms started, and soon developed the Grameen Bank, the first microlending organization.  They loan out tiny sums to peasants—usually women, who are more enterprising and prone to repay than men in Bangladesh—and have dramatically transformed Bangladesh.  The country was written off as “a basket case” previously, but is now quite successful at keeping the poorest alive and well.  The Bank gradually expanded to push other social issues, such as population control and education.  It now has countless imitators, in Bangladesh and around the world.  It has probably succeeded best there, partly because the incredible poverty (the result of population pressure and a dreadful history of conquest and ripoff) meant that even the most enterprising and sharp people were usually poor. 

In other countries, where the more enterprising are usually out of poverty already or where poverty is due to other factors (genocide, lack of natural resources, or the like), the plan doesn’t work as well, but it works at least a little almost everywhere, and has now helped millions of poor people.

            Less dramatic, but far more effective and important worldwide, is simple education—as long as it’s reasonably well done and teaches useful skills rather than rote knowledge.  Education for girls is particularly important, transforming health and population growth rates as well as improving life.

            Most effective of all, in terms of benefit per cost, is simple health care.  Best of these is just getting kids to get their shots—for a few dollars’ worth of inoculations, one prevents billions of dollars in lost lives, lost worktime, etc.  Thus, almost everyone worldwide now gets their shots.  Most Third World countries now have better rates of kids “getting all their shots” than the US does.  Much of this is the work of one man; when James Grant was head of UNICEF, he made it his project to see that kids got their shots, and the percentage—worldwide—of those who did jumped from 30% to 70%.  This has saved tens of millions of children’s lives. 

It is thought-provoking that everyone knows of Adolf Hitler, but almost no one has heard of James Grant, who probably saved as many lives as Hitler killed.

            There are lots of other ideas that really work.  Even just controlling crime, or providing a road to market, can work wonders in certain places.

The one common denominator that all successful plans have, and that none of the failed schemes has, is that they actually give opportunities to  ordinary people.  It is among the ordinary people of the world that we can and must seek and find salvation. 

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Updates to Anderson, The Food of China (Yale University Press, 1988).

This update resulted from my having the opportunity to teach a short course on Chinese food history at the Universita di Scienze Gastronomiche, Pollenza, Italy, in 2005.  What follows is simply a set of rough working notes on the literature that has come out since 1988, with several additional field observations of my own.  I claim no academic virtues for this quick-and-dirty job, but it may be useful as a reference, mainly as a reference source for interested food scholars.

E. N. Anderson

Dept. of Anthropology

Univ. of California

Riverside, CA 92521-0418, USA

gene@ucr.edu

This loosely follows the chapters of the original book, but breaks up the early dynasties more (because so much more has been discovered) and adds sections on modern times.

One important thing to note is that the book used the Wade-Giles transcription system for Chinese.  Unfortunately, although Wade-Giles is far superior, recent books almost all use the Pinyin system.  This means that:
Chou becomes Zhou (and, either way, is pronounced Jou)

Sung becomes Song (pronounced Sung)

Ch’ing becomes Qing (pronounced Ching)

T’ao Hung-ching becomes Tao Hongjing

Chia Ssu-hsieh becomes Jia Sixie

Tao becomes Dao; T’ao becomes Tao

Kao becomes Gao; K’ao becomes Kao

Pao becomes Bao; P’ao becomes Pao

Kuangtung Province becomes Guangdong Province

Fuchien (or Fukien) Province becomes Fujian Province

Chiao-tzu (dumplings) become jiaozi

And so on.  Those examples cover the main changes.

1.  Natural Environment

            Nothing much can be added here to what I wrote in the 1980s.  More earthquakes have taught us a great deal more about plate tectonics.  South China is quite stable, but North China is being shoved or squeezed northeastward, with violent quakes resulting. 

            China’s incredible biodiversity, the greatest in the temperate zones of the world, is collapsing fast; see below.

Prehistory and Archaeology

            China has been inhabited by humans for a million years or so.  During this time, cold dry glacial periods alternated with warm wet interglacials.  Primitive humans—Homo erectus and then hominids similar to Homo neanderthalis—had to cope with these violent fluctuations.  They produced quantities of stone tools, but most of their technology was evidently of wood or bamboo, because we have little evidence of it.  (Even so, their stone technology was sophisticated and diverse as early as 800,000 years ago; Gibbons 2000, Hotz 2000.)  They no doubt fed on anything they could find that would not poison them or outfight them.  As we used to say in my youth in the rural U.S., they “would eat anything that won’t eat back faster.”  However, early claims of evidence for cannibalism in “Peking man” (Homo erectus pekinensis) have turned out to be wrong.  The evidence for deliberate use of fire (Anderson 1988) has also been very strongly questioned by recent research (Weiner et al. 1998). 

            Modern humans—Homo sapiens—probably arrived well before 30,000 years ago, but we have no very good evidence.  They were evidently rare.  By 20,000 years ago, people were hunting mammals and birds and eating fruits and seeds all over what is now China, leaving many sophisticated stone points, knives, and other tools for us to find.   

            Agriculture was independently invented in at least four places (Levant area, China, Mexico, Peru) and probably more (New Guinea, northern South America, possibly elsewhere). 

The oldest known agriculture in the world is in the Near East, where it dates around 9500 BC—the first feeble efforts at cultivating wheat and barley.  Agriculture really took off in the Near East at about the time the Younger Dryas period brought a return to Ice Age conditions around 9000 BC (Syria:  Akkermans and Schwartz 2003, Hillman 2003; Jordan Valley area:  Philip Wilke and Leslie Quintero, personal communication).   Faced with colder, drier weather, people in areas that were already dry found that they had to grow plants deliberately, in warm, moist habitats, if they wanted to have their traditional grain foods.  People presumably had known about planting seeds before, and experimented some with farming, so they were able to shift rapidly to partial reliance on agriculture.  However, agriculture was still not very important for centuries.

Perhaps China developed agriculture at the same time under the same circumstances.  We still haven’t found the earliest agriculture in China.  Agriculture began by 8000 BC, possibly before 9000 BC (see e.g. Crawford and Shen 1998; Higham and Lu 1998; Liu 2004).  It would make sense for agriculture to start there under the same conditions as in the Near East—the Younger Dryas made China colder and drier, too. 

China independently discovered agriculture, domesticating rice in the warm southeast and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) and panic or broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) in the dry northwest.  By “domestication,” we mean actual change from the wild form, such that the tame form is not like anything in the wild.  On the other hand, the earliest agriculture we have so far is well after the Younger Dryas, so quite different causative factors may be involved (Shelach and Grosman 2008)—possibly the rapid increase in rainfall and vegetation following the rebound.

Pottery, which tends to accompany agriculture in the Near East, came thousands of years earlier than agriculture in East Asia.  On present evidence, pottery was invented in east Asia; the earliest may have been in Japan (reported by 16,000 BC; Kuzmin 2008a) or the nearby Siberian mainland (13,000 BC) or even China, though the earliest pottery there appears around 11,700 BC.  By 11,300 it was well distributed over China (Jiang and Liu 2006; Kuzmin 2008a, 2008b).  It spread west through Siberia and Central Asia, reaching the Near East shortly after agriculture began.  Perhaps the Near East independently invented pottery (as the New World certainly did), but it looks to me like straightforward diffusion.  It remains interesting that pottery came long before agriculture all over east Asia, while in west Asia and the New World agriculture came first.

            Rice is first documented in the Yangzi Valley, where it was domesticated by around 8000 BC (Chang 1999:46; Jiang and Liu 2006, earliest site, Shangshan in Zhejiang; Liu 2004; Lu 2005; MacNeish and Libby 1995).  Crawford (2006) doubts this early date, finding certainty only by 6500 BC, and Kuzmin (2008a) doubts that the earliest finds are truly domesticated, and finds certainty only by 7000 BC.  Fuller et al (2009, looking at shattering vs. nonshattering heads, the latter showing domestication) traced a slow domestication process between 4900 and 4600 at Tianluoshan, which seems to have been well behind the curve—a backward area.  Domesticated rice was common, widespread, and varied by 5000 BC.

Many complex farming cultures existed by the latter date.  Dates for first rice cultivation get progressively younger as one leaves the Yangzi Valley, so presumably rice was first cultivated there and spread from there throughout China, then Korea and Southeast Asia, and finally South Asia and—in historic times—the rest of the world.  Reflecting this, rice vocabularies from neighboring but only dubiously related languages show great similarities all across East and Southeast Asia (Blench 2005 gives an important review).  Japan got rice cultivation only by around 1000 BC (Kuzmin 2008a) and did not get seriously into it till 400 BC.

The rice of West Africa is a different species, independently domesticated about 2000 years ago (Carney 2001).  The “wild rice” of North America is neither wild nor rice; it is Zizania, cultivated also in China under the name lu sun, a name recently used also for asparagus.  (Clear?)

At Jiahu in the Huai Valley, almost in the exact center of (today’s) China, rice was grown abundantly by 7000 BC (the village was occupied till 5800 BC).  Game and fish, plus wild foods including acorns, water chestnuts, and beans, and domestic dogs and pigs filled out the food supply.  The people made flutes of crane bones; many have been recovered, some still playable (Zhang and Lee 2005).  Cranes are sacred in much of East Asia to this day, and one assumes the flutes were used in shamanistic or other religious rites.

            Rice today is divided into long-grain and short-grain varieties.  Very early rice finds show a mix of long and short grains.  By 5000 BC, long and short varieties clearly ancestral to today’s “indica” (=long-grain) and “japonica” (=short-grain) types were already developed.  Some rices may already have had the now-common genetic variant of the starch amylose that makes them cook up sticky.  (This is mistakenly called “glutinous” in the books; “glutinous,” in reference to grain, should really be confined to grain that has actual gluten in it.  Wheat does but rice doesn’t.)  Paddy agriculture is attested clearly by 2500 BC (Crawford 2006) and must have been common before then.

Water buffaloes, so essential to rice cultivation, were possibly domesticated as early as 5000 BC (Olsen 1993; but at least some early finds claimed to be domestic were actually wild—Liu 2004:59) in the Hemudu area (lower Yangzi Valley), already a center of rice agriculture (as it still is).   Water buffaloes were certainly domesticated by the dawn of civilization. 

             Foxtail millet is one of many species of grain called “millet.”  The term refers to any small-seeded grain.  Wild foxtail millet is widespread; it was independently domesticated in ancient Mexico, but abandoned when maize came along.  (The same process is ongoing in China now—maize, which came in the 17^th century, is replacing millet.)  Foxtail millet was domesticated by 8000 BC. (Chang 1999:44-45; Liu 2004; Liu et al. 2009; Lu 2005; see Sagar et al. 2005, passim) and panic millet (Panicum spp.) by then or at least by 6000-6500 BC. (Bellwood 2005:21).  The earliest center of millet agriculture is around the Wei River Valley and its confluence area with the Yellow River (the Peiligang culture).  Millet reached Taiwan by 3000-2500 B.C.; a spectacular recent find revealed large amounts of foxtail millet (as well as rice) at Nan-kuan-li.  This and related sites probably represent the ancestors of today’s Austronesian-speaking “aborigines” of Taiwan, recently arrived from south China with seeds in hand (Tsang 2005).  Panic millet is early in Europe, common by 5500 BC in the Linearbandkeramik and other cultures (Bellwood 2005:21), and probably spread from China, though independent domestication cannot be ruled out.   

            In 1988 I postulated river-bottom land as the ideal place for early agriculture, but Liu et al (2009) make a convincing case for domestication in low foothill and piedmont slope areas, where easily-worked soil, good drainage, and safety from floods exist.  I would bet on both. 

By 6000 BC, pigs were domesticated and being fed the millet husks and waste (Jing and Flad 2002; Liu 2004).  This is about as early as domestic pigs are found in the Near East; they were independently domesticated both places.  This is not surprising.  Pigs, like many animals, tame themselves if fed.  They are very good eating.  People all over the world keep young wild pigs (and other wild game) today, especially if hunters kill a mother and young ones are left.  The young are eaten when they grow big.  This provides a good context for domestication.  The most tranquil young may not be killed till they have bred, and thus tranquillity and “domestic”-ness is automatically selected.  

Around 5500 BC, people, pigs, and dogs in central north China noted above suddenly shift toward eating a lot more C4 plants, i.e. millets;  before that they were eating mostly C3 plants, i.e. wild foods (Barton et al 2008; Jing and Campbell 2009).  The reference is to the type of carbon-fixing metabolism.  The difference shows up in the carbon in human bones, allowing archaeologists to figure out what people ate.  The vast majority of temperate-zone plants use the C3 pathway to fix carbon into nutrients.  A few grasses use C4; these include millets and maize.  The latter, of course, was not to reach China till the 16^th or 17^th centuries AD.  Jing and Campbell (2009:101) report a very odd case of two skeletons showing a C3 diet among many others showing C4.  Were these strangers?  Hunter-gatherers from the uplands?  Migrants from rice regions to the south?

            Pigs soon became very important as a wealth item, with consumption of pork showing high status.  Domesticated pigs are now reported by 7000 BC (Lawler 2009), though, as usual with early dates from China, this date is questioned.  Heavy pork-eating and the pattern of status consumption are clear by 3000 BC (Kim 1994) and the same patterns are clear today.  However, it is interestingly much clearer in north China than in the Yangzi country.  The latter had so much game and fish that these resources remained more important than domestic livestock until quite late, perhaps 2000 BC (Yuan et al. 2008).  Fish were so important in the lower Yangzi area that people were buried with them.  Perhaps this was food for the other world, but very possibly it had richer significance.  Fish may have been sacred (as some still are in south China) or may have been totems or spirit companions.

Other early animals include chickens, domesticated apparently in what is now southern China (West and Zhou 1988), by 4000 BC or earlier (Liu 2004—yet again questioned!), almost certainly by Thai-speaking peoples.  The Thai inhabit the home area of chickens in south China and northern southeast Asia; the Chinese did not get there till relatively recent times.  The Chinese word for “chicken,” ji, Cantonese kai, is pretty obviously a loan from Thai kai.  (The Mandarin pronunciation ji is very modern.  It was still ki when Europeans came to China and evidently kai rather earlier.)  Roger Blench (2007) has evidence that the word did not stop there; it seems to have spread, progressively transforming as it went, all the way to Berber and Mande in Africa!  By then it was unrecognizably different from kai, but Blench finds plausible—if far from certain—links in the forms along the way.

Meanwhile, sheep were domesticated in the Near East.  Recent evidence suggests that domesticated sheep came from the Near East across Central Asia.  It now seems less likely that sheep were domesticated independently in China, where they may go back to 4000 BC (Anderson 1988; Liu 2004:59) but perhaps only to 2500 BC (Jing and Campbell 2009).  The sheep are of an Asian strain found all across Asia then and now (Jing and Campbell 2009).

Goats do not appear till 2800 BC (Liu 2004:59).  Cattle and other Near Eastern domesticates got to China later (cattle by 2500 BC; Jing and Campbell 2009).  Magnificent longhorns like Texas longhorns are shown on bronze sculptures from the Dian culture in early medieval Yunnan (personal observation, Yunnan Provincial Museum). 

            Dogs may have been originally domesticated in China, where they go back to 8000 BC.  They too were eating millet, and probably the Chinese were already eating them.  The Chinese dog breeds are closer to the wolf ancestor than western breeds are.  The Near East may well have domesticated the dog separately at about the same time or a bit earlier. 

Horses, domesticated in the western steppes around 3500-4000 BC, got to China early.  The date is uncertain by they are there by 1500 BC (Lawler 2009).

            Vegetables and minor grain crops are not well attested early, but many were no doubt cultivated long ago and will be documented.  Crawford (2006) reviews the minor domesticates and gives dates for East Asian appearances.

            Wild animals exploited in the early Neolithic include “sika deer, water buffalo, water deer, hare, cat, raccoon dog, tiger, and bear” (Liu 2004:59), among others.

            A dramatic new find is a 4000-year-old bowl of noodles, at Lajia in northwest China (Lu et al 2005).  They were made from millet (both panic and foxtail) and were about 20 cm. long; they were excellently preserved, in an overturned bowl that had become sealed by clay below and around it.  They look like pulled noodles (see below) but presumably were not, since millet does not have the requisite gluten for the process; they were probably extruded by being forced through holes in a plate and into boiling water—this being the traditional Chinese way of making noodles from low-gluten substances.  The history of noodles in the western world is well known; they first occur around 200-400 A.D.  Perhaps they spread from China, but very likely they were independently invented.  In any case, China has a clear and very long priority!  Noodles are not mentioned in Chinese writing till ca. 100 A. D. in the Han Dynasty.  (Yi-Li Wu on the Chinese Medicine listserve commented this “really underscores the connection of noodles with longevity.”  Chinese eat extra-long noodles at birthdays to express hope that the celebrant will live long.)

            The rise of agriculture evidently led to an expansion of ethnic groups.  The probable inhabitants of the Yangzi Valley in those times were the ancestors of the Thai and certain related groups (the “Kadai”).  They seem to have expanded southward, and, much later, secondarily re-radiated from their current area of maximum ethnic diversity in the China-Vietnam-Laos border area.  The Hmong (Miao) and Mian (Yao) may have participated in these early agricultural forays as well, since those groups—linguistically unrelated to either Thai or Chinese—expanded southward from the Yangzi River drainage (or the mountains just south of it) at some early point.  My strong sense is that the Thai-Kadai served the role on the mainland that the Austronesians did on the seas (see below):  they were the primary, though not the only, carriers of agriculture outward from its origin point.  (The Austro-Asiatic phylum, sometimes credited, actually originated in India, and expanded to the China frontier late, probably within historic times.  It had no role in East Asian agricultural expansion, though probably a great deal of importance in that regard in India.  On these matters see Bellwood and Renfrew 2002.) 

The possibility that the early millet cultivation goes with the ancestral Sino-Tibetans is much more tenuous, but intriguing.  The Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages are related at about that level—they are about as different as you would expect if they branched off from each other five to eight thousand years ago.  But very little is known of this, and matters are controversial (van Driem 1999, 2002).  Van Driem, who includes Chinese within Tibeto-Burman, thinks the stock originated in Sichuan.  Others (myself included) think it originated slightly further north.  Either way, the stock originated suspiciously close to the origin point of millet agriculture.

No longer controversial is the correlation of advanced rice agriculture with the spread of the Austronesian languages in the south.  There is clear archaeological evidence for an explosive radiation of advanced farming and pottery-making people from south China to Taiwan and thence to the Philippines and the islands south and east—the lands inhabited by Austronesian peoples today.  Peter Bellwood (1997, 2002, 2005) has repeatedly argued for this being a record of one linguistic group radiating, and all the evidence so far seems to suggest this.  (Though see Donohue and Denham 2010; but Bellwood has a very effective answer in the Commentary section of this article.  Subsequent profound changes in both language and agriculture took place when Austronesians mixed with Papuans in Melanesia—see Paz 2002—but this is a different question.) 

            Meanwhile, the Chinese fondness for strong drink was already conspicuous.  A fermented beverage made of rice, honey, and grape and/or hawthorn fruit left unmistakable lees on pots from 7000-6600 BC at Jiahu.  Patrick McGovern, dean of oeno-archaeologists, has recently examined and analyzed these (Khamsi 2004; Zhang and Lee 2005).  This is as early as any cultivated rice in the world.  It seems that the Chinese started brewing as soon as they had domesticated grain.  No one who knows modern China will be surprised.  Probably they were already writing songs to the moon and flowers while guzzling from those jars.  (The same Patrick McGovern found that King Midas, in what is now Turkey, later drank a brew of grain, grapes, and honey; this was reconstructed by an American brewer.  It sounds strange, but it proved an excellent tipple.  I have tried it. See McGovern 2003.)

            Decades of failure to find Neolithic soybeans strengthened the case that the soybean came from the North (as Chinese records say) in the Zhou Dynasty.  Finally, however, Lee and associates have found earlier domesticated soybeans.  A sequence of larger and larger soybeans—indicating deliberate breeding for size—emerged from 2500-3000 BC in the Erlitou area of North China (where an early “Xia” city rose).  Full domestication at around 1100-1000 BC occurs through North China and Korea (Crawford 2006; Lee 2007).  Ping-ti Ho’s classic case for derivation from the “Jung barbarians” (Shanrong “Mountain Rong” in today’s usage) may still be fair enough.  The northeast remains the earliest center of diversity, though centers of diversity elsewhere in China soon appeared (Lee et al 2008). 

            Archaeology has revealed a vast number of neolithic cultures.  Every part of China, as well as Korea (Nelson 1993), had a complex, sophisticated neolithic tradition by 2000-3000 BC.  These lived on grain, with many fruits, vegetables, fish, turtles, and domestic and wild animals.  China was still game-rich, and deer were important.  Even far-off New Guinea may have contributed; sugar cane (more likely, though, from India) and bananas may be New Guinea domesticates.  Bananas, a complex hybrid of two species (Musa acuminata x Musa balbisiana), come from somewhere in the Malaysia-Indonesia region, and recent studies suggest a date of 7000 years ago and a location in New Guinea (Rice 2005), where another species (Musa fehi) was also domesticated.  The classic association of more cultural complexity with a widening gap between rich and poor and between male and female, noted in my 1988 book, is confirmed by recent studies of body size.  In particular, people tend to be somewhat less healthy as the Neolithic progresses; then, in the late Zhou Dynasty, males are notably taller and females smaller than in earlier times (Pechenkina and Ma 2008). 

            Chinese civilization arose in a core area in the western parts of the North China Plain and the adjacent Wei Valley (on which see above).  Until recently, it seemed to be a civilization that began in one area and spread in neat rings outward, like the ripples from a stone cast in a pond.  This neat scenario was early questioned by Wolfram Eberhard, and I followed him in my 1988 book in casting a dubious eye on it.  Today, the early rice and other items in the Yangzi Valley show that it was as advanced as the North China Plain, if not more so, from earliest times onward.  By 2000 BC it had large towns and sophisticated art, similar to and culturally related to the proto-civilization of the North China Plain (Underhill and Habu 2007).  Sichuan is also providing dramatic new finds that show a related but distinctive early civilization there (Bagley 2001).

Moreover, the stunning finds in north and northeast China have revealed utterly unexpected cultures there.  The mysterious and controversial Hongshan culture produced many towns long before China had dynasties.  “A huge ritual complex, about 8 by 10 km², was discovered at the late Hongshan period (ca. 3500-3000 B.C.) site of Niuheliang in western Liaoning province….  It contains stone platforms interpreted as altars, stone foundations that could have been temples,” sculptures, images, jewels, shamanic figures,  “pig-dragons,” and much more (Underhill and Habu 2006:131).  No writing or other signs of advanced civilization are associated with these sites.  Though their monumental architecture is huge, the communities were small chiefly ones of only 1000 people or so. Could they be somehow part of the background of the “Rong barbarians”?  We will probably never know.

Going back to 4000 BC, this culture had intensive agriculture and large towns that evolved into real cities by about 2000 BC—as well as pig burials (Nelson 1994, 1995).  Yet it remains totally mysterious.  Its people may have spoken ancestral Chinese, ancestral Korean, or some totally lost language. 

Other high cultures with distinctive art and architecture have been discovered in Sichuan, the Yangzi Valley, northeast China, and Central Asia (see Lawler 2009 for quick overview).  They share many broad patterns with the better-known early cultures of the Yellow River plain, but are distinctive.  They show that the transition to civilization in China took place very gradually (from 3000 BC to 1500, roughly) and over a very wide area.  Urban-size sites extended from the far north to the Yangzi and inland to Chengdu by 2500-2000 BC.  So far, scholars have been very cautious about calling these “civilizations.”  This is partly because they all lack writing—it first appears with the Shang Dynasty in the Yellow River plain area, by around 1300-1500 BC.  I personally expect that earlier writing will turn up.  Signs on vessels as early as 2000 BC are suggestive, but clearly are tally marks rather than real characters; still, it is awfully hard to believe that all those cities managed without writing and that it then suddenly came into full-blown existence hundreds of years later.

The Central Asian cultures have produced many mummies, preserved by the dry, cold climate.  These show that most of the people there were of west Asian (some perhaps even European) background. (Current genetic theory holds that east Asian “Mongoloid” peoples are derived from groups that moved up very slowly from southeast Asia.  So their late radiation into Central Asia led to a meeting of quite different stocks when they encountered Caucasians.)  Many of their textiles are woollen, woven in patterns similar to European ones; some are strikingly similar to Scottish plaids (Barber 1999; Mallory and Mair 2000).  Th earliest mummies date back to 1800-1500 BC.  These people certainly include the ancestors of the Tocharians; two Tocharian languages were spoken in this area in historic times.  They are Indo-European, close enough to eastern European languages that their word for “fish” was “lox”!  (Phonetically laks, lakse, or laksi.)  And a modern Uyghur bread resembles the bagel (Robinson 1998).  Also well represented are people related to known Iranic groups, and one assumes most of the people of the ancient Tarim Basin and neighboring areas were Indo-Iranian.  Turkic and Mongol speakers probably were established at the northern fringe of Xinjiang. 

The food attested was largely wheat and barley, with sheep, goats, cattle, horses, Bactrian camels, donkeys, and probably yaks to provide variety of dairy and meat stock.  Some of the mummies, including the spectacular “Beauty of Xiaohe” from 1800-1500 BC, were buried with wheat grains; she also has a basket and winnowing fan to use in the afterlife.  A baby was buried about that time with a sheep-nipple baby bottle and a goat-horn drinking cup.  By Han times, grapes, apricots, melons, and other fruit were established, and I am sure they go back to earliest times; apricots and wild grapes are probably native to the area, and apples find their home not far off in the mountains of west central Asia.  In neolithic and Bronze Age times, the Tarim Basin was solidly West Asian in culture and genetic background.  The frontier zone of west and east was probably the divide between the Tarim and Yellow River drainages. 

            Southeast Asia has produced nothing so large so early, but advanced cultures by 1500 B.C. show that this area too was advancing almost in step with China.

In short, Chinese civilization was a diverse set of traditions from earliest times.  Different language groups are certainly represented, and surely include Thai as well as Sinitic; most scholars suspect that Miao (Hmong), Yao (Mien), Altaic, and other groups were also involved.  Austronesian speakers were almost certainly present on Taiwan by 4000 BC and probably occupied the mainland before that.  It is generally assumed now that the Austronesian language family radiated from Taiwan, where its most diverse and divergent languages survive (Bellwood 1997, 2002).

Tibet was settled by 30,000 years ago, and a major pulse of people entering around 6000 years ago indicate the coming of agriculture and presumably animal husbandry (Brantingham and Xing 2006).  There and in central Asia, once again, complex cultures flourished by 1500-2000 B.C. or earlier.

            And, last but not least, the dragon has been around for a while.  A dragon figure and a tiger figure, made of mussel shells, stuck to the floor of a tomb about 5600 years old, were discovered in Henan in 1987 (Da 1988; Chang 1999:51).  The tomb, broadly Yangshao in culture, is probably that of a shaman; his skeleton is flanked by the animals, the dragon on his right, the tiger on his left—a directionality that survives to this day.  The dragon, being yang, goes on the right; the tiger, more yin, on the left.  Presumably this find also reveals the unsurprising fact that mussels were regularly eaten.  More beautiful and even more striking is a dragon made of turquoise stones, arranged carefully in a grave at Erlitou, the city traditionally identified as the capital of the Xia Dynasty (Lawler 2009).  That dynasty is mythical, but the myth obviously has at least some basis.

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—  2002.  “Farmers, Foragers, Languages, Genes:  The Genesis of Agricultural Societies.”  In Examing the Farming / Language Dispersal Hypothesis, ed. by Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew.  Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeology.  Pp. 17-28. 

—  2005.  “Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hyothesis in the East Asian Context.”  In The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics, edited by Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench, and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas.  London:  RoutledgeCurzon.  Pp. 17-30.

Bellwood, Peter, and Colin Renfrew.  2002.  Examing the Farming / Language Dispersal Hypothesis.  Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeology. 

Blench, Roger.  2005.  “From the Mountains to the Valleys:  Understanding Ethnolinguistic Geography in Southeast Asia.”  In The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics, edited by Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench, and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas.  London:  RoutledgeCurzon.  Pp. 31-50. 

Blench, Roger.  2007.  “Using Linguistics to Reconstruct African Subsistence Systems:  Comparing Crop Names to Trees and Livestock.”  In:  Denham, Tim; José Iriarte; Luc Vrydaghs (eds.).  2007.  Rethinking Agriculture:  Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives.  Walnut Creek:  Left Coast Press.  Pp. 408-438. 

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Fuller, Dorian Q.; Ling Qin; Yunfei Sheng; Shijun Zhao; Xugao Chen; Leo Aoi Hosoya; Guo-ping Sun.  2009.  “The Domestication Process and Domestication Rate in Rice:  Spikelet Bases from the Lower Yangtze.”  Science 323:1607-1610.

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Hotz, Robert Lee.  2000.  “Stone Axes Suggest Diversity’s Dawn.”  Los Angeles Times, March 3, p. A24.

Jiang, Leping, and Li Liu.  2006.  “New Evidence for the Origins of Sedentism and Rice Domestication in the Lower Yangzi River, China.”  Antiquity 80:355-361.

Jing, Yuan, and Rod Campbell.  2009.  “Recent Archaeometric Research on ‘the Origins of Chinese Civilisation.’”  Antiquity 83:96-109. 

Jing, Yuan, and Rowan K. Flad.  2002.  “Pig Domestication in Ancient China.”  Antiquity 76:724-732. 

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Kuzmin, Yaroslav.  2008a.  “Lord Avebury’s Virtual Journey Through Time.”  Review of Archaeology 28:72-83.

—  2008b.  Pottery and Agriculture in the Terminal Pleistocene-Middle Holocene of Northeast Asia;  Peculiarities of Spatial-Temporal Relationship. Paper, Society for American Archaeology, annual meeting, Vancouver, BC.

Lawler, Andrew.  2009.  “Beyond the Yellow River:  How China Became China.”  Science 325:930-943.

Lee, Gyoung-Ah.  2007.  “Crop Evolution, Human-Environment Interactions, and Politics of Food in Early East Asia.”  Talk, Feb. 27, University of Washington, Seattle.

Lee, Gyoung-Ah; Li Liu; Gary Crawford; Xingcan Chen.  2008.  Origins of Soybean in East Asia:  Comparative, Interdisciplinary Perspectives.  Paper, Society for American Archaeology, annual meeting, Vancouver, BC.

Liu, Li.  2004.  The Chinese Neolithic.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Liu, Xinyi; Harriet V. Hunt; Martin K. Jones.  2009.  “River Valleys and Foothills:  Changing Archaeological Perceptions of North China’s Earliest Farms.”  Antiquity 83:82-95.

Lu, Houyuan; Xiaoyan Yang; Maolin Ye; Kam-Biu Liu; Zhengkai Xia; Xiaoyan Ren; Linhai Cai; Naiqin Wu; Tung-Sheng Liu.  2005. “Millet Noodles in Late Neolithic China.”  Nature 437:967.

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Pechenkina, Ekaterina, and Xiaolin Ma.  2008.  Trajectories of Health in Early Farming Communities of East Asia.  Paper, Society for American Archaeology, annual meeting, Vancouver, BC.

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—  2002.  “Tibeto-Burman Phylogeny and Prehistory:  Languages, Material Culture and Genes.”  In Examing the Farming / Language Dispersal Hypothesis, ed. by Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew.  Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeology.  Pp. 233-249.

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Zhang Juzhong and Lee Yun Kuen.  2005.  “The Magic Flutes.”  Natural History, Sept. 2005, 43-47.

2.  Earliest Dynasties

            Research on the Shang Dynasty has not led to any huge breakthroughs since 1988.  Much more material has accumulated, but it confirms earlier findings:  Shang was a brilliant but local civilization, centered on the great central plain of north China, depending on intensive agriculture and pig-raising.  The major new finding is that Shang’s neighbors were almost or quite as brilliant.  These included the ancestral Zhou to the west and the mysterious Hongshan and its heirs to the northeast, as well as splendid local cultures in the Yangzi Valley.  We can no longer think of Shang as “the” ancient civilization of China.

            Very few animal species were shown in Shang art; about half of them were mythical, mostly various types of dragons.  The pig, by far the most common animal in archaeological finds, was never shown.  Evidently it was too plebeian, not to say unclean, to find its way into noble art.  Pigs are shown in both Neolithic and (rarely!) Zhou Dynasty art.

            Oracle bones (Flad 2008; Keightley 2006) show, at least, lots of consumption of sheep, pigs, turtles, deer, and so on.  They remain controversial as to what they are “really” about.  If all that mattered was the forecast, it would have been easier to write it down with a brush, as indeed they did (Keightley 2006); why go to incredible effort and expense to carve it?  Evidently something about state power and authority is involved.  Showing off expensive evidences of ritual divination may have been the goal.

In Shang, the king could order farmers to work collectively in fields.  Officers supervised (Keightley 1999:279).  In one storage pit, “444 stone sickles showing wear were discovered with gold leaves, stone sculpture, bronze ritual vessels, and jade artifacts.  Such precious items would be found neither in the storage pit of an ordinary farmer nor in a stone workshop.  The implements must have been stored there by a master” (Hsu and Linduff 1988:28), evidently a noble—either an administrator or an owner of an estate.  The Shang used stone implements—bronze is impractical for farming—to conduct slash-and-burn agriculture in forests, as well as upland agriculture on grass and brush steppes.  The bottomlands especially were valued as fertile farmland.  Fertilizers as such were unknown, but ash and vegetable debris restored soil fertility (Hsu and Linduff 1988:29). 

By Shang, there was a Many Dogs Officer to take care of the hunting hounds.  There was also a Many Horses Officer (Keightley 1999:280).           

The early Zhou Dynasty subsisted especially on millets.  The founder of the dynasty was Lord Millet (Hou Ji; ji was some kind of millet, apparently foxtail millet).  Wheat and rice were also important, but wheat is rarely mentioned in Shang and early Zhou, while hundreds of mentions of millet occur (Hsu and Linduff 1988:346).  Archaeology confirms the implication about their relative abundances.  Beans and hemp seeds added to the pot.  The hemp was grown for fibre for cloth, but no one was going to waste the edible seeds.  The value of the resin for drug uses was no doubt known, as it certainly was later (see below).  

            Ceramic and bronze vessels of enormous size, beauty, and technical complexity abounded.  The Shang Dynasty already had a spectacular material culture, including what many consider the most beautiful bronze vessels of all time.  Zhou produced ones even larger (if less beautiful to modern taste).  Residue analysis confirms that these held meat, alcoholic beverages, and grains.  This analysis confirms at least some of the traditional Chinese claims about which type of vessel held which food.  Vessels were used in banqueting (von Falkenhausen 1999), and some at least saw long use before being buried with their lordly user; residues attest this. 

            A recent review book gives pictures of early Chinese civilization materials (Allen 2005).

Allen, Sarah (ed.).  2005.  The Formation of Chinese Civilization.  New Haven: Yale University Press.

Von Falkenhausen, Lothar.  1999.  “The Waning of the Bronze Age.”  In The Cambridge History of Ancient China, ed. by Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.  Pp. 450-544.

Flad, Rowan K.  2008.  “Divination and Power:  A Multiregional View of the Development of Oracle Bone Divination in Early China.”  Current Anthropology 49:403-437.

Hsu, Cho-yun, and Kathryn Linduff.  1988.  Western Chou Civilization.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

Keightley, David.  1999.  “The Shang:  China’s First Historical Dynasty.”  In The Cambridge History of Ancient China, ed. by Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.  Pp. 232-291.

—  2006.  “Marks and Labels:  Early Writing in Neolithic and Shang China.”  In Archaeology of Asia, ed. by Miriam Stark.  Oxford:  Blackwell.  Pp. 177-201.

3.  Later Zhou and the Warring States

            Archaeology has been more productive in regard to later Zhou, though one finds no huge modifications in earlier conclusions about food.  China  became more populous, grain became more basic to life, and game gradually moved out of the reach of ordinary people.  By the rise of Han, only the elite and the remote mountain-dwellers had much chance at anything bigger than a rabbit.  Farming was basically in the hands of yeoman farmers, as it remained throughout history—by government policy established in Warring States times.  Huge estates worked by serfs and/or slaves were, however, all too well known.  The Warring States period was a time of high feudalism, and the continuum from slave and serf to freeman was apparently as complex as it was in feudal Europe a few centuries later. 

            The Warring States period, like China’s subsequent period of disunion from 220 to 581 AD, resulted from a situation in which the normal heartland of conquest—the Wei River Valley—simply could not marshall enough resources to defeat big, rich states south and east.  When it could (with the rise of Qin in the Warring States period and of Sui later on) it immediately conquered outward and subdued all China.  (Similarly, Liao and Jin could not quite marshall enough power to defeat Southern Sung in the 11^th and 12^th centuries, in spite of their control over the north and northwest; it took the Mongols to do that.)

            Thousands of Zhou and Warring States tombs have been excavated in the last 20 years.  These fill out knowledge of local traditions and of sacrifice rites. 

Recent work on the Zhou Li—theoretically the government manual of the Zhou Dynasty, actually a later reconstruction (if not outright fabrication)—promises to add to our understanding of food and nutrition.  It was the Zhou Li that first established nutritiion as the highest branch of medicine.  The Zhou Li claims that the court had—along with shamans, dream interpreters, and so on—special officers in charge of aromatic plants, wines, chickens, and other food items.  In fact, it holds that the ideal court (the idealized Zhou court, that is) should have two court nutritionists overseeing all—the most important medical officials in Zhou—and also 152 feastmasters, supervising some 70 butchers, 128 cooks for the inner court, 128 more for the outer offices and functions, 62 assistant cooks, 335 masters of the royal domain who (among other things) oversaw collecting the foodstuffs, 62 game-hunters, 24 turtle-catchers, 28 meat-driers, 110 butlers, 340 winemakers, 170 other beverage makers, 94 icehouse attendants, 31 people to manage serving-baskets, 61 meat picklers,62 other picklers, and 62 salt makers—some 2263, or 55% of the 4133 officers of the royal household (Knechtges 1986:49).  Of course, it is highly doubtful if the Zhou ever had so many.

With Zhou, we first find occasion to refer to the superb and encyclopedic history of Chinese food technology by H. T. Huang, one of the greatest food historians (Huang 2000).  This book, the life work of Dr. Huang, sets a new standard for Chinese food research.  While beginning with the Neolithic, it really comes into its own with Zhou food.  Among other things, Huang identifies the ritual vessels, and shows some of the superb archaeological relics.

Also, a recent book edited by Roel Sterckx (2005) and dealing with food and religion in China has focused largely on Zhou and the Warring States period, though it ranges on down through Chinese history.  Written largely by religious studies scholars, it has one article by Vivienne Lo (2005), expert on Chinese medicine and food; this is by far the best article in the book, especially to a food historian.  It ranges over all of China’s history and is most valuable for the medieval period, but it and the rest of the book might as well be cited here, at the start of the long historical period covered by the various articles. 

Further research on conservation of resources in ancient Chinese thought has turned up a great deal (Anderson 2001). 

Also, poems help us interpret the data.  The Book of Songs is well known.  Also, a major collection of songs from the state of Chu, or at least from what was once the state of Chu, contains several laments for the dead in which the mourners attempt to call a man’s soul back.  (Sometimes a man or woman was simply in a coma, and revived—hence the attempts.  This practice continues, and I have seen it.)  The mourners lure the soul with promises of good living, including food.  I quote from Arthur Waley’s translation, more free than accurate, but giving the “flavor” of the poem:

“Where pies are cooked of millet and water-grain,

Guests watch the steaming bowls

And sniff the pungency of peppered herbs.

The cunning cook adds slices of bird-flesh,

Pigeon and yellow-heron and black-crane.

They taste the badger-stew.

O Soul come back to feed on foods you love!

Next are brought

Fresh turtle, and sweet chicken cooked in cheese

Pressed by men of Ch’u.

And pickled suckling-pig

And flesh of whelps floating in liver-sauce

With salad of minced radishes in brine;

All served with the hot spice of southernwood

The land of Wu supplies…”  (Waley 1946:37-38; compare the different translations in Chang 1977:32-33, Knechtges 1986:54-57, and Huang 2000:94-95).

Interesting in this poem (but you have to run down all the translations to get it) is the use not only of Chinese “pepper” (Zanthoxylum spp., flower or brown pepper, actual a citrus relative) but also smartweed (Polygonum spp.) and wormwood (Artemisia spp.) as flavorings.  These were common in China before chile peppers replaced them in the last 400 years.  They have now almost disappeared from Chinese cuisine, but smartweed survives as a spice in Vietnam (rau ram, Polygonum odoratum) and Artemisia, either fresh or dried and powdered, survives as a common flavoring in Korea.

Anderson, E. N.  2001.  “Flowering Apricot:  Environmental Practice, Folk Religion, and Daoism.”  In: N. J. Girardot, James Miller, and Liu Xiaogan (eds.):  Daoism and Ecology:  Ways within Cosmic Landscapes.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School.  Pp. 157-184.

Chang, Kwang-chih.  1977.  “Ancient China.”  In Food in Chinese Culture, ed. K.-C. Chang.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.  Pp. 23-52.

Knechtges, David R.  1986.  “A Literary Feast:  Food in Early Chinese Literature.”  Journal of the American Oriental Society 106:49-63.

Lo, Vivienne.  2005.  “Pleasure, Prohibition, and Pain:  Food and Medicine in Traditional China.”  Sterckx 2005:163-185.

Sterckx, Roel (ed.).  2005.  Of Tripod and Palate:  Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China.  New York:  Palgrave MacMillan.

Waley, Arthur.  1946.  Chinese Poems.  London:  G. Allen and Unwin.

4.  The Blinding White Light of Han

            Chinese food suddenly comes out of the shadows in the Han Dynasty.  Archaeology and textual research give us a very good idea of Chinese food at the time.  Apparently this was a time of major innovation, with everything from European grape varieties to the wok entering China (Anderson 1988).  Fermentation technology seems to have taken off, and even distillation seems evidenced in Han, though it did not become common or well-known till Tang (Huang 2000). 

Conservation of resources had become scientific by Han times, if not by late Warring States.  For example, the Li Ji (another Han reconstruction of a supposedly Zhou text), the early Daoist texts (Yates 1997:163), and the Huai Nan Zi (Ames 1994, esp. pp. 163, 201) specifically counsel the conservation and management of plants, game animals, agricultural land and resources, and other renewable resources.  For instance, they forbid taking of pregnant game animals, setting fishnets in spawning season, burning of forests for driving game, and even burning off of fields before (beneficial) insects have gone into hibernation (Ames 1994:163, 201).  The rules sound completely modern, and—with some change of rhetorical style—would not seem out of place in a modern resource management textbook. 

It will be recalled that Han saw the perfection of the “ever-normal granary” system (Li 2007:167), borrowed by the United States in the 1930s and developing there into the agricultural subsidy system.

From Han comes the obsessive classification of everything in Chinese civilization into fives.  The correlation of the five directions and five flavors is of interest to us here, because it seems to refer to regional cooking styles.  The center correlated with sweet, and central-eastern Chinese cooking is still notably sweeter than other areas’.  North goes with salt, and the north does have salt lakes and a salty cuisine.  South goes with bitter, and southern Chinese food does make relatively more use of bitter greens and other vegetables.  East goes with sour, and China’s best vinegar comes from the central east; other correlations (especially when the center is left out) correlate east with sweet, which may make more sense.  West goes with pungent, and anyone who has had real Sichuan food knows where that ascription comes from! 

            Spectacular tomb finds, especially at Mawangdui, have revolutionized the study of Han food.  The Mawangdui tombs date from around 163 BC.  Careful embalming and subsequent burial in an anaerobic bog environment led to extremely good preservation not only of bodies and vessels (see the superb lacquerware illustrated in Huang 2000:101) but even of texts and individual food items.  Many of the texts were medical.  Donal Harper (1998) has prepared an extremely valuable edition of these.  There is now a  considerable scholarly literature on them (notably relevant to food is Lo 2001).  Along with general principles, sexual hygeine, exercises ancestral to tai ji and qi gong, these medical texts provide much information about diet therapy and plant drugs.  Many of the actual medicines are buried along with the texts—a dream come true for those of us who long agonized over what the old drug names “really meant” in botanical terms.  

            Almost as dramatic was the discovery of two sets of distilling vessels, dating from around 100 AD (give or take a few decades; see Huang 2000:209-215).  This predates by centuries the earliest previously-known stills (which are also from China).  Apparently the Chinese invented distillation.  Distilled liquor becomes common in Tang.

            Another oft-claimed Han innovation is bean curd.  Soy sauces were long known, and liquid soy sauce as we know it may have come in with Han or just before (though there are no clear references till Ming!).  However, bean curd (tofu) seems not to have been common till much later.  Thus, in 1988 I dismissed the Han invention story as legend.  However, archaeology has revolutionized the picture yet again; a tomb from Han shows a quite clear representation of making bean curd or something very similar (Huang 2000:305-333).  Still, one wonders why references to bean curd remain totally nonexistent till the end of Tang.  If bean curd was indeed a Han invention, it stayed amazingly obscure.  One would think that such indefatigable chroniclers of foodways as Jia Sixie and Tao Hongjing could not possibly have missed it.  Huang (2000:333) is probably right in speculating that the process was “still undergoing development.”  The perfection of bean curd must have waited till Tang.

            Yet another new product seems to have been tea.  Tea is native to what is now far southwest China, but that area was not part of the Han empire.  Tea was an import.  It is thinly and dubiously referred to in Han, but becomes known in subsequent centuries, and was common and well-known by mid-Tang (see Huang 2000:503 ff for the best history).

            Han armies preserved meat—even rats—by drying, grain by parching or boiling and then grinding for meal (see Sinoda 1977:486), and food in general by chilling.  Fish could be preserved by fermenting with rice, which contained sugars that decomposed into lactic acid that preserved the fish (Sinoda 1977:487).

            Literary sources provide diverse descriptions of food (Knechtes 1986).  Other sources preserve less favorable impressions of minority foodways.  Women married off to “barbarians,” i.e. steppe nomads, complained of  “rancid mutton that to me was completely revolting” and “raw meat and koumiss” (Cai Yan [attrib.], cited  Idema and Grant 2004:122-123).  Chances are that the mutton was neither particularly rancid nor particularly raw, but obviously the fine court styles of Han were unknown on the frontier.

            One qualification to the blinding white light is that scholarship has established that the great Han medical texts—the Yellow Emperor’s Classic, the Shang Han Lun, and so on—were constantly revised, and our modern versions of them date from as much as a thousand years later.  They are as different from the originals as current editions of Gray’s Anatomy are from the original, early-19^th-century version.  So we are not sure that the possible derivation of the Yellow Emperor’s term huoluan from the Greek word cholera is as early as Han; it would constitute a uniquely early borrowing, if so.  Similarly, the Shang Han Lun’s very accurate and useful descriptions of beriberi (and its cure), oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea, and the like (Anderson 1988) might be from well after Han times.  They probably are not Han.  However, references to what seems to be beriberi occur early, with a strikingly good clinical description in 610 (Huang 2000:580-581; this probably is not a more recent updating, since it is preserved as a long quote, not as a part of an updated textbook.)

            Han conquered Central Asia, thus bringing this previously “Western”-looking region into the Chinese orbit.  Settlement and administration followed (Mallory and Mair 2000; see Chapter 1).  Wheat and barley remained the foods there, with millet a very minor player, used for porridge.  The wheat and barley were ground for flour—remember that relatively advanced milling came to China from the west at this period—and some fancy pastries were baked.  The Silk Road exhibition of 2010-2011 included a flour-and-water pastry that looks like a modern florist’s chrysanthemum flower.  (It probably is intended otherwise, though, since said flower had probably not been developed by Han times.)  A group of short spaghetti-like noodles, twisted together and deep-fried, was found in a Han site; I have eaten similar items in northwest China. 

Ames, Roger.  1994.  The Art of Rulership:  A Study of Ancient Chinese political Thought.  Albany:  SUNY Press.

Harper, Donald.  1998.  Early Chinese Medical Literature:  The Mawangdui Manuscripts.

London:  Kegan Paul International.

Idema, Wilt, and Beata Grant.  2004.  The Red Brush.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Lo, Vivienne.  2001.  “The Influence of nurturing Life Culture on the Development of Western Han Acumoxa Therapy.”  In Hsu 2001 (see reference in Section 14 below), pp. 19-50.

Sinoda, Osamu.  1977.  “The History of Chinese Food and Diet.”  Progress in Food and Nutritional Science 2:483-497.

Yates, Robin.  1997.  Five Lost Classics.  New York:  Ballantine.

5.  Foods from the West:  Medieval China

            We have become more aware of the importance of Wei and other regimes for introducing western and Central Asian ideas to China.  Starting in 316, Central Asian states began serious conquests in China, leading eventually to dominance of the north by the Toba (Tabghach) Turks who ruled as the Wei Dyansty.  Wei engaged in constant trade and diplomacy with Central Asian nomadic groups.  In 520, they gave one nomad group “one thousand bushes of newly cooked rice, eighty bushels of fried [sic.; evidently shao, here meaning parched] wheat, fifty bushels of fried [roasted] nuts, …two girl slaves…and two hundred thousand bushels of grain” (Jagchid and Simons 1989:171, translating a Wei court document).  In return, Wei got horses, livestock, furs, and the like.  (Contrary to Jagchid and Simons’ wider point here, the nomads did not truly depend on Chinese foodstuffs; trade was important and brought valuable commodities, but they could hold their own if they had to; Di Cosmo 1994.)  Ongoing trade linked China and Central Asia throughout history, but was never more important than in the 400s and 500s, when Central Asian dynasties ruled North China.   By Tang, Persians were selling breads on the street, and restaurants had waitresses with white skins and blue eyes (Sinoda 1977:488; see also Schafer 1963).  What is now Xinjiang was dominated by this time by Turkic peoples, notably the Uighurs, as well as Iranic groups; the two Tocharian languages were also widely spoken. 

            Food there was still overwhelmingly bread and other baked products made from wheat and barley.  Millet was only about 15% of the grain used, and beer was its main use.  It was eaten as porridge.  Both naked and hull barley was grown, the former being classed with wheat, evidently because of milling (hull barley needs an extra step to get the hulls off).  Wheat was soaked before milling, the mills being still inefficient.  (Tang used a vertical stone turning in the vertical plane to crush the grain on an anvil slab.  Stone mills in the west used, and still use, two horizontal wheels, the upper one roughened with tangential grooves, to slash up the grain as well as grinding it.  This provides finer flour and better bran separation, and is still the preferred way to mill wheat—far superior to the cheaper steel rollers of industrial grinding.)  White bread was made in large quantities for the elite and professional classes, by bolting the flour.  Hard workers had to depend on whole grain bread, bran and all.  (This paragraph depends on the superb analysis by Trombert 2009). 

One assumes that Central Asia ate as remote parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan did within living memory: Bread was overwhelmingly the staple food, with dairy products, fruit, meat, and vegetables coming next in descending order (apparently).  Remains in cemeteries and Buddhist temples show a varied, cosmopolitan, high-quality diet for the well-to-do, and bran bread with some dairy and fruit for the rest.  The basic diet had not changed since the days of the Beauty of Xiaohe, but the elite had a far greater range.  Rice, now a staple of the region, seems to have still been lacking.  It is commonly mentioned in the Mongol Empire, but the relevant sources come from Beijing, not the old Central Asian core. 

            Probable Central Asian influence appears in the many forms of wheat cakes and dumplings described by Shu Xi (ca. 264-304) in his “Rhapsody on bing” (Knechtges 1986:58-63).  Bing now means “cake,” but then it meant just about any prepared wheat food.  Many of these have relatives all over Asia, and probably came from westward; Shu remarks on how recent they are, tracing them back no farther than Han.  Filled dumplings—what would now be called bao and jiao—are included, and described in mouthwatering detail.  Large filled dumplings were called mantou, a word folk-etymologized to “barbarian heads” and said to come from a conquest in which these dumplings were substituted for real heads in a sacrificial feast (Knechtges 1986:60).  This is a typical bit of Chinese fantastical folk-etymology; more significant than the story is its supposed date, the 3^rd century AD, just before Shu was writing.  Mantou is in fact the Chinese reflex of a word known all over Asia (from Korean mandu to Greek mantu or manti); it is probably not a Chinese word, and the food itself probably came from central Asia (Anderson 1988).  The point here is that meat-filled dumplings were all over Asia by this time; they were rather new in China; and they are almost certainly intrusive there.  A mummified dough jiaozi has been found in Xinjiang, along with a mummified spring roll that looks exactly like a modern one (personal observation, Silk Road exhibition, Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, CA, 2010). 

            Over time, mantou became a term for unfilled loaves of steamed bread, bing became restricted to baked or steamed wheat cakes, and the filled dumplings became, as noted, bao if thick-skinned,  jiao if thin-skinned.  Elsewhere, including in Xijiang (see below), the cognates of mantou still refer to filled dumplings, usually with meat fillings.  Mian, previously a word for flour, became the word for noodles (Coe 2009:90; he notes egg noodles were not invented till around 1500). 

            From Central Asia and India, Buddhist missionaries and influences poured into China during this period, and some Chinese went to India to seek out more Buddhist knowledge.  With this came vegetarianism, avoidance of alcohol and onions and garlic, and other Buddhist food rules (see the Sterckx volume cited above).

            A new historical survey of milk and milk products, by Luo Feng (2008), adds to our knowledge of them in this era.

            In China itself, medicine continued to develop.  Robert Campany (2002) has provided a valuable translation of Ge Hong’s fourth-century work on immortals—a major influence on medical books later, being quoted in e.g. the Yinshan Zhengyao (see below).  The sixth century AD proved a major watershed, at least in regard to production of books.  The incredible work of Jia Sixie, the Qi Min Yao Shu (ca. 540 AD), was described earlier (Anderson 1988), but it has now received serious attention from Françoise Sabban, the unquestioned leader in the field of Chinese food history.  The epochal work of Tao Hongjing (456-536) on chemistry, alchemy, nutrition, Daoism, and medicine remains to be seriously monographed in western languages, but research is underway.  Earlier works are preserved, at least in part, in these efforts. 

Early medical works and cookbooks followed, from 600 on, but are known only in fragments (see review in Huang 2000:125-126).  Books on medicinal and culinary uses of food began to appear, including Sun Simiao’s medical work “Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold” (2007; Chinese original 654), one of the earliest books of prescriptions and one of the first to blend herbs and food into a comprehensive materia medica (see Engelhardt 2001).  It consists largely of directions deduced from the “five phases” theory rather than empirical or verifiable medicine.  Much of it is downright magical thinking, with no basis in fact and little in theory.  It is not a very original work, being heavily based on Tao Hongjing’s writings, but it has new ideas and emphases.

Meanwhile, in the south, food was very different (see Anderson 1988).  One area reported wildrice (Zizania aquatica), barnyard millet, crab eggs, nutmeg, betel nut (already!), and water plants (Sinoda 1977:488).  Tea spread rapidly from the southwest.

In Tang and Song, monks and religious devotees took to consuming tea and medicinal soups on a regular basis, as an aid to longevity, purification, self-cultivation, sophistication, and general religious virtue (Liu 2006).  This was a pattern that was to persist.  Readers of the Qing Dynasty novel The Story of the Stone will recognize it as a key part of the lifestyle of the nun Adamantina.  More recently, it was still a very widespread pattern in the 20^th century, as I (among many) can attest from personal experience.  It spread to Japan and continues there as well.

            Tang fell at a time of worldwide drought (Zhang et al. 2008), the same drought that brought down the Classic Maya and weakened the Khmer state centered on Angkor.

Campany, Robert.  2002.  To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth:  A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Di Cosmo, Nicola.  1994.  “Ancient Inner Asian Nomads:  Their Economic Basis and Its Significance in Chinese History.”  Journal of Asian Studies 53:1092-1126.

Engelhardt, Ute.  2001.  “Dietetics in Tang China and the First Extant Works of Materia dietetica.”  In Innovation in Chinese Medicine, ed. by Elisabeth Hsu.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.  Pp. 173-191.

Jagchid, Sechin, and Van Jay Simons.   1989.  Peace, War, and Trade along the Great Wall:  Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia.  Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press.

Liu, Shu-fen.  2006.  “Between Self-cultivation and the Monastic Code:  Tea and Medicinal Soup in Tang and Song Monastic Life.”  Bulletin of the Instituite of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), Sept.

Luo Feng.  2008.  “A History of the Production and Consumption of Milk Products in the North of China:  an Archaeological and Ethnological Enquiry.”  Journal of Chinese Dietary Culture 4:115-178.

Sun Simiao.  2007.  Recipes Worth a Thousand Gold.  Translated by Sumei Yi.  Ms.

Trombert, Eric.  2009.  “Between Harvesting and Cooking:  Grain Processing in Dunhuang, a Qualitative and Quantitative Survey.”  In Regionalism and Globalism in Chinese Culinary Culture, David Holm, ed.  Taiwan:  Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture.  Pp. 147-179.

West, Stephen H.  1987.  “Cilia, Scale and Bristle:  The Consumption of Fish and Shellfish in the Eastern Capital of the Northern Song.”  Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 47:595-634.

Zhang, Pingszhong; Hai Cheng; R. Lawrence Edwards; Fahu Chen; Yongjin Wang; Xulin Yang; Jian Liu; Ming Tan; Xianfeng Wang; Jinghua Liu; Chunlei An; Zhibo Dai; Jing Zhou; Dezhong Zhang; Jihong Jia; Liya Jin; Kathleen R. Johnson.  2008.  “A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record.”  Science 322:940-942.

6.  Definitive Shaping of the Food System:  Song and the Conquest Dynasties

            The importance of Song (founded by Zhao Guangyin—whose name was misprinted in the book) and its agricultural progress has been continually reemphasized.  Rice yields doubled or tripled (ultimately, at least, but not in Song or Yuan) after the Champa fast-ripening varieties and other novelties.  The Champa rice reached the lower Yangzi from Fujian in the early 11th century (the classic date is 1012).  It had come at some uncertain (but probably not much earlier) point from Champa, now southern Vietnam.  It was rather poor quality and cooked up dry, thus hurting its appeal; its only advantage was its quick ripening (plus some resistance to drought).  Thus it was slow to make its way, coming into its own in later dynasties when cooler and drier interior uplands were settled.

            A recent and very good popular summary of Chinese food history, by Joanna Waley-Cohen (2007), belongs here, because she focuses overwhelmingly on the Song, Ming and Qing Dynasties, and specifically on the type of food and gourmetship that evolved in the Song Dynasty. 

            Li Bozhong (2003), however, argues that the full benefits of the Song introductions was not felt till Ming, and that the new rices did not have as revolutionary an effect even then as Elvin and others had argued.  However, he has to admit that the Song crops and cropping systems had a powerful effect in the Yangzi Delta area, the economic powerhouse of the country—and one which, as he points out, did not suffer as much as other regions from the violence of the subsequent conquests.  Thus, the issue is really one of what constitutes a “revolution”—the beginning and locking in of a basic change, or its final fruition.  The latter was not even completed in Ming; Qing saw it finalized, even in the Delta.  In fact, the marginal parts of the south did not get their full “revolution” until the 20^th century.  It seems logical to see Song as revolutionary, then, even if the full benefits were not reaped (literally!) until later. 

            Certainly, the Delta was doing well.  Richard von Glahn (2003; see also Li 2003) translates one Fang Hui (1227-1307) as noting that families there had about 30 mu (a bit under 5 acres) of land.  For a family of five, this meant a bit under an acre per person.  The yields per mu were up to two shi, or dan, of rice.  (The shi is a measure of weight, now 133 lb., but then a bit more, around 145 lb; see Li 2003:170.  Shi of rice are counted in dan, the way grain yields in the US used to be counted in “bushels.”  Thus an amount of rice that weighs 100 shi is counted as “100 dan rice.”  In older literature the shi was referred to by its Malay name, pikul.)  Tenants sharecropped on a 50-50 basis, leaving them 30 dan.  Fang Hui calculated a family of five would need 18 dan per year, leaving 12 for sale.  Recall this was often superior rice that would command a premium price.  Assuming the family of five was two parents and three children, 18 dan would give about 4.5 dan per adult and 3 per child, or better than 600 lb of rice per adult, certainly a liberal ration.  Of course many a farm returned only half that yield per acre (Li 2003, see esp. p. 170), and outside the Delta the norm was probably lower still. 

            Northern Song coincided with a strong monsoon, with reliable rainfall and good growing conditions all over China (Zhang et al. 2008).

Trade also flourished; Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital, was full of all kinds of fish, though it is in a dry area and had to bring most of them from afar (West 1987).  Printing also flourished as never before (Chia 1996), allowing cookbooks, tea books, and very modern-seeming restaurant and food and wine guidebooks to multiply inordinately. 

            Sugar developed as a major crop, and the Song found ways to keep it a smallholder crop, rather than becoming a plantation product as it was in the western world (Mazumdar 1998).  Mazumdar’s book, one of the greatest works in all agricultural history, continues the story by showing the successful integration of sugar into China’s smallholder production system through imperial times.  China was thus spared the horrors of slavery, indentured servitude, and colonial displacement of grain by sugar (Geertz 1963; Mintz 1985).  Sugar never paid well, so it provided no escape for the trapped peasants.  Even so, it is the most striking case of China’s ability to adapt anything to the freeholder economy.  Thanks to Warring States political philosophy, written into imperial policy by Qin and Han, China’s farmers were rarely “peasants” in the European sense.  They did not form a lower class, subject to legal discrimination and bound to the landlords.  They were proud freeholders—as many of them told me in the 1960s!  At some times and in many places serfhood and slavery did exist, but these were never the norm.

            Song foodways were greatly elaborated, as we have long known.  I noted in the book that tea had become a staple by late Song.  Smith (1991:51-62) has more recently detailed the taxation of tea in Sichuan in the Song.  An insight into the cuisine of Song is the cookbook by the great Song artist Ni Tsan (Anderson, Wang and Mair 2005).  Ni provides highly refined recipes for a delicate, artfully simple cuisine. He also provides brewing directions (alas, garbled in transmission somehow) that indicate complex and highly flavored wines were home-brewed at the time; another book of the time, Zhu Gong’s work on wine brewing Beishan Jiujing, has accurate recipes.  Flour was stirred with water and probably a starter to cause lactic acid fermentation.  Then glutinous rice was cooked and added.  This was fermented and strained (see Sinoda 1977:491).

Another scholar’s cookbook was that of Lin Hong (13^th century), who developed a highly refined cuisine (Sabban 1997).  Based on delicate vegetables, this cuisine could accommodate delicate meats and fish, but—except for an odd stew of wildcat—few more robust meats, though mutton and venison did make it in.  Delicacy can go no further than infusions, congee, and stuffings flavored with flowering-apricot blossoms; they have a carnation or clove scent.  (They were used to flavor tea in the Qing Dynasty; they give a slight carnation fragrance to it.)  Recipes include dishes of lotus, orange, wild mushrooms, hare, and various light-flavored greens.  Like other scholars then and since, he warns against eating certain foods at the same meal, including crab and persimmon (this combination is still avoided, though no one has ever come up with a valid reason for it; Lin speaks of a mysterious “wind worm”; Sabban 1997:42).  Many, perhaps most, of Lin’s recipes contain literary allusions.  Influenced by Daoism, he still cannot give up grains or meats, but he minimizes them, and includes various vegetarian-“meat” recipes such as vegetarian duck.  The book contains an early use of “won ton” (huntun) to mean a broth; it is, here, a medicinal one, using cedrela root (Cedrela sinensis=Toona sinensis)  to treat diarrhea.  (Many of the recipes are medicinal, and probably all were considered to have medicinal value.)  He is devising a cuisine for scholars who have retired to the mountains—a cuisine simple and natural, but still refined and tasteful (not to say expensive).

By this time, Buddhism was strictly vegetarian, some sects of Daoism encouraged vegetarianism, and some Chinese scholars were simply too merciful to take animal lives—or so they claimed.  Vegetarianism probably came in with Buddhism before Tang.  By Song it was more widespread, and remains a part of the Chinese scene today.   (On meat and the rise of substitutes for it, see Huang 2000; Sabban 1993.)

Conversely, raw foods were still popular, as they had been in Tang.  Not only fish, but pork, mutton, duck, goose, sparrows, and other foods were eaten raw (Sinoda 1977:490).  This habit declined steadily from Song onward, disappearing in the 20^th century as the health hazards became widely known.

Many other cookbooks and food books are known from this period (Huang 2000:126-128).  There are also other observations on food, including many sour comments by exiles on the foods of remote regions.  The south was infamous for its “yams and taro,” rats and bats, raw fish, and so on (Rosner 1999; Schafer 1967).  The great poet Su Shi complained of this, and his wife died after eating snake without knowing what it was; he attributed her death to the shock of finding out (Sabban 1999:5).  The gap between conservative, meat-eating north and eclectic, eat-everything south was well known, of course, since much earlier.  The north’s dairy products and the south’s fish, frogs and snakes were stereotypic by the 6^th century (see also Rosner 1999; Sabban 1999).

            North China fell into foreign hands during the Liao, Jin, and early Mongol periods, and then all China fell to the Mongols in 1279.  Little is known about food in north China during the earlier periods.  Population declined; by early Ming, the North China Plain may have had as few as 7,000,000 inhabitants, comparable to Shang Dynasty levels. 

            The Liao emperors were embalmed carefully; among other things, their bodies were stuffed with “fragrant herbs, salt and alum,” and drained of body fluids, resulting in a dried mummy that an irreverent Chinese observer called “emperor jerky” (Steinhardt 1998:226).  Some corpses have lasted long enough to be excavated by modern archaeologists such as Steinhardt (1998).  Copper wire suits and gold and silver face masks decorated the bodies, as the Liao court records had said.  Food offerings were made, but seem not to have survived.

            The subsequent Jin Dynasty is known, among other things, for introducing the word “shaman” to the world (Tao 1976:12-13; see also Tillman and West 1995, esp. Jin 1995:217-220).  The Jin were Tungus-speaking, and “shaman” is a word from that language.  More to our point here are the surprisingly complex Central Asian recipes they prepared at court (Buell, Anderson and Perry 2000).  One odd bit of foodlore dating to those troubled times is the Cantonese term “oil-fried devils” for the fried breads known elsewhere simply as yutiao, “dough strips.”  The Cantonese commemorate the minister Qin Gui (1090-1155) and his wife, who, according to received histories at least, convinced the Song Emperor Gaozong to cashier and then execute the great general Yue Fei (1103-1142), who had stood off Jin.  The result was transient peace for Song and eternal hatred in south China for Qin.

            Population crashed in each conquest episode.  Apparently “a population of 108 milion in 1210 fell to 75 million in 1292, rose to 87 milion in 1351, and fell again to 67 million in 1381” (Smith 2003:9, citing several authorities).  Of course these figures are highly tentative.  Li Bozhong (2003:138) correctly dismisses the claims of bubonic plague episodes contemporary with or earlier than Europe’s great 1346-8 epidemic.  There is absolutely no evidence for a Chinese equivalent of this.  For many reasons (some addressed memorably in Benedict 1996) bubonic plague is endemic, not epidemic, in China.  It seems never to have been a major killer, judging from the lack of descriptions of this unmistakable disease in the records we have.

            The Mongol Empire and its foods and agriculture are now well known (Allsen 2001; Anderson 2005; Buell, Anderson and Perry 2000; Ratchnevsky 1991; Rossabi 1988).  The striking findings are that the Mongol Empire was very far from being a brief irruption of nomads who settled down to become just another Chinese dynasty.  The Yuan in the early 1300s controlled the Yellow River for the first and last time in China’s dynastic history.  Other water control projects flourished (Li Bozhong 2003).

The Mongols brought ideas and people from all over Asia.  The Mongol court’s official book of food, nutrition and dietetics, assembled in 1330 by court nutritionist Hu Sihui (Buell, Anderson and Perry 2000), is a stunning work of synthesis.  It provides a large number of recipes with their nutritional values as perceived by Chinese medicine of that time.  The recipes come from as far afield as Baghdad, Kashmir, and eastern Europe.  Most of them are Central Asian:  Turkic, Mongol, or Iranic.  Many are Chinese, but the Chinese recipes are definitely in the minority, although the book was compiled in Peking.  Many recipes are examples of fusion cuisine:  Chinese ingredients in Central Asian recipes, or outright blends of the two traditions.  An interesting observation, given what is said about distilling above, is that Hu gives directions on making arak—using the Arab word (a-la-ji in transcription).  If distillation spread from China to the west, it was now spreading back again, or at least a type of distilled liquor was. 

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Mongols and others at their court wished to demonstrate their sophistication by eating foods from all over the world.  They also loved to impress visitors by providing them with the foods of their homelands.  They also were famous for assembling skilled people and skilled knowledge from any and all places, as part of their insatiable thirst for anything that would help them conquer and hold the world.  But, beyond this, I believe that the Mongols were deliberately and openly showing off their power.  The message of their feasts was:  See, we can command foods and recipes from the entire known world; we not only conquered these lands, we really own them, and we can take their people, their cultural ways, their skills, their expertise.  All is ours.

By contrast, ordinary Chinese seemed rather unaffected; Sinoda (1977:491) has noted that the contemporary novel Shui Hu Quan mentions only standard Chinese foods.

Scholars once believed that pasta came from China to Europe; it went the other way.  Invented in the east Mediterranean in Roman Empire times, it spread to China, probably with steppe nomads in the period just before Tang.  The Chinese, however, added new tricks that eventually spread back to Europe.  (See the classic history of pasta by Serventy and Sabban 2002).

Allsen, Thomas.  2001.  Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. 

Anderson, E. N.  2005.  “Lamb, Rice, and Hegemonic Decline:  The Mongol Empire in the Fourteenth Century.”  In Christopher Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson (eds.)., The Historical Evolution of World-Systems.  New York:  Palgrave MacMillan.  Pp. 113-121.

Anderson, E. N.; Teresa Wang; Victor Mair.  2005.  “Ni Zan, Cloud Forest Hall Collection of Rules for Drinking and Eating.”  In Victor Mair, Nancy Steinhardt and Paul R. Goldin (eds.), Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture.  Honolulu, HI:  University of Hawaii Press.  Pp. 444-455.

Benedict, Carol.  1996.  Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China.  Stanford UP.  See under China.

Buell, Paul D.; Eugene N. Anderson; Charles Perry.  2000.  A Soup for the Qan.  London:  Kegan Paul International.

Chia, Lucille.  1996.  “The Development of the Jianyang Book Trade, Song-Yuan.”  Late Imperial China 17:10-48.

Jin Qicong.  1995.  “Jurchen Literature under the Chin.”  In China Under Jurchen Rule:  Essays on Chin Intellectual and Cultural History.  Albany:  SUNY Press.  Pp. 216-238.

Li Bozhong.  2003.  “Was There a ‘Fourteenth-Century Turning Point?’”  In The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition inChinese History, Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center.  Pp. 135-175.

Ratchnevsky, Paul.  1991.  Genghis Khan:  His Life and Legacy.  Oxford:  Blackwell.

Rossabi, Morris.  1988.  Khubilai Khan:  His Life and Times.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Rosner, Erhard.  1999.  “Regional Food Cultures in China.”  Paper, Sixth Symposium on Chinese Dietary Culture, Fuzhou.

Sabban, Françoise.  1993.  “La viande en Chine:  Imaginaire et usages culinaires.”  Anthropozoologica 18:79-90.

—  1997.  “La diète parfaite d’un lettré retiré sous les Song du Sud.”  Études chinoises XVI:7-57.

—  1999.  “Chinese Regional Cuisine:  The Genesis of a Concept.”  Paper, Sixth Symposium on Chinese Dietary Culture, Fuzhou.

Schafer, Edward.  1967.  The Vermilion Bird.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Serventi, Silvano, and Françoise Sabban.  2002.  Pasta:  The Story of a Universal Food.  New York:  Columbia University Press.

Smith, Paul Jakov.  1991.  Taxing Heaven’s Storehouse.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

—  2003.  “Introduction:  Problematizing the Song-Yuan-Ming Transition.”  In The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition inChinese History, Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center.  Pp. 1-34.

Steinhardt, Nancy Shatzman.  1998.  “Liao Archaeology:  Tombs and Ideology along the Northern Frontier of China.”  Asian Perspectives 37:224-244.

Tao, Jing-Shen.  1976.  The Jurchen in Twelfth-Century China.  Seattle:  University of Washington Press.

Tillman, Hoyt, and Stephen H. West (eds.).  1995.  China Under Jurchen Rule:  Essays on Chin Intellectual and Cultural History.  Albany:  SUNY Press.

Von Glahn, Richard.  2003.  “Towns and Temples:  Urban Growth and Decline in the Yngzi Delta, 1100-1400.”  In The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition inChinese History, Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center.  Pp. 176-211.

Waley-Cohen, Joanna.  2007.  “The Quest for Perfect Balance.”  In Freedman, Paul (ed.),    Food:  The History of Taste.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.  Pp. 99-134.

Zhang, Pingzhong; Hai Cheng; R. Lawrence Edwards; Fahu Chen; Yongjin Wang; Xulin Yang; Jian Liu; Ming Tan; Xianfeng Wang; Jinghua Liu; Chunlei An; Zhibo Dai; Jing Zhou; Dezhong Zhang; Jihong Jia; Liya Jin; Kathleen R. Johnson.  2008.  “A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record.”  Science 322:940-942.

7.  Involution:  Ming and Qing

            Agriculture continued to develop, slowly but surely, in Ming and Qing.  The great drama was the steady growth of population—interrupted by the enormous crash in the Ming-Qing transition, when population fell by at least 25% and possibly far more.  Qing population then grew from 100-150 million to 400 million, putting unprecedented stress on the production system.  Supporting so many took a level of skill, innovativeness, and hard work that has not been adequately appreciated.  Most of the literature (e.g. Elvin 2004; Elvin and Liu 1998) stresses the grim Malthusian crisis, with deforestation, unsustainable conversion of wetlands, desertification, “retreat of the elephants” (Elvin 2004), and so on the inevitable toll.  All these and more did indeed occur and were horrific, and conditions by the early 20^th century were beyond modern imagination (Li 2007), but the real news was that somehow those 400 million managed to eat.  

Research has shown that China’s agricultural regions were similar to those described by Buck in the early 20^th century, although maize was not important until Qing, probably late Qing (Myers and Wang 2002:581).  Sorghum and millet prevailed in areas where maize was central by Buck’s time.  Maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts, chiles, and other New World crops made a huge and dramatic difference in the end, but were slow in coming and in spreading.  New scholarship shows that maize may have come first through southwest China and Tibet, as often suggested in earlier decades, and spread rapidly, while sweet potatoes were widespread by the 1730s; maize remained commoner in central China, sweet potatoes in the southeast (Vermeer 1998:266).  They allowed more activity in the mountains of the center and south, where they grow well but rice does not.  This in turn led to further deforestation (Vermeer 1998:267).

Will and Wong (1990) and others (see Myers and Wang 2002; Rowe 2002) have showed that the Qing Dynasty’s famine relief system was pervasive and effective, probably the best in the world in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  Beijing’s food security, for instance, was guarded effectively by a range of institutions (Li and Dray-Novey 1999).  Few countries at that time were so well organized as China in making sure that people had some access to food.

Through the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the western world was almost unanimous in taking a supercilious, patronizing attitude toward China’s traditional food sector.  Only those who had intimate acquaintance with it, such as F. H. King (1911; and see many others quoted in The Food of China), recognized what an accomplishment mere survival was, under the circumstances.  Now that the United States has as dense a population as Qing China had, and now that the world food system is tottering toward collapse, we may be able to take a more properly humble attitude.

            Still, the hard times of Ming and Qing are undeniable, and would have been less severe if government officials had been less corrupt and slothful.  Encroachment on lakes and wetlands continued (e.g. Osborne 1998), though it was far less serious than what is going on today.  More serious, and perhaps the worst environmental problem of Qing, was the massive deforestation (Vermeer 1998).  Reduction of minorities was often the cause (Vermeer 1998:246 describes this for the Miao).  Their forests were plundered.  Sometimes this was done on the excuse that “bandits and rebels” (Vermeer 1998:247), many of whom were actually desperate resistance fighters, were taking refuge therein.  Other forests were cut by desperate poverty-stricken people who invaded them in spite of rules and restrictions.  Vermeer quotes a number of contemporary sources, some pro-forest, some pro-deforestation.  Awareness of the devastating effects of deforestation was widespread, but not adequate to stop the combination of official fear and grassroots desperation.  Agroforestry was practiced widely (see e.g. Vermeer 1998:251).  Tree plantations were, however, vulnerable to poaching and government takeover.  These acted as disincentives.  Government reserves fell apart and were given over to cultivation, continuing a trend established as early as the Han Dynasty.

            Population grew, but the idea that China “always” had a huge, fast-growing population is a myth.  China’s population, and its increase rate, remained comparable to Europe’s through most of this period (Lavely and Wong 1998; Pomerantz 2000; etc.).  Only when China’s 18^th century brought peace, and Europe’s birth rate declined (and declined more in the 19^th and 20^th centuries), did China forge well ahead.  Thus, population pressure is not a valid explanation for differences.  It caused ecological degradation in China (Elvin 2004; Marks 1998), but so did it in Europe.  The Chinese were fully aware of the environmental problems (Myers and Wang 2002:640), and did a great deal to prevent them—planting trees, maintaining forests, keeping dykes maintained and when possible keeping them low and letting the rivers run.  True remedies were, however, beyond China’s technological power.

Famines took place constantly and were horrific (Li 2007; Mallory 1926; Wu 1996, 1997—with comments on the fears of cannibalism).  They were worse in China than in most of the world, incluiding Europe (Li 2007).  However, the rest of the world had no shortage of famines in those times.  For the vast majority of humanity, freedom from want became a real possibility only with the rise of modern bulk transport of grain and perishable commodities, by rail and ship, in the late 19^th century.

After decades of neglect of this vitally important topic, food and famine in Qing has finally received serious attention.  Pierre-Étienne Will and Bin Wong (Will and Wong 1991) carried out major studies of famine relief, amazingly effective in much of Qing.  Stockpiles of grain for famine relief could be huge, overflowing granaries and rotting because there was simply not enough storage capacity (Li 2007:169).  Famines persisted, however, because the population was so dense and so fast-growing that a government with only premodern transportation methods at its disposal was handicapped.   Lillian Li’s book Fighting Famine in North China:  State, Market, and Environmenbtal Decline, 1690s-1990s (2007) investigates the problems of Beijing and the areas around it.  Beijing grew from 660,000 to over a million in Qing (p.a 146) and the region grew even more. 

Like other observers, Li describes a diet of wheat, millets, sorghum, and—increasingly—the New World crops, maize, peanuts (an oil crop; see p. 99), and sweet potatoes.  Many varieties of soybeans were grown; the black one was for horses or for the starving.  Cotton competed for land with food.  Rice was grown but never did well in that cold climate, and there was little water for it in many years.  Rice from the south tended to be old and probably bug-eaten.  The land was productive (far more so than comparable parts of Europe, if later statistics hold true for Qing).  However, the climate was changeable and official policies and practices were too.  The climate could produce droughts or floods; the region has a very high amplitude of variation in rainfall.  The officials could produce excellent policy in a good time (such as the early 18^th century), but corruption was common, and in bad decades even minimal law enforcement was difficult. 

The grain tribute brought an enormous amount of food to the capital.  Up to “13-15 million shi” (Li 2007:148; a shi was 133 lb. in the early 20^th century) were stored in the city at a time; that would be about 10,000 tons of grain.  One effect was linking prices over the empire; regionalism was inhibited and grain flowed throughout eastern China and to some extent through the center and west.  The nobility was given huge donations of grain (as well as silver and other items) and sold some of it.  The government tried to keep grain prices low, favoring the urban population but often hurting the farmers.  This is a practice familiar in the modern world, where many countries have done it, usually with unfortunate results for agriculture.

Soup kitchens and other aid facilities, as well as grain storage, helped the hungry.  The system functioned best in the 18^th century, preventing mass deaths.  The dreadful tales of late Ming, which resurfaced in the 20^th century, are singularly absent from the records (Li 2007:247):  no cannibalism, no living on bark, no selling of children for a few coins or bits of food.  Relevant is the wider context of peace; the core provinces were so calm that when a local rebellion finally occurred in Shandong in 1774 (Perry 1981), the local law enforcement personnel could not find their weapons.  When they finally located these in an old storeroom, they discovered that the weapons had rusted away!  I know of no comparable story anywhere else in the world.

In the 19^th century, all this slowly unraveled.  Rising population led to want, which fueled rebellions that brought the Qing down in 1911.  Probably the worst famine in premodern history was that of 1876-79, in which 10-13 million people died (Li 2007:272).  Up to 90% of the population died in some districts in 1878 (Bohr 1972).  Then and throughout the early 20^th century, people were reduced to eating chaff, bark, weeds, and corncobs.  Even the more edible weeds and tree barks were long gone.  Cannibalism from desperation was widespread in the 1876-79 famine, and was observed by sober outside observers, not merely reported by the Chinese sources (which in olden times loved to exaggerate this horrific recourse). 

For the rich, food became ever more sophisticated (See Huang 2000:129 for a list of major culinary works; see Waley-Cohen 2007 for brief history of gourmetship and Tong 1986 for some recipes). Sarah Schneewind tells a hilarious story concerns an attempt to fool a Ming emperor into thinking an auspicious, and therefore rewardable, omen had appeared in the form of two melons growing on one stalk.  The emperor was not fooled. 

The great Chinese gourmet Yuan Mei (1716-1798) flourished in Qing, and his book of food is now widely available; we are hoping to translate it.  His birthday, set at March 25 in the western calendar, has recently been declared as International Chinese Food Day.  You might plant a tree too; he planted one on his 70^th birthday, saying:

“Seventy, and still planting trees….

Don’t laugh at me, my friends.

I know I’m going to die. 

I also know I’m not dead yet.”   (Tr. J. P. Seaton, 1997:92.)

Much more important is everyday food.  As we have seen, Li Bozhong (see above) points out that the effects of the new crops and cropping patterns introduced in Song and Yuan were not widely felt till Ming, and thus Ming population and wealth could grow steadily in spite of the poor governance of that troubled dynasty.  The Yangzi Delta and neighboring areas flourished especially.

Yields stayed about the same in shi per mu in Ming, but the shi was much larger, around 220 lb or more (Li 2003:170).  Thus, though landholdings shrank, the combination of higher yields and higher measures meant that people were not hurting.

            Suzhou in Ming focused on high-quality rice, trading it widely (the peasants who grew it had to sell it to buy cheaper rice).  The gazetteer (local guidebook and products list) in Ming reported “seventeen varieites of nonglutinous and twelve varieties of glutions rice, six strains of wheat and six types of beans…nine kinds of fruit in addition to eleven different tangerines and twelve varieties of plums…thirteen types of vegetables and six of melon” (Marme 2005:23), as well as many fish, water plants, medicinal herbs, and so on.  The fishermen were boat-dwellers, as in early modern south China generally. 

Both the end of Yuan and the end of Ming (like the end of Tang) coincided very closely with dramatic drops in the strength of the monsoon, and it appears almost certain that famine and unrest associated with these events helped bring down the dynasties (Zhang et al. 2008).  The events coincide with dry or cold periods elsewhere in the world.

A frequent question for students of late imperial China has been:  Why didn’t China develop as western Europe did?  As of 1100 A.D., anyone betting on different regions of the earth would probably have bet that China would be the unquestioned leader in all fields for the next many centuries; the Near East and perhaps southeast Europe would stay a strong second; and west Europe would remain a marginal backwater, except in so far as Muslim civilization brought Spain into the wider world.  Clearly, this would have been a wrong prediction.

Modern authors like Kenneth Pomerantz (2000) and Bin Wong (1997) have stressed China’s many advantages in population, resources, productivity, learning, and organization, even as late as the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  They have done much to demolish the idea of European exceptionalism.  Li Bozhong (see above), also, emphasizes the enormous increases in agricultural production and productivity and the other economic gains in Ming.  Moreover, China did have the advantage of European science (admitted out-of-date and thin in many cases), thanks to the Jesuit missionaries, and—contrary to frequent western claims—the Chinese welcomed, adopted, and used these introductions (Elman 2005).  This makes the problem more thorny; it might seem that China could, at any time before 1700, have overtaken and passed the west. 

Against Pomerantz, however, Philip Huang (2002) reaffirms his arguments for agricultural involution (see above), and argues that China was so trapped by its intensive agriculture and high person-to-farmland ratio that few resources (whether land, labor or capital) could be freed for development.  Huang argues from his work in the Yangzi delta, without reference to pioneer fringes like Yunnan and Manchuria that produced more surplus.  Pomerantz has hotly riposted to Huang (2002), and the debate has been joined by others (Lee et al 2002; Brenner and Isett 2002).  The argument winds up turning on misplaced decimal points, misdrawn curves, and other minutiae, and is—in fact—beyond resolution with the data available at this time.  Suffice it to say that it is clear that China had a rich economy with a good deal of surplus that could have been invested, while west Europe had more, including a wealth of animals and an easily accessible trove of coal (Pomerantz 2000).  It is also clear that much of China was trapped in static situation of local lineage power, micro-farms, and razor-thin margins.  Mazumdar’s work, noted above, is again apposite here.  Change was impressive and important in Ming and Ch’ing China, but much of it was driven by governmental desire to centralize and take ever more power, rather than by a real desire for development in the modern sense.  Local individuals and regions might resist, but they could, at best, slow down and dilute the rise of autocracy. 

Most scholars would probably accept the conclusion that, while China failed to expand into global sea trade, Europe was forced to expand in that direction, and profited greatly.  Portugal in particular had nowhere to go but out into the Atlantic, and the Dutch too had little option but to take to seafaring.  These nations were, successively, the leaders of long-range voyaging and trade.  The Dutch are sometimes credited with (or accused of) inventing capitalism as a result.  China was ahead in maritime matters until the early 1400s, but then turned against marine trade and voyaging.  Ming tried to ban sea trade, and Qing fought piracy in ways that damaged the seafaring economy.  This did not stop such ventures, but it did give the west a chance to catch up and then forge ahead, to take a commanding lead by 1500.

I personally continue to accept the hoary, time-honored view that China’s autocratic centralism inhibited change, while the ferment and competition of multinational west Europe forced change.  Ming’s royal family had a touch of paranoia (literal, not a loose use of the word), which led to some mass murders of intellectuals and innovators; the founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, killed an estimated 100,000 elite individuals (Marme 2005:76; cf. Smith and von Glahn 2003, passim), and his successors were often as bloody.  They targeted specifically anyone interested in change—in loosening up the intellectual crust on the country.  Obviously, this had some effect.  The Qing Dynasty, an unpopular reign of alien “barbarians,” found itself forced to become even more autocratic, and did everything to achieve this (see Peterson 2002, passim).  Even their liberation of the serfs and low-caste peoples was apparently a way to create a levelled, easily-ruled society, not as a blow for freedom (Rowe 2002, in the Peterson volume).  Intellectuals protested and advocated small government in terms reminiscent of the American founding fathers, and were savagely repressed in consequence (Peterson 2002; see especially Woodside 2002).  Commerce greatly flourished, and capitalist-like firms and behaviors multiplied (Rowe 2002), but the oppression of all initiative crushed any chance of real development.  It seems clear to me—but I recognize there can be much debate on this—that if Europe had continued on the path to autocracy that it pursued at the same time (see P. Anderson 1974), Europe would have had the same sluggish development and the same involutional tendencies.  Revolution, colonization, and other processes spared them (P. Anderson 1974).

In this, Europe benefited from lack of unity; geography made unification under an autocratic emperor almost impossible (Pomerantz is among many who have discussed this idea).  It was not for lack of trying; from the Romans on down to Napoleon and Hitler, but the mountains always got in the way, saving Europe from unity and stagnation.  Perhaps the European Union will end European progress….  Conversely, if Japan had been a continent with several conflicting polities, it might have parlayed its rather striking parallels with Europe (see von Glahn 2003) into equally rapid and impressive development.

Quite apart from the very real problem of an often autocratic, backward-looking state, there were more immediate incentive issues. For an upwardly mobile Chinese in imperial times, getting into government service was always a major goal.  Families diversified their portfolios by investing in land, trade, and education for government service, rather than focusing on economic development.  China had large cities but rather few large towns, and the population was scattered and rural, in a vast network of marketing areas; Myers (Myers and Wang 2002:579) contrasts this with the highly urban-centric (“plexus”) economy of Europe.

Clearly, there was much more to the whole story.  Richard von Glahn (2003) has reviewed a vast number of theories, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.  The latter essentialize Europe, making it either innately superior or else a homogeneous realm characterized by a single political-economic framework that somehow unites early Renaissance Italy and modern England (the Japanese appear to be especially prone to this).  In the absence of definitive conclusions, I will not make further claims. 

What matters here is that Pomerantz, Wong, and Philip Huang (1990), as well as other scholars, all agree that China was extremely productive agriculturally during this time.  Myers and Wang’s summary article (2002) describes a stunningly successful, rationalized, developed agriculture with highly sophisticated technology.  Farmers and writers realized that bean plants, plowed in, restored soil fertility, as did beancake fertilizer (see e.g. Myers and Wang 2002:610-611).  They knew the relative values of different kinds of dung.  Efficiency of production, transportation, and processing all increased, at the same time as leasing arrangements, banking, and government policy were making it ever easier to trade in foodstuffs.  On the other hand, rural wages (calculated in rice-buying power) declined as population rose (Myers and Wang 2002:637, citing Kang Chao). 

Moreover, China’s cities were quite “modern,” having—among other things—a wealth of teashops, restaurants, and attendant food-related amenities (see e.g. Rowe 1989, esp. p. 86; Rowe 2002).  The Chinese also practiced birth control and maintained, at least locally, a low birth rate (Lavely and Wong 1998), though frontier areas often had larger families.  (There is some doubt about population figures, since we have no believable figrues from late Ming or the Ming-Qing transition, but the general trends are clear; see Myers and Wang 2002, Rowe 2002.)  The problem was certainly not lack of food or lack of ability to feed a growing, increasingly urbanized population. 

            One revealing insight into the relative decline of China and rise of the west is provided by herbals.  China’s greatest premodern herbal was Li Shizhen’s Ben Cao Gang Mu (see e.g. Métailié 1989).  When it was published in 1596, shortly after Li’s death, it was probably the greatest herbal in the world, but already west European botanists such as Fuchs were breathing hot on its heels.  Dodoens’ great herbal came out at about the same time.  By the early 1600s, Europe was producing flocks of herbals far ahead of Li’s—but China was stagnating.  Li’s herbal was never surpassed in Imperial times, and is still very widely used, though it is now dwarfed by the great herbals of the Communist period (and even by a few from Qing—but they added little that was really new).

            Important work on tea has come out.  Robert Gardella (1994) compared China’s smallholder production with the rise of plantations in the colonial world; Qin Shao (1998), in a fascinating article, showed that China vilified teahouses as dens of freethinking and other iniquities—just as Turkey and later Europe attacked coffeehouses, and just as “espresso joints” were attacked as hotbeds of “beatnikism” within my own memory. 

Keith Schoppa (2002) has chronicled the fate of the Xiang Lake, across the Qiantang River from Hangzhou.  This lake was created as a reservoir in Sung times; it held excess water and released it later for irrigation.  It became famous for its water-shield plants (Brasenia schreberi, a small waterlily relative famous for its crunchy, succulent texture), and for bricks and tiles made from its alluvial clay.  Local elite lineages constantly tried to encroach on it, being stopped off and on by heroic efforts of local activists and magistrates; Schoppa’s main point in the book is that only a few such individuals existed, and could turn the tide, while the vast majority lived in terror of the local elites and dared not combine to act against them.  In the 20^th century, the Xiang Lake met the fate of most of rural China—it was trashed by the Nationalists and destroyed utterly by the Communists, to the enormous damage and impoverishment of the area.

Otherwise, food history during Ming and Qing has not been investigated in depth (though I have not seen Su 2004, which may have changed this).  The tendency is to assume that China kept developing more and more elaborate dishes, and became more and more committeed to what we now recognize as “Chinese cuisine”—no more Central Asian and Near Eastern borrowings (Anderson 2005 [see above]).  Yuan Mei, poet and gourmet, has little that is not thoroughly Chinese in his cookbook (Schmidt 2004; So 1986; Waley 1956).   The Qianlong Emperor loved birds’ nests, but Li Shizhen does not refer to them (Rosner 1999:7).

“Taking grain as the key link”—an infamous campaign of Mao Zidong—had its ancestry in a Qing campaign launched by the Yung-cheng Emperor.  In 1725 he wrote:

“I enjoy eating rice, and I never waste even a kernel.  Rice is a gift from Heaven and nourishes the people.  Because I love the people, I must respect heaven and take great pains to save and treasure rice….  If I…waste foodgrain, Heaven will be angry, and our people will suffer calamities.  I have heard that people in Kiangsi feed grain to the hogs.  This is not appropriate behavior….  Avoid waste and love grain!”  (Quoted Myers and Wang 2002:608.) 

Alas, China today feeds a great deal of its grain to the hogs, and in consequence has to import grain on a massive scale, driving up world prices and impacting the world’s poor.  Heaven will send calamities.

Yet, China continued to deal with Central Asia.  A Muslim Uighur concubine in the court of the Emperor Qianlong in the 1760s and 1770s managed to avoid pork, eating mutton instead, and to eat sweets—probably with a Central Asian flavor (Millward 1994:435). 

Borrowings from the New World—crops like maize and sweet potatoes came in the 16^th century (Sinoda 1977:493)—had a revolutionary effect.  Sucheta Mazumdar’s work dramatically confirms and extends my comments (Anderson 1988; Mazumdar 1999).  Among other things, New World crops allowed Chinese cultivators to continue to live as small independent farmers.  The new crops also fed a sustained population increase that still continues.

            A less pleasant borrowing was opium, long known but explosively expanding its tentacles in the 19^th century.  It was used moderately and reasonably before the 19^th century, but then the British began “dumping” it on China in order to get silver and to get a local foothold on trade.  David Bello has recently updated the history of this drug (Bello 2003 and references therein—a comprehensive bibliography).  The Qing Dynasty tried, not without success, to prohibit it, but the western powers—finding little else they could sell at a profit—forced it on China anyway.  By the end of China’s last dynasty, in 1911, millions of Chinese were addicted to this debilitating curse.  Pace Dikotter et al (2002) the result of the British pressure was a rise in demand and in addiction, and eventually a serious problem, as had plenty of opportunity to observe in Hong Kong in the 1960s.   The effect on food production was serious, as more and more laborers succumbed.  Attempts to eradicate opium in the early Communist years were quite successful, but, with the opening of the market after the 1970s, heroin and other hard drugs flooded in (Dikotter et al 2002—here usable to advantage).

            During Ming and Qing, vast numbers of Chinese migrated to the Nanyang—the “Southern Ocean,” i.e. southeast Asia, including the Philippines and Indonesia—to make a living.  This led to the emergence of many new food traditions, as Chinese adopted local foods and Southeast Asians picked up Chinese foodways.  It is to this that we owe such inventions as ketchup—a Hokkien word (ke tsiap, fermented fish sauce) borrowed into Bahasa Indonesia and eventually used to mean “soy sauce” (kecap in modern Bahasa), and then borrowed into English as “ketchup,” which eventually came to mean a tomato sauce.  Many other Hokkien words entered Indonesian: tauge for bean sprouts, tauhu for bean curd (“tofu”), and so on.  In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I saw a Dutch painting done around 1660 of a market stall in Java.  The stall-holder is Chinese, and he is selling not only Southeast Asian fruits such as coconuts, bananas, rambutans, langsats, durians, rose apples, and mangos, but also New World foods:  Pineapples and cashews. 

            The 20^th century is somewhat outside our purview here; observations on Chinese food seem contemporary enough to be logged in the following section.  However, see Anderson (1990), Bohr (1972), Li (2007) and Mallory (1926) for the history of famine and nutrition studies in the early 20^th century.  Population growth and environmental deterioration reached a collision point.  Famines were appalling.  People were reduced to eating husks, roots, bark, and grass, until all the trees died because people had eaten not only the leaves but also the bark.  A superbly detailed account of Chinese foodways in the 20^th century is provided by Simoons (1991). 

By the early 20^th century, however, China had a great deal of international help (Anderson 1990; Li 2007), which at least prevented cannibalism in most cases, though sale of children continued.  In the famines of the 1920s, death tolls were comparable to those of 1876-79 (Li 2007:304).  Even when it came, relief was slight; rations of 8 oz. of grain a day—i.e. 800 calories, 1/3 the needs of an adult—were given in 1921 (Li 2007:300).

By the 1930s, China, especially the north, was in the grip of chronic poverty, and people were reduced to near-starvation even in good times.  William Hinton (1966) reported people in the 1940s virtually hibernating in winter because there were not enough calories to allow any activity.  People simply lay down under wraps for days on end.  Maize had replaced more nourishing grains over much of China, with a resulting increase in malnutrition.  Life expectancy may have dropped to 25 in north China, with infant mortality running to 30 or 40% (Li 2007:315).  Modernization, trade, factory work, and other improvements stabilized matters, but the diet of the ordinary people remained one of coarse grain (as usual, Li reviews all data).  Banquets increased for the well-off, but very few were in that category.   The world depression of the 1930s did not help matters, and the Japanese invasion was utterly devastating.

The Communists after 1949 changed all this.  Resources were freed up by expropriating large estates and other methods.  Agricultural development came fast.  Reforestation was widespread; it usually failed but sometimes succeeded, saving large tracts of land.

Unfortunately, major policy errors—the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, “taking grain as the key link,” and so on—led to massive famines.  The Great Leap Forward in 1958-1961 caused what was almost certainly the greatest famine in all Chinese history.  Li (2007:359) cites an estimate of