Aboriginal Americans: cultures, histories, and issues of the First Nations of the New World

The entire Mississippian culture was annihilated by smallpox, and other illnesses, which preceded the Europeans into that part of the world and only got worse after they arrived. There was limited direct contact between the Mississippians and the Spaniards in the 1530s, but by that point smallpox was already on the scene, and was destroying the entire culture.

Combat with the Spanish expedition under de Soto, and the arrival of still more disease in the region hastened the decline of what remained of the Mississippians, who had already been devastated by pestilence. They wound up abandoning their urban centres and disintegrated into the numerous different tribal peoples whom Europeans are more familiar with.

The Little Ice Age is also a factor in this; don't get me wrong, but European disease is a major part of the problem. Trying to cope with climate change is one thing, but trying to cope with it while in the midst of a major epidemic is another.

edited 29th Mar '18 8:34:11 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Hey, Ambar. You mentioned Diamond' Guns, germs and steel , right?

What do you think of the book overall? A lot of friends of mine are very critical of it, mainly other South Americans.

The best consensus that I have found is that it is a influential book that does help to contextualize a lot of the reasons of the Conquest, but that it don't should be treated as a 100% definitive book and that it still does have a eurocentrist vision of the world.

Opinions?

Calling the book Eurocentrist is about the stupidest criticism you could level at it. The whole point of the book is to take the piss out of European claims to racial or cultural superiority by demonstrating that the only reason Europeans had technological or military superiority over others was an accident of geography.

The section on China is admittedly weak, which Diamond himself admits (and the problems there have since been addressed by other authors). But the rest of the book holds up. It asks the question of "why did some people have guns, germs, and steel while others did not?" and it answers it better than anyone else has since.

Interesting. Because there a good amount of Latinoamericans that DO dislike the book for not mentioning cases of Indigenous resistence. Personally, I haven't read the book (I should, I know) and of course, r/badhistory (one of the most academically inclined subreddit) do hate it to the extend of having a series of posts dedicated to tear down the book (they were also the ones that called the book Eurocentric, just not overtly racist)

I have to admit that reading Jared' description of thr Clash in Cajamarca did worry me a bit, and honestly... I felt a bit insulted (I'm peruvian, my whole family from my father side is clearly andean and my mother side is iffy, but is still pretty native).

I mean, it sounds iffy. Like if somehow knowing other cultures means that you have a mass advantage over the Inca

edited 29th Mar '18 11:00:31 AM by KazuyaProta

Again, that's silly. It's like complaining that a book on how the Final Solution operated doesn't talk enough about the Jews who got away. That's not the point of the book.

The whole point of Guns, Germs, and Steel was to ask "why were Europeans able to conquer so much of the world?" Before it came out, the standard answers to those questions were "they were racially superior," "they were culturally superior," or "they had guns, germs, and steel." The first two aren't acceptable answers for obvious reasons, while the latter isn't actually an answer—it focuses on what advantages Europeans had, but not on why they had them.

Diamond asked the question "why did Europeans have guns, germs, and steel?" and came to a conclusion that does not involve racial or cultural superiority on the part of Europeans. That's the whole purpose of the book and it revolutionized the field.

I was imagining something like that, the whole book is basically a story of Europe and the why they were able to defeat others culture.

The answer was that they were lucky and Europe might be actually be a geographical paradise for civilizations.

It's worth noting that a number of critical reviews of Diamond have harped on the fact that he doesn't claim Europeans are culturally inferior and set out to conquer the world because they're a bunch of barbarians.

Leaving aside the fact that most societies have produced empires, these criticisms too miss the point—it doesn't matter how conquest oriented your culture is if you don't have the tools to back it up. Diamond's work specifically sought to explain three things—European metallurgy, European firearms, and European pestilence—that enabled the European conquest; he wasn't out to examine why Europeans wanted to conquer people in the first place.

A lot of criticism of Diamond, in my experience, seems less based on the thesis itself and more in anger that he asked the question. I get why, for a lot of people, the discussion of "why did Europe take over the world" seems inherently bigoted. They dislike the fact that we ignore centuries of success by indigenous cultures and instead only look at how they got conquered and why. But the reality is that if we're going to have an explanation for why they got conquered, I'd rather the answer be "Europe got lucky geographically" rather than "Europeans are inherently superior to native peoples."

I was refering to Cahokia itself as an urban center, since thats what the question was about. More generally, you are correct that Native American populations collapsed as diseases of European origin spread much more rapidly than the European themselves did. But dense urban areas north of Central America were long gone by then, so far as I know.

It kinda does, which was what Diamond's point is. It's not the the Spainards were smarter or inherently better fighters than the Inca, it's about the breadth of the knowledge base. Pizzaro had (at least in theory) access to a history of military thought stretching back to Rome and Classical Greece, against such diverse opponents to other large military empires (Greeks or Romans vs Persians, or the various Roman internal struggles) to smaller, less organised groups, down to even the tribal level such as against various Celtic and Germanic groups and the Berbers in Roman North Africa. Or large nomadic groups like the Mongols in their western edge. This essentially gives him more experience without having to live through it himself, which no one can do. And while putting theory into practice is easier said than done, Pizzaro had that theory available to him.

Ultimately knowledge is cumulative and a literate society (in whole or in part) can accumulate more. And while the Inca did have their system of knotted strings and even if they were more than just a system of accounting, once again tying back into the central thesis of the book, Europeans earlier start meant that by the time of the Colombian Exchange, that head start had developed into a much broader and deeper base.

I have read the book and one part that I think is often overlooked is that in the sections dealing with China and the rest of East Asia vs Western Europe, is that Diamond himself says it's mostly speculative, especially compared to the parts dealing with Oceania, the Americas and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The thing is, Pizarro couldnt fucking read.

He wasnt a scholar soldier from the best schools of Spain, he was a thug. Is like saying that a white trash redneck had the advantage because he should know History.

edited 29th Mar '18 6:05:57 PM by KazuyaProta

But what about his aides? Or his teachers back home?

There were many of them?

Albeit, touche. I guess that admit that I am biased, given that my own teacher really dislike GGS (albeit, he is kind of a indigenist, so he certainly had a bias and a intention of showing the spanish as complete brutes)

Keep in mind that here on Peru, Pizarro is a Broken Base that tend to be extremely hated for indigenists and beloved/tolerated for white supremacists, I mean, Spanish nationalists.

edited 29th Mar '18 6:45:13 PM by KazuyaProta

Even if Pizarro himself can't read he's a soldier from a society that has access to several thousand years worth of written history; this influences the breadth of his available tactical thought even if he can't read it himself.

And again, the whole point of Diamond's work is that Pizarro does not have access to that because Europeans are somehow better than the Inca. They only had it because they got lucky in terms of the flora and fauna at home.

It'd be like an incredibly unbalanced strategy game where one player gets access to a ton of resources from the start.

edited 29th Mar '18 7:30:09 PM by M84

I understand. I like this thread, I really do.

Something that I wonder is about mythology, what if the Andeans themselves do things are using their own monster to do movies trying to WILLINGLY get the same attention that beings as the Wendigo do.

I say this because, well, there a "Jarjacha series" created in the Peruvian andes, which are Horror movies who are regarded as So Bad, It's Good for the youtube community (they were uploaded to it) which are movies made for people from the andes trying to use the native monster as its mascot.

All the actors are andean, the production is andean and there was certainly nobody forcing them to use its native monster (besides a anecdote of the director, saying that he wanted turn the Jarjacha into "the andean wendigo")

edited 29th Mar '18 8:40:22 PM by KazuyaProta

Linked this in the media thread because it was relevant, but it's relevant here as well. Abenaki storyteller tells the story of "The Woman and the Chenoo" one of the most famous stories involving that particular monster in his culture. I'd have embedded the link but I can't for the life of me figure out how to do it.

edited 29th Mar '18 9:30:13 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Here you go.

You really do need to read the book yourself so you can judge. Becasue Diamond at no point excuses their actions, he's only interested in explaining how they were able to do so, both from a technological and resource perspective, as well as why the Europeans were not subject to the same sort diseases that ravaged the populations of the Americas and Australia which had an at the time unappreciated effect on the local populations to resist.

Edit for typo.

edited 30th Mar '18 12:53:27 AM by KnightofLsama

Does he make any comparisons between the collapse of the Mediterranean Bronze Age civilizations and the end of the Aztecs and the Inca empires or makes mention of any internal factors that helped the Spaniards in their conquest?

The Late Bronze Age collapse isn't as well chronicled and climatological reasons have been proffered for that event as well.

One reason some people have a problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel is because they perceive it as supporting an environmental determinism interpretation of history. And the implication of that is individual choices don't matter, you can neither credit Europeans with being superior to anyone else, but you also can't blame them for being more immoral than anyone else either. Some people argue that that lets Europeans off the moral hook: anybody would have done what they did if the accidents of geography had gone another way.

I'm not certain that Diamond intended to propose an environmental determinist interpretation of history, or that he equates environmental determinism with a de-emphasis on individual agency, or that a de-emphasis of individual agency necessarily implies that the actions of people in the past can't be judged by modern moral criteria. But some people go there.

No comparisons to the Late Bronze Age collapses that I can remember off the top of my head, but as Septimus said, it's not well chronicled and the reasons for it are partially speculative. However the internal dissent among groups like the Aztecs and Inca are mentioned, though plagues of European origin are generally identified as making things worse than they would have been otherwise, if not direct causative factors (like smallpox deaths among the Inca ruling families throwing the line of succession into chaos and causing internal conflict prior to Pizzaro's arrival).

Speaking of morality, I feel that whenever we speak of that in regards of the Conquest, it tends to fall into a Black-and-White Morality perspective with the Spaniards as the worst and the natives as the full out good guys or viceversa instead of trying to judge both under the same lenses. For instance, the Incas were known to exile the peoples they conquered across the entire Tawantinsuyo and as far away from their homeland as they could while the Aztecs are already infamous for their human sacrifices; that of course doesn't excuse the Conquistadores from working natives to the death in the silver mines.

Yeah, I have read that desease was actually the main killing factor in the first moments of the discovery of America.

I do. I only bother to judge past Europeans, by modern standards, when people try to mythologize them to influence modern events. "The Great and Wonderful Founding Fathers intended in their infinite and prescient wisdom—" "Let's not worry about what a bunch of white wealthy slavers and duellists intended."

edited 1st Apr '18 1:31:38 AM by TheHandle

Was that to me or De Marquis. Because if it wasn't to me (and I'm having a hard time to see how it would be), you missed an arrow.