I just purchased the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (excellent!), which offers some insight into foragers’ reproductive capacities. Not only is the initial menstruation delayed until 16-18 because of diet & activity, but also the level of mobile activity performed by foraging womyn, as opposed to womyn’s sedentary home labor under agriculture, suppresses menstruation, similar to what is seen in certain female athletes. Womyn’s breastfeeding (which is longest in foraging societies) also suppresses menstruation, biologically. There’s also womyn’s control over their own bodies, herbal contraceptives & abortives, and infanticide (nomads can only care for or carry so many babies) that all help gatherer-hunters sustain their population levels, and I’m sure endemic illnesses do to as they lack antibiotics. I could probably find specific studies if you really need me to….

One possible scenario is that a traumatized, charismatic individual sadistically maneuvers a band/tribe towards destructive ends, to compensate for feeling a lack of power / inferiority complex or PTSD. Ex: You are the survivor of an endemic plague where the rest of your community has been slain & you were then taken in by a new band/tribe, but psychologically damaged. You realize that grains and dairy contain the equivalent of opiates, and use them to gain power as an administrator of irrigation practices, trade, or distribution of surplus in cultivation, the agro-addiction initiates….etc.

Or, new religious practices or local customs could’ve been in effect, also due to charismatic leaders. (Seems like charisma and climate change are always the 2 most dangerous problems….) Not saying this/these happened, or that it is even likely, just that it is another potential explanation (that I just made up) that could account for some societies’ transitions.

Anyways, all of the scenarios deal with domestication and emerging classism, marking the rise of separationist/hierarchical thinking and relations instead of holistic/anarchic relations. Any sustainable band/tribe would need customs/mechanisms in place to prevent this, such as religious practices that respect non-humyns as equals, thus preventing domestication/cultivation, or taboos against grain-consumption, or shunning/exiling/insulting/healing those who seek to gain power, etc.

This “Big Man” model (which sounds like a Marvin Harris hypothesis, so it doesn’t surprise me that Harris seems to be the main source) might have been worth mentioning as something that could conceivably have happened in certain places — but as THE model of the development of civilization it is like a tall tale that utterly misses.

And taking this story as THE path in which production surplus led to the the creation of hierarchy meant that no other path in which agriculture led to civilization is examined or even mentioned in this article — not even the simpler and more obvious paths.

I hope that some of these theses can be seriously re-examined before they are published in a book.

in French, you say “J’ai soif” or “J’ai faim” (->”I have thirst/hunger”),

This is actually one of the things in French that I have a hard time with. You also say “Je suis fatigue”. I suspect that this is because there isn’t a convention for turning a noun into an adjective as there is in English.

English also uses forms of “to have” and “to be” as auxiliary verbs for tense formation. Usually “have” for past tense “I have studied french” and “be” for future tenses “I will be studying french” and some tenses use both, “I have been studying french” I don’t actually know the English name for this but it is a tense that indicates past action continuing into the present.

–
JimFive

- in French, you say “J’ai soif” or “J’ai faim” (->”I have thirst/hunger”), while in English you d say “Iam thirsty/hungry”. I dont think the difference is that big, though.

- Nowadays you dont say “J’étudie”, but directly “Je suis étudiant” (-> “I am student”). Because studies have got longer and longer, so now its really an important stage of one’s life (and therefore you have an identity as a student… especially when it comes to train fares or movie tickets ). And you still say “Je suis médecin” or “Je suis architecte” (”I am physician/architect”). I’d guess not having an article in front of the noun denotes that we dont put so much emphasis on the social position as an identity, but I am not linguist…

- We have two auxiliary verbs : “être” et “avoir” (be/have). You use “être” for the passé composé of some verbs. Passé composé is a more or less intermediary tense in value between English preterit and present perfect, with the grammatical construct of the present perfect. These verbs are called “verbes d’état” (ie verbs that denote a state).

- On the other hand, we dont have the compound present (BE + ING), we use the simple present for the same value…

your understanding of French is correct, and the remark hits the spot Thanks for pointing it out

I didnt want to start a discussion on eprime, but if the arguments provided are not below this quality, I guess its alright. And honestly, I should have read more attentively the paper, because indeed it presents as many flaws itself as it highlights in e-prime… So point taken here Which doesnt answer my question about “sgeno”, or about what people think of Levy Bruhl by this neck of the woods…

RE: F-Prime

My limited understanding of French leads me to believe that at least one class of statement that E-Prime is concerned with doesn’t occur in French. In English, one might say “I am a student”, but in French one would say “J’etudie” not “Je suis un etudiant”. So, at least in that case, there is no need to modify French. (Please feel free to correct my impressions of French, or, indeed, my spelling and grammar)

RE: the objections document:
My off the cuff rebuttal
10. More choice is not necessarily better. See: “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz. Also note that the constraints required to write a Shakespearean sonnet lead to more inventiveness by the writer.

9. It seems that the author of the objections is using the term “general semantics” to mean more than is indicated. Isn’t any semantic practice part of “general semantics”.

8. Really, “He is a professor” and that is all, period, full stop, end of story?

7. Sometimes it is easier to dump out the container than to try and separate the salt from the sugar.

6. “The silly practice of E-prime continues” to what? A better formulation of the original sentence (”E-Prime is silly”) might be “I consider the practice of E-Prime silly.” And this displays the usefulness of E-Prime. In the first, silly is presented as an inherent basic fact of E-Prime, while in the second it is a judgement of the speaker and needs to be supported.

5,4,1. E-prime is a “rule of thumb” for eliminating the confusion and force of identity and predication statements. The fact that the goal is more subtle than E-prime takes in to account is irrelevant.

3,2 Pure speculation, “May have drawbacks” or it May not.

Overall: If I were a composition teacher I would probably give a couple of assignments in E-prime just to challenge my students. It is much easier to say “Do not use any form of the verb ‘to be’” than it is to say don’t use identity or predication.

Giuli, Jason, jhereg, jimfive, and all others whom I may be forgetting, when you are back from the wild… please dont forget my little lonely comment…

thanks, and what language is the word “sgeno” ?

Btw, sorry for not writing in e-prime, but I prefer general semantics…:-p see “10 objections to e-primitive”

http://learn-gs.org/library/etc/49-2-french.pdf

please dont discuss too much that last bit about e-prime, i dont want to start a troll here… :-p I am french anyway, so I would be more intereested in “F-prime” if there were such a thing… Our language has such a strong Latin & greek basis that it s even more categorical than English whihc is a lot more imaged. A simple example would be plant names : “Lapsana” becomes “Lampsane” for us and “Nipplewort” for you, “Marrubium” -> “Marrube” vs “Horseshoe”… But the Latin names are also imaged, like “Trifolium” which means “three-leaved” (clover in English, and trèfle in French)

Jason, in a brief post about “The Ten subsersive comandments” - at http://anthropik.com/2005/03/so-let-it-be-written/ -
you mention a paper you have written : “Asceticism as Political Resistance in Roman Judea, 6–66 CE,” [PDF].
In the post here, you also use one of your papers as reference :

Godesky, J.
2000. “War and Society.�? Published online: http://media.anthropik.com/pdf/godesky2000.pdf

Could you give a link to these papers ? It seems impossible to access them through the blog engine, in its current state of rusting…

You can also feel free to mail me the papers if you want - the system should have stored my email.

Subsidiary question : have you read Levy-Bruhl’s work ? Then what is your opinion about his work ? He is the father of modern French ethnography, if I am right, and wrote important essays about primitive thought.

No.

Farming will always persist in pockets. Foragers will only be allowed where soils are too poor to sustain farming.

Whenever soils rebuild, the nearest agricultural holdouts will colonise and use them up.