The Habitats of History

Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Scholars of history have conceived of a great many schemes for dividing human societies and civilisations into groups, ranging from such basic identifiers as time and place - where they are/were in the world, the time in which they flourished – to linguistic and ethnic groupings to social characteristics such as kinship customs or political organisations. In Civilizations, Felipe Fernández-Armesto has chosen instead to organise this overview of many of the world’s cultures, past and present, according to the nature of the physical environment in which they developed. In the process, broad themes about how humans adapt, modify, or adapt to specific kinds of environments emerge and allow us to look at the history of humans on this planet in new and thought-provoking ways.

The result of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's work is a series of startling and illuminating juxtapositions - the maritime civilizations of the Venetians and the Polynesians; the mountain cultures of Tibet and Papua New Guinea; the lifestyles of the English and the Iroquois. Societies that flourished in the Arctic, the Rain Forest and the Desert are re-evaluated alongside those of the ancient river-valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, where civilization is conventionally supposed to have started. In this book the search for civilization leads not to Imperial Rome, Enlightenment Paris and Renaissance Florence but rather to the Sahara of the Dawada people, the Aleut Islands of the icy northern Pacific, and the Indian Ocean where the Oran Laut 'boat people'. (source)

Readers of Jared diamond’s work will find some similarities between the approaches of the two authors, although Fernández-Armesto focuses more on the physical geography of environments while Diamond is looking more at ecologies and resources set. Both scholars, however, make us think about our species’ past in terms of its interaction with the world around it, rather than as an isolated force moving though the world, and in today’s world, where our interactions with the world may very well put an end to the future of our species, that’s an important paradigm shift.

Fernández-Armesto is more than an environmental historian, though – he is also a raconteur, and his discussions of each of the civilisations included in this volume contain fascinating bits of information about the people, places and times, small exemplars of the cultures he explores that make even those societies most separated in time and space from the modern developed nations his readers most likely inhabit seem vivid and immediate.

From my point of view, Fernández-Armesto’s argument becomes problematic when he goes beyond categorising civilisations by their physical environments and seems to place greater value on those civilisations that have more completely altered their environments to meet the needs and preferences of humans:

Civilization makes its own habitat. It is civilized in direct proportion to its distance, its difference from the unmodified natural environment.

The degree of civilisation thus becomes a measure of how much of a mark humanity has made on the environment. At the same time, the author is clearly aware that the transformation of environments can lead to catastrophes, resulting in a tension between his admiration for the most transformative of civilisations and the unavoidable realisation that without sustainability, transformation is ultimately a dead end.

Sweet and Sour

Chicken with Plums, by Marjane Satrapi

In her latest graphic novel, Satarpi, the author of Persepolis, the two-part personal memoir of a young Iranian girl growing up during the Revolution, and Embroideries, a look at family life and relationships though the eyes of the women of Satrapi’s family, turns her vision to the life – and death – of her great-uncle, musician Nasser Ali Khan.

Chicken with Plums is a meditation on the importance of art and love, set within the story of an artist who has lost and cannot replace the instrument that allowed him to express himself with passion, who carries within him an earlier loss of a love that gave him a passion to express. Without his instrument, Khan is overwhelmed with a sense of futility, has no desire to live any longer, and decides not to eat or drink again. Chicken with Plums is the story of what happens, among his family and friends, and in his own heart and mind, during the eight days it takes for him to die. Khan’s memories, fantasies and visions and the thoughts and actions of those around him, unravel the personal history of the artist that has led him to such a decision and illuminate the culture that has helped to shape his life and choices and the effect that the political and social changes in Iran over the first half of the 20th century have had on that culture.

Dark material, certainly, but at the same time full of life and celebration of the pleasures of life, and very powerful in its impact. It reminds us that, like the author's favourite family dish that serves as the book's title, there is no sweet without the sour, nor sour without the sweet.

The Fantasies of My Youth

The Grey Mane of Morning, by Joy Chant.

A long time ago, when I was still in my teens, most publishers thought that, despite the overwhelming success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, fantasy was primarily for kids and readers of pulp magazines. Sword and sorcery and supernatural fantasy had been around for a while – from writers such as Lovecraft, Howard, Bloch, Smith, Moore and Leiber – but the flowering of adult fantasy in the 1800s (MacDonald, Mirlees, Morris, Dunsany et. al.) was mostly forgotten, and the genre was, with its other speculative fiction cousins, science fiction and horror, in disrepute. There was always fantasy being written and published, of course, but not a lot of it.

Then along came a brilliant editor named Lin Carter (himself a fantasy author), who launched one of the more influential publishing imprints in the history of speculative fiction: the Ballantine Adult fantasy series, which during its five-year existence reprinted a great many of the classics of adult fantasy, and introduced a few new authors who would help lead the great rebirth of adult fantasy.

One of those authors was Joy Chant. While The Grey Mane of Morning was not part of the Ballantine series (it was published in 1977), it is set in the same world as her first published novel, Red Moon and Black Mountain, which was printed by Ballantine in 1971.

OK, so that’s the history. I became a devoted reader of fantasy during this rapid proliferation of old and new material of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Joy Chant was one of the writers who took me there.

The Grey Mane of Morning is a story of a nomadic and technologically unsophisticated people living under the influence of a city-dwelling people who see them as a useful source of readily available luxury goods and crafts (furs, animal horns, and so on) and slave labour, and the young man whose actions provoke their emergence from a state of servitude and the beginning of their transformation into a powerful civilisation.

It’s the first of Chant’s books that I’ve been able to locate and re-read, and I am very glad that I was able to do so. I’m looking forward to finding and re-reading her two other books set in the same world, Red Moon and Black Mountain and When Voiha Wakes, and also her book The High Kings, a retelling of Celtic myths and Arthurian legends.

Anarchic Visions

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy

Not too long ago, I found myself in the position of trying to describe to a friend some of the ways in which a society based on anarchist philosophy might operate, and in the process of trying to make my own visions of an anarchist’s utopia more concrete, I picked up and re-read the two books on my shelves in which someone else had already done this, and probably far better than I ever could.

LeGuin’s The Dispossessed tells the story of a scientist, Shevek, raised on Anarres, a world settled by the followers of a political philosopher from Anarres’ sister world Urras, who finds himself questioning and rejecting the philosophy of the world in which he grew up. He travels to Urras, thinking to find a better way of life, only to realise how strongly his values have been influenced by the culture of his birth. Ultimately, he decides that the flaws in the culture and philosophy of Anarres are easier to live with – and possible change – than the flaw he finds in the philosophies of Urras.

Ursula Le Guin discusses her novel in an introduction written for “The Day Before the Revolution,” a short story written in memoriam to the anarchist, Paul Goodman:

My novel 'The Dispossessed' is about a small world full of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn't get into the action - except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right, but anarchism as pre- figured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian state (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

What is interesting about LeGuin’s exploration of an anarchist utopia is that she allows it to be flawed. No society created by humans will ever truly reach the perfection of a utopia, because humans themselves are not perfect beings. LeGuin, however, shows the reader a flawed anarchist state and a flawed authoritarian state and asks: which is easier to live in, easier to change and improve without bloodshed, provides a better life for more of its citizens?

Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time also presents an anarchist state and an authoritarian state for the reader to consider, although the former is more of a utopia and the latter more of a dystopia than in LeGuin’s book. Piercy’s protagonist, Connie Ramos, is an American Latina living on welfare, who has a “bad history” of standing up for herself and other women against the oppression and violence of men, and is ultimately incarcerated in a mental hospital where she is chosen to be a subject for experimental "mind-control" research. She is also a Receptive, someone who can serve as an focal point for a kind of mental time-traveller and, with the assistance of that traveller, move forward to see the future herself. Or she is mad, and hallucinating everything that she experiences in her encounters with the time-traveller Luciente and the future she sees and commits herself to helping to bring into being in her own time.

Luciente’s future is, like Shevek’s Anarres, a society based on basic anarchist principles, although it is more consciously a feminist utopia as well. Both books explore ways of organising society and making collective decisions about that society without the creation of hierarchical, authoritarian structures, of valuing co-operation and mutual assistance, of sharing labour and eliminating class, and of changing the nature of the family, interpersonal relationships and gender roles.

Both are strong and important visions of what an anarchist society might be like. As such, they are also an inspiration and an invitation for further consideration of how life can be lived without social or political oppression of any group of human beings by any other.