Collapse

Megan wonders why people in blighted and deteriorating cities like Detroit don’t switch to subsistence farming. I’m not sure how close we are to a situation where things are bad enough that a major lifestyle shift like that looks attractive, but it’s certainly something that could happen, and there are actually a lot of precedents for that kind of change.

There’s a common conception of history as a monotonic, teleological process leading from stone age hunter-gatherers through primitive agriculturalists and ancient urban civilizations, culminating in modern European-style urbanization with an extremely fine-grained division of labor. This conception, which owes much to the racist and Eurocentric ideologies of nineteenth-century historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, has been more or less completely discarded by contemporary scholars in those disciplines, but it persists among the lay public, if often only on the level of background assumptions. When other cultures are viewed through this prism, they are implicitly being assigned a place on a continuum from “savagery” to “civilization,” and those that differ significantly from modern European society are thought of as relics from a previous stage of history, preserving their “primitive” traditions and material culture virtually unchanged since the time when they were developed. Thus, the natives of the Americas were (and are) widely thought to have lived for millennia in an unchanging state of “tribalism” in small groups of hunter-gatherers, leaving little impact on the land (an idea which Charles Mann calls “Holmberg’s Mistake” after a prominent anthropologist). Similarly, in looking at ancient history there’s a strong tendency to take the reports of settled, urbanized people like the Greeks and Mesopotamians about their nomadic or otherwise “barbarian” neighbors at face value and see the nomads as crude, primitive people bent on destruction. It’s not all negative, of course, and the very same “primitive” peoples, both ancient and modern, are also extolled for their simple ways and closeness to nature as Noble Savages.

The truth, of course, is much more complex. History is not a simple progression from hunting to farming to cities to us. And when faced with severe ecological or political disaster, one of the common ways people cope is by shifting to a different mode of subsistence, even one that is “lower” on the supposed hierarchy of cultural development.

Take the ancient nomads, for example. Recent research on the ancient near east (the website for this upcoming conference looks like a good summary) has shown that it’s not really possible to make a clear dichotomy between “settled” and “nomadic” peoples, and that in many time periods the two lived in states of symbiosis, with the nomads and the farmers trading and interacting as different segments of a single society. At other times, especially in Mesopotamia where ecological disasters have been a recurring problem for thousands of years, farmers abandoned their villages and took up nomadic pastoralism instead. This is a quite reasonable response to either declining agricultural productivity or increased political instability, since nomadism both is less dependent on the fertility of land and makes it easier to move out of the way of clashing armies. In more stable times, nomads would often shift back to agriculture as the rewards from that lifestyle began to look better.

Another example is the Indians of what is now the southeastern US. In precolumbian times, they almost all belonged to what is called the Mississippian Culture, which featured (relatively) dense urban settlements focused on giant earthen mounds and a strongly hierarchical social structure headed by powerful priest-kings. This mode of society was widespread throughout the southeast and midwest, and even when a particularly powerful chiefdom (like Cahokia, the biggest of them all) collapsed politically, its people seem to have usually reconstituted themselves into smaller chiefdoms with the same basic organization rather than switching lifestyles.

All that changed, however, when the Europeans first showed up. In the southeast the first major contact was the expedition of Hernando de Soto in the 1530s and 1540s, which rampaged from Florida to the Mississippi in search of riches to conquer before giving up and returning to Mexico. While the de Soto expedition caused a great deal of destruction in the immediate areas visited by the Spaniards, its long-term effects were more indirect. In a process that was repeated throughout the New World upon contact with Europeans, natives began to die in droves from diseases inadvertantly introduced by the explorers. The losses in the Mississippian chiefdoms were immense, and many of them collapsed entirely. The survivors, facing an unprecendented demographic disaster, often changed their lifestyles completely to focus on hunting and small-scale agriculture in small villages loosely organized into fairly egalitarian political confederacies. When the next Europeans, French explorers in the seventeenth century, came through the southeast, they found it sparsely occupied by small groups, in sharp contrast to the reports from the de Soto expedition of a densely populated land of large villages and intensive agriculture. When the English founded the colony of Carolina in 1670, they encountered these tribes, among whom were the famous Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw, and assumed (of course) that they had been living a “savage” lifestyle based on hunting since the dawn of time, when that mode of society was actually a quite recent innovation. The Mississippian type of society survived only in the lower Mississippi valley (the modern state of Louisiana), where the French encountered tribes such as the Natchez, Tunica and Taensa living in hierarchical societies in villages with mounds and temples. These villages were of course much smaller than the precolumbian ones had been.

The point of these examples (and there are many more in the archaeological and ethnographic record) is that there’s nothing special about our current way of life. History hasn’t been a steady progression toward the ability to live like we do, and there’s no guarantee that this lifestyle will go on forever. A switch from dense urbanism to low-level subsistence farming is hardly the most radical thing that could happen, and it may indeed be one of the likelier (and easier) outcomes if things start to get really, really bad.