We are what we crop?

The first installment of a promised two-part coffee-table conversation from Jacob van Etten.

Some time ago, I promised to write something about if and how crops shape societies. ‘Environmental determinism’ and ‘technological determinism’ are not popular theories in the social sciences these days. ‘Crop determinism’ is in a way both these types of determinism in one, so doubly despicable, I guess.

But I like deterministic theories. For one thing, they make for good talk around the coffee table. Ellen Semple’s environmental determinism is classic and moreover produces grand prose:

Man is a product of the earth’s surface. This means not merely that he is a child of the earth, dust of her dust; but that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits, given him his problems of navigation or irrigation, and at the same time whispered hints for their solution. She has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul. On the mountains she has given him leg muscles of iron to climb the slope; along the coast she has left these weak and flabby, but given him instead vigorous development of chest and arm to handle his paddle or oar. In the river valley she attaches him to the fertile soil, circumscribes his ideas and ambitions by a dull round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the cramped horizon of his farm.

That’s by way of prelude to her famous thesis that monotheism is the product of desert landscapes.

Up on the wind-swept plateaus, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herd gives him leisure for contemplation, and the wide-ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes monotheism, God becomes one, unrivalled like the sand of the desert and the grass of the steppe, stretching on and on without break or change. Chewing over and over the cud of his simple belief as the one food of his unfed mind, his faith becomes fanaticism; his big spacial ideas, born of that ceaseless regular wandering, outgrow the land that bred them and bear their legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests.

Ellen Semple was a geographer who worked in the first half of the 20th century. Now, for much of the rest of that century geographers have been busy rebuking such coffee-table theorizing. Carl Sauer, one of the founding fathers of modern geography, who wrote a great deal about agriculture, said that cultures and environments influence each other. It is all about how we learn about our environment and acquire the skills to make the earth a suitable habitat for ourselves. Different cultures do that in different ways, independent of the environment they live in.

That is a good point, of course, but there may be certain general tendencies in human adaptation to the environment — parallel evolution, so to say. At least, one-cause theories open our eyes to certain patterns we hadn’t noticed before and which demand an explanation. Personally, I don’t believe that monotheism has much to do with deserts or horizons. But another of my favourite theories in this category is perhaps more plausible.

Slicher van Bath, a Dutch historian, argued that democracy has to do with wet soils. ((B.H. Slicher van Bath. 1948. Boerenvrijheid (Groningen/Batavia), inaugural lecture at the University of Groningen.)) The argument goes like this. On wet soils in Europe (peat soils in the Netherlands, the UK and elsewhere, Swiss valleys), there are few agricultural alternatives to livestock. In times of need, livestock farmers sell a cow or a sheep. The following year, new animals are born, so they can recover from the loss. In this way, farmers retain their independence and remain on an equal footing. But if you are a crop farmer, you may, by contrast, be forced to sell some land. Land, unlike livestock, doesn’t reproduce. Some farmers will accumulate a lot of land and start to dominate. A less democratic society is born.

Livestock countries in Europe are among the most democratic ones, so this makes sense, it seems to me. Perhaps some jobless mapper could further test it by doing a nice overlay map of soil wetness and democracy indices.

Mountain valleys also shape very particular kinds of societies. Another of my favourites is an article by Robert Rhoades and Stephen Thompson about the remarkable parallels between ‘adaptive strategies’ in mountains. ((R.E. Rhoades & S.I. Thompson. 1975. Adaptive strategies in alpine environments: beyond ecological particularism. American Ethnologist X, 535-551.)) Strong communal decision-making and fragmented landholdings are found in the Andes, the Himalayas, as well as in the Alps. Also, both the Himalayas and the Alps have traditionally drained off their ‘surplus’ males as mercenaries. I wonder: what is the Andean variant of the fierce Gurkhas and the quaint Swiss guards?

And what about crops then, you ask? Stay tuned for Part Two…