Franz Boas is often called “the Father of American Anthropology.” Boas is perhaps best known for championing the idea of cultural relativism, and soundly trouncing the previous notions that all societies existed along the same, one-dimensional progression that ultimately led to the pinnacle of existence represented by the white, Victorian Englishman. Another influential early anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, argued that part of this unilineal progression was the transition from primordial matrilineal succession, to patrilineal. The Pacific Northwest Coast was home to the most advanced forager societies ever encountered, including the matrilineal Tsimshian and Tlingit along the northern coasts of British Columbia, and the patrilineal Nootka and the Salish to the south. Between the two, near Vancouver Island, Boas found subjects to problematize Morgan’s simplistic succession: the Kwakwaka’wakw–meaning, “speakers of the Kwak’wala language–more commonly known as the Kwakiutl, after the Kwakwaka’wakw at Fort Rupert. Europeans erroneously applied the only slightly more pronounceable local term “Kwakiutl” to the entire people. Boas’ study of the Kwakiutl became an anthropological classic, and the Kwakiutl became a favorite subject of anthropological study, and a mainstay of introductory cultural anthropology textbooks for millions of college students.

People are quantifiable in terms of energy. A person intakes energy in the form of food. This chemical energy is turned into heat energy. The brain uses electrical energy to control numerous bodily functions. The vocal cords use energy to vibrate, creating sound energy. This energy transfers through a medium, typically air, and reaches another person. That person absorbs this energy through their ear, which translates it into electrical energy to be sent to the brain. Everything a human is and does is a function of energy. As such, it is not a large stretch to say that human societies are characterized the same way: by the throughput of energy. It is the ways this energy is obtained, the uses it is put towards, and the amount of energy involved that determines the various features of a given society.

So, at this point, I think we’ve visited and revisited the philosophical and academic grounds for primitivism enough that most of you who remain are wondering, “now what?” Learning primitive skills is a matter of gaining self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is the key to all freedom. You can never be free so long as you are dependent on someone else, and whatever it is you do depend on is what your fate is staked to. If you are dependent on civilization, then the end of that civilization is your own doom, as well. If you depend on the natural world, then you will only die off with the end of all other multicellular life on the planet. Self-sufficiency–primitive skills–is always the key to freedom, but in a time of collapse such as ours, it’s also the key to survival.

We recently had a rousing discussion about Peak Oil and collapse, centering around John Michael Greer’s “The Long Road Down,” and the idea that the gradual extinction of fossil fuels would lead to a long collapse–”not with a bang, but a whimper.” In thesis #18, we discussed that Peak Oil may cause collapse, if its depletion rate was very high. Stuart Staniford at The Oil Drum guessed the threshold of collapse to be around 11%, and I have no reason to argue that. But, the latest news from Kuwait provides a better guess of what that depletion rate might be.

I’ve been thinking of getting a new car, and I keep wondering if perhaps it’s time to get a diesel. Biodiesel can cost cents on the gallon to produce, but diesel cars also often get close to 50 miles to the gallon. For me, making my fuel from vegetable oil hauled from a greasy spoon, this could be a really great thing. Of course, blown to the scale of a full society, and the result may not be so pretty–just ask Brazil. They switched over to ethanol produced from sugar cane on a society-wide basis in the 1980s. The effect of the air quality in the cities was tremendously positive; but it was disastrously negative in the rural areas, since all those sugar cane fields needed to be burned at a certain point in the growing season. Deforestation grew from those larger sugar cane fields, growing the nation’s primary fuel. Small farms and varied agriculture was replaced with vast fields of sugar cane. A new class of seasonal workers was created, and it proved a disaster for the precious biodiversity of Brazil–and its crucial rain forests.

WHEW!

Thirty Theses in seven months, but I’ve finally managed to put down a basic statement of my beliefs that I can easily point to, rather than argue the same points over and over again. Yes, I’ve allowed myself the minor conceit of comparison to Martin Luther, though not so much for my personal self-esteem (I actually think terribly little of myself) as for “good luck.” Thesis #15–the mid-way point–was published on October 31st, the day on which, according to legend, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church as an open invitation to debate them. Today, I’ve published Thesis #30–the final one–on the 485th anniversary of Luther’s defense at the Diet of Worms, where he said to pope and emperor, “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. G-d help me.” Inspiring myths–but neither one seems to have a shred of historical truth to them. Fitting, then, to frame our examination of civilization’s myths about history as a story of “progress” amongst such auspicious dates, no?

In his Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, while arguing for the re-introduction of slavery, Thomas Carlyle played on Nietzsche’s term, “the gay science,” and gave us the derogatory title of economics: “the dismal science.” Caryle used that same term when writing about Malthus’ theories, calling them, “Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventative check and the denial of the preventative check.” In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter worried that his idea of complexity subject to diminishing marginal returns would make archaeology economics’ heir to the title. The idea that we are not in control of our own destiny is depressing to us. We rebel against determinism not because we can prove it is untrue, but because it frightens us to think of ourselves as mere cogs in a machine beyond our power. These theses may seem dismal in their predictions of inevitable collapse and a future created by deterministic, materialistic forces beyond our control. They should not be. This is, as another translation of Nietzsche’s original phrase would read, a “life-enhancing knowledge.” The greater moral of this story is not that our lives are bound by diminishing returns, but that the future will be what we make of it.

No matter what topic you’re researching, the Internet is guaranteed to supply you with a goldmine of completely unsupported and inaccurate information on the subject. If wedding traditions are any different from other subjects in this regard, it’s only because the amount of bad information increases - and then goes on to grace the pages of infinite, expensive, well-packaged fluff books. The origin of the wedding ring in particular is frequently explained - sometimes seriously, sometimes as a joke - as a remnant of barbaric primitive times, in which horny cavemen kidnapped helpless, unsuspecting maidens and tied their feet together so they couldn’t escape. The story usually continues to claim something along the lines of the woman’s feet first being bound together by vine, then by wood, then by iron, then by bronze, then by silver, then by gold. And of course, by that time, civilization has become so advanced and pro-woman (unlike those violent, anti-feminist foragers) that the shackles have now become delicate gold rings.

Previous collapses often set the scene for another “rise” to civilization. The fall of Rome shapes the Western imagination’s idea of collapse, with the descent into the barbarism of the Dark Ages, the long gestation of the Middle Ages, and the final rebirth of “civilization” in the Renaissance. However, as Greer points out in “How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse,” [PDF] the Western Roman Empire suffered a maintenance crisis, not a catabolic collapse. So the question remains, is this a collapse, or the collapse? Are we merely facing a momentary downturn in a new sine wave of complexity, or does this collapse represent the end of civilization once and for all?

As beneficial as collapse may ultimately prove to be for the state of humanity (see thesis #27), the process itself will likely be horrific. Ultimately, the only sustainable level of complexity is the stone age (though this allows a great deal more complexity still than the popular imagination permits, as we discussed in theses #22-24). But complexity is a function of energy; complexity allows more energy to pass through a society. Most of that energy takes the form first of food, and then, of people (see thesis #4). In short, we face a severe problem of overshoot–and the drop in our carrying capacity to its sustainable level will mean the die-off of some 90% or more of the current population.