yet another example of why not to get your history from an anthropologist
Reposted from
Hilary Agro 🍄
As an anthropologist, if the only thing I ever did all day was remind people that before the privatization and commodification of land humans had way more free time and peace of mind, it would still not do a dent in how deep this myth has burrowed into people's colonized minds like a parasite
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https://linktr.ee/hilaryagro
I asked a PhD economist to explain how a gas engine worked. He couldn't even start but he drove a white SUV.
What is the psychology of knowledge compartmentalization and information hiding?
What is the Net Domestic Product, NDP?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/01/the-ancient-psychedelics-myth-people-tell-tourists-the-stories-they-think-are-interesting-for-them
Or a good analysis of the Gretchen plot in Faust
but then you have a pretty strong affinity between the rambling movement and socialism by the 1920s - hence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3H60NgsAzw)
Though I guess that amount is a known quantity and you don't need to go above it?
The best case against the current paradigm of work is that it prioritizes convenience and time saving *too much,* at the expense of the environment for instance.
https://youtu.be/hvk_XylEmLo?si=4qKrStL6fD0eKau-
As someone that also has an Anthropology degree, let me just say:
There's a lot of idiots in this discipline, and you're right to dismiss many of them outright
(Anthropologists are *great* on kinship and fictive kinshp, for instance, in ways that can bring a lot of insight to work elsewhere - like Chinese business culture!)
Though there's not exactly many Historians that will bother to look at Anthropology, so it definitely goes both ways
A lot of people in my geographic field are anthropologists though! They get at sources I don’t and are generally pretty helpful. What’s the deal with yak herders? They seem to know!
Anthropology is just neat because it has 2 basic assumptions:
1) humans are animals and not to be trusted
2) observers are also human, see rule 1
Largely because so much of it was cross listed with other stuff I was taking. Those classes were very fun!
Sociocultural Anthropology is where most of the "weird" comes from, but also some of the best writing about the human condition!
Its a pretty broad umbrella for a single Department
Just too much emphasis on the thinker, not enough on the thought.
Anthro Dept at UMass, where i got my B.A., was Archaeology-biased
Only had 1 semester of theory, 1 of ethics, then you had to do 1 of Archaeology, 1 of Bio-Anthro, and 1 of either Forensics or Linguistics, then the rest were your speciality (Sociocultural for me)
Both of those things are in conflict with material reality+a Conservative argument. Why are there so many Libertarians on BlueSky
Speculating about pre-historic hunter-gatherers peace of mind is something else entirely.
Crop failure and not being able to just leave if shit happens in an area are downsides to agriculture, but also I’d prefer not to drop to 3% of the current population or whatever the number is?
She's an idiot who just looks for justifications of her Marxist views is all. She also admits to projecting her beliefs onto people of the past.
That's not how the reality of it was. Hunter-gatherer societies you can kind of get by on that, but also like, anything pre-agriculture is a joke to compare to modern times.
She straight up admits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_Without_Abundance
-Constant backbreaking labour just to barely survive.
-Half my kids die.
-Every winter could easily be my last.
Pros:
-The constant backbreaking labour isn't being done for a "boss" as wage labour, thus is free time thus I have the highest quality of life in human history.
it sucks
Then the clowns who claim to be economists cannot figure out planned obsolescence in automobiles half-a-century after the Moon landing.
On chairs for children.
Is that football or basketball? 🤣
Leisurely subsistence is an illusion.
There is so much wrong here I am not even sure where to start.
To say nothing of course of subsistence farming/supplementary hunting. Hunting and fishing are so fucking time intensive. It takes fucking forever to gut, clean, and prepare a deer holy shit. And preservation, damn.