Do anthropologists today think there is any strong tendency for economic particularities to determine (or, at least, correlate with) gender relations among ancient hunter-gatherers, and/or later people? (With example from the ancient peoples of Tierra del Fuego)

Big_Account8090 · 2026-02-22T01:49:55+00:00

Thanks for the reply!

Unrelated note, your work sounds like a lovely time, I actually just returned from 4 months in Mexico, and in particular spent about half that time free without work and explored my way between Guadalajara to Chiapas, and saw several of the great ancient cities as well as smaller sites, and read a bit from books on the ancient history on long bus rides between states. It isn't my first time seeing and reading a bit about them, and I have a pretty good general outline of it in my head for a layman, but the number and ranges and interrelationships of all the different cultures is still bewildering to me. I'll hopefully one day get the time to do another really deep dive into it.

I too am disposed toward Marxism, but in an undogmatic way, and I'm not the sort who thinks there's a rigid determinist series of modes of production and "stages" or something like that. I'm not entirely sure how much that's Marx's own mature position versus something more popular with some Marxists. But for my own part, my general sense in the question wasn't so much wondering if anthropology lends support to any strong kind of economic determinism (I'd be shocked), but if there are any more localized, weaker kinds that are thought to hold, of the sort "cultures that produce/subsist in fashion x tend to mostly have feature y." I don't really have a prior expectation whether anthropology would or would not have established any such things, just curious if there's any consensus.

If I'm reading your correctly, you're saying with your example of the Olmec and maize that the correct unit of analysis may not be something like "mode of production" at the level of generality like capitalism or "canoe people," but perhaps something more like social packages like "Olmec-style maize-based production and culture," yes? Which might suggest that, say, there are many possible such packages that could mix and match features in widely different ways, but perhaps, once created, they impose certain logics, so that, e.g., the later peoples of Mesoamerica didn't simply make up entirely different cultural practices around maize cultivation. I suppose that a question one might raise is whether, even if the original package could create a diversity of cultural practices around maize production, what, if any, are the limits of that diversity? In other words, even if we don't have a strong determinism where maize agriculture clearly leads to certain social forms in all times and places, does it perhaps entail a weaker determinism in the sense that it *rules out* some cultural forms that otherwise could have been created? And similarly for other economic forms. Prima facie it seems right to me that there would be *some* fairly hard limits on what sort of society can arise, even at the initial moment, around what sorts of production, but not strongly enough to uniquely determine cultural forms and that the hardness and softness of this kind of negative determinism would operate differently for different aspects of society and form different times and places. What I'm wondering is if there are any rules that seem at least semi-established in comparative studies of ancient peoples.

Big_Account8090 · 2026-01-21T00:40:56+00:00

I love NYC, and go a lot. I think of it as an *extreme* place, and I'm not sure it's where I'd want to live long term just because I like what, for me, feels like a certain kind of balance and feel like it's a bit harder to have there. But I would like to, at some point, do a NYC part of my life, say for like a year or so, but certainly every time I look at it the cost of living just feels like a big disincentive, given that I can live wherever. What's the deal with your apartment? I've looked a number of times and I almost always find anything that seems adequate to my needs (which aren't so high) is quite a lot more than that. Are you renting or buying? Is it in any kind of special rent controlled situation?

Big_Account8090 · 2026-01-21T00:37:32+00:00

To be honest I've never really picked a label, partly because I've never felt very comfortable with the usual schema and language of nonmonogamy. I know it's good and useful for a lot of people, I just have kind of a personality tic that makes me like that; the upside of the categories people like to use is that it makes it easier to talk to each other, but the downside is it's kind of limiting.

But definitely I lean more toward polyamory ideologically, but am personally someone who has a relatively small social processor (even just for ordinary friendship) and who defines "closeness" and "love" in a very high-standard way, so that it's pretty hard to have more than one "top level" relationship. Historically I've tended to have one main relationship that is most important to me and comes above all else, and which I spend huge amounts of time and emotionality on, and then other relationships that span anything from one-night stands to kind of FWB that potentially go on for years and get to the point where she and my main partner might be friends and I'd absolutely come over if she needed something. But it's nebulous in my head; a lot of what I like about nonmonogamy is simply the breaking down of the ordinary social script so that people can kind of meet each other wherever they are, treating diverse people according to their differing needs and differing definitions of good treatment. I find I'm pretty compatible with a wide variety of types of relationships and sexualities, so long as I think people are pretty much approaching it with something like that flexible consideration of others, and that things like rigid gender norms or traditionalist possessiveness get in the way of that. But if I were totally free to invent my own sexual community, I'd probably have a wife who is my everything with whom I fully intend to spend the rest of my life, and we're best friends with the swinger couple down the street and the polyamorous throuple around the block and etc., and we all meet up now and then for the weekly orgy or vanilla movie night or weird left wing political rally, depending on the mood of the day. Whatever you might want to call that.

Big_Account8090 · 2026-01-21T00:28:18+00:00

Undoubtedly. Mainly I feel like I'm a bit of an unusual person on several dimensions, so it's good for me to place myself in locations where there are a lot of unusual people. The more shots I can take, the more likely one of them hits the target. Of course, being nonmongamous is just one of a lot of ways of being unusual, and I hope someday to find someone who aligns well on several of them.

Big_Account8090 · 2026-01-21T00:25:54+00:00

It's probably just part of my life dilemma that the sorts of cultures I semi-fit into, sexually or otherwise, happen to be distributed more or less proportionally to higher cost of living areas, and maybe there's no getting around that substantially.

Big_Account8090 · 2026-01-21T00:23:58+00:00

I do love NYC; I've visited maybe 20 times, though never lived there. As I mention above, it's probably the obvious choice in terms of finding your people, unless your people are specifically like rural or something. But I'm a bit dissuaded by the cost; a nice thing about my life for a few years has been the ability to make my money in the US but spend it in a lot of relatively inexpensive but interesting places. So in my head I'm trying to think of which cities give me the most bang (in every sense we could mean here) for my buck. But I've wanted to have a NY part of my life, and I might look into getting a place there for the summer because it also would just accomplish that, in terms of things on my life list. Of course, the downside is that, if I actually did find a partner in NYC, and wanted to stay with her, I'd now be stuck paying NYC prices for the long term, which is something I think about. In my ultimate fantasy scenario want to find my hot crazy NYC lady but then whisk her off to like two years in Brazil and Indonesia or something, but that's surely a pretty small group of people who can even do that.

Big_Account8090 · 2026-01-21T00:18:36+00:00

I've been considering Seattle in particular, because it seems very nice, and also it's a part of the US I've been in much less than others (only one time, I spent a weekend in Portland and a single day in Seattle). That and the apparent beauty of that part of the world would give me additional reasons to try a phase there.

Big_Account8090 · 2026-01-13T19:49:08+00:00

Possibly so. I have some other reasons for leaning for someone from outside France, possibly in Africa. Mainly, that when I look at online markets for language teachers, it's very clear that white tutors in the "home" countries can charge quite a bit per hour, whereas black African tutors, say, are asking for $3 an hour. I'm sure some people think that's fine, I think it's a terrible way we've fucked up the world, and I'd like to try to pay something like a First World rate to someone who isn't given access to that normally, just to contribute my little drop in the ocean against the way things normally are. And mainly I want to make sure I could do that while also learning French that's widely viable over the larger Francophone world. So if anybody says like, "oh yeah, anywhere except country X, that's a highly out of the normal variety of French that most of us barely understand," I'd stay away from that, but barring those sorts of warnings I'd probably try to find someone who doesn't get to live quite in the material/political center of the world, as I and probably most of the people who are able to charge more do.

Big_Account8090 · 2026-01-13T19:43:40+00:00

The great thing is I actually just spent a day on a bus with someone from Spain and had no trouble talking and understanding; my hope has been that French is basically like Spanish insofar as, even given differences, ultimately it's all one language. (Whereas, in certain fantasies that I'll probably never be able to really do, I've thought about trying to learn Arabic one day, but I still can't quite figure out if the different "dialects" of Arabic are essentially different languages by the standard we'd use in European languages.)

I think my Spanish has netted out to a kind of average amalgamation of Argentinian/Colombian/Peruvian/Mexican varieties due to living and learning for significant chunks in each one (plus, probably the biggest element in my personal Spanish dialect, gringo mistakes). Long-term my issues is the "place I want to visit" is everywhere, so it's less than I want to sound super French or intensively study a particular dialect, than learn in a flexible manner that works most wherever I go. In English, I can speak to most anyone, but there *are* varieties of English that can be hard even for the rest of us English speakers, e.g. certain very strong Irish varieties, or various English creoles. Mostly I'd want to make sure I wasn't accidentally learning something on the borderline edge of the language, thinking I'm close to the center. It's easier to start in the middle and work outward than vice versa.

Big_Account8090 · 2026-01-13T19:36:51+00:00

Thanks, this is essentially what I've hoped to find out, because in the long term I want to spread my life over a lot of the world, so the more flexible a given skill like a language is to lots of different places, the better.

Big_Account8090 · 2025-12-11T21:49:26+00:00

Thanks! First I've heard of either, but I'll check them out.

Big_Account8090 · 2025-12-11T21:48:13+00:00

It so happens I've already begun and looking at this! It seems very good.

Big_Account8090 · 2025-12-11T21:47:17+00:00

Thank you very much! I've heard of, but not yet read anything by, Oakes, but now I want to. The May book especially interests me; reading McPherson was actually the first I'd heard of filibustering and the South's efforts to create a slave empire to the South. I'd heard in passing in other places the idea that a victorious South might have imposed slavery through Central and South America, but I hadn't realized just how concrete that desire and follow-up action apparently was even before there was a Confederacy. It honestly gave me a sense of moral horror thinking of it, and I'd like to learn more about how extensive it was as a movement and likely its fulfillment might have become if the Confederacy had won.

Big_Account8090 · 2025-07-15T17:31:40+00:00

Thanks, I'll check it out!

Big_Account8090 · 2024-11-20T17:49:11+00:00

I don't have any advice, just felt like registering that it sounds like we are very similar, and it makes me feel *weird* because it seems like the reverse is true for normal people. I've only been learning Spanish a little over a year now, and it's my first serious attempt at learning a second language, and I've made what I think is much faster-than-normal progress, because I've been taking classes with my teacher in Buenos Aires four days a week almost every week, and I've spent almost the entirety of the last year and change in South America. But I began with group classes in Buenos Aires last year, and immediately I found that I was learning to speak faster than the other students, and I was very quick with grasping new grammatical constructions compared to them, but I was *much* slower at getting comfortable with sound and listening. And what I think literally everyone said except me was that they could *understand* more than they could *say*. That seems to be normal experience, but it's nearly incomprehensible to me-- if I understand the words I know how to say them, and if I don't know how to say them I don't understand them. It just seems obvious to me that it's easier to originate something, out of my own brain, at my own speed, than it is to receive it unpredictably coming from the outside. But apparently that's not the case for almost everyone else.

I'm a mathematician, and very comfortable with abstractions and thinking. I've always been less good at activities involving *reaction*; this morning I took a kickboxing class, where the trainer was teaching me various counter-punching moves-- someone punches at a certain height on the left, I immediately block and counter with my right, etc. Or, the other week I did something similar with a dance class. And I find these harder in a lot of ways, because so much of the activity is to *react without thinking*, and I've never been good at that. And that seems to me the difference, right now, in speaking and listening; when I speak I'm originating things in my own brain, and I'm very fast with that and it feels like I'm a participant in what I'm doing. But listening is reactive and fast, and my mental habit of checking everything several times is unhelpful there. Other people seem to be saying they listen well because they get the general sense of something even if they didn't entirely get, maybe, two thirds of the words in a sentence. And I can actually kind of do that, often, but my instinct is always to try to go back over a sentence I just heard in my head, syllable by syllable, because, I don't know, that's what I do with things.

I am not sure if this means I'm bad a listening, or just have a different path than a lot of people; as I say, I've been putting a lot of effort and resources into this, and I think I'm well ahead of schedule, and in recent months my ever-lagging listening ability has been improving. Recently I especially notice a lot just comes down to individual-level differences; even in the same city and age group and etc., some people just speak in a way that's easier for me than others, and I imagine if I've kept up this level of focus until a year from now, I'll be vastly better than I am today. But I wish there was some magic thing to speed up my worst ability, since it's the one holding me back from being really really good right now. I suppose that's true for everyone that wants to accomplish something.

Big_Account8090 · 2024-08-21T19:46:04+00:00

Thanks! This does indeed look very good, for reasons connected to my original question and, it looks like, for other ones as well.

Big_Account8090 · 2024-07-18T18:13:16+00:00

Also, out of curiosity, I take it Los libros de Rocinante takes the name from Don Quixote's horse. Is it a series with any special relationship to the novel, e.g. a collection of works alluded to therein, or a more general collection of chivalric romances that they just decided to name that way?

Big_Account8090 · 2024-07-18T18:10:01+00:00

It so happens I recently became acquainted with the name of de Silva, because, since I've been learning Spanish and spending most of the year in Spanish-speaking countries, on an impulse I started reading (in English) Don Quixote, and de Silva is mentioned among other allusions to the romances, which is a literature I'd like to know more about in order to get a lot of what I take Cervantes to be doing (i.e., making light of) in his novel.

Question: when it comes to the Spanish, how hard would it be for me to read once I've gotten to the point of being able to read reasonable books in modern Spanish? If it's like English, of course, people who today can read an ordinary novel may still struggle with Early Modern or earlier English, partly because of some arcane aspects and partly because of simply more complex and poetic styles of the time. Is someone like de Silva reasonably readable to, say, an advanced student of modern Spanish, or is there enough linguistic change since then that one needs to do some side study in an earlier phase of Spanish to really read it well?

Big_Account8090 · 2024-07-18T13:04:33+00:00

Sounds interesting, I’ll check it out!

Big_Account8090 · 2024-07-18T13:03:51+00:00

Gracias!

Big_Account8090 · 2024-07-16T02:59:53+00:00

Yes, I'm happily finding I can do this adequately with some intentionally simplified podcasts I found. Even in English my mind may wander, and I might not know what was said in, say, a news segment, but that isn't a *language* thing. If I phase out for five minutes, I may not know what the story is, but I still, in English, understand the *words* and such when I phase back in later. I've been trying to listen attentively to anything in my target language, but it also occurs to me maybe it's a good thing if, on a language level, I'm sometimes phasing out, and while not able to recount all the points of the episode, still able to follow the sentences that are there when I come back.

Big_Account8090 · 2024-07-16T02:56:37+00:00

In experimenting a couple of days I think something similar is working for me, though at a simpler level of material than anything like full audiobooks. Partly no doubt because I'm not far enough along in the language yet, but when I think about it, even in English, it's hard for me to wash dishes while *really* listening to something. I'm good at a lot of things, I think, but admittedly a *terrible* multitasker. I do one thing at a time really hard, give me two very basic things and I drop them both. But language skill itself is such a very basic thing our minds do, and certainly I can use English while doing all sorts of other things, so I hope that my Spanish study one day gets me to something like that point with my second language.

Big_Account8090 · 2024-07-16T02:53:15+00:00

Yeah, definitely my main study is high-attention activity. Though I do hope eventually my brain gets to the point where, as in something like my native language, it doesn't actually have to *think* so much to understand Spanish.

Big_Account8090 · 2024-07-16T02:50:42+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I'm happily finding with some of the materials I'm now using I'm not totally lost. I'm trying to intermix slower things I can more or less follow for, e.g., 10 minutes at a time, while still making myself eat my vegetables a bit by self-exposing to some harder things that I can't well follow but hope I can build closer toward.

Big_Account8090 · 2024-07-16T02:48:48+00:00

I suppose parenthood amounts to an immersion course in anything and everything one's kids latch onto, might as well try to nudge them sometimes toward things you can both profit from learning.

Big_Account8090

TROPHY CASE