Steal Smoked Fish, or, Fishing Slaves Lives · 6:06am Jul 5th, 2022
So in the background I’m working on a book about an alternate history of Earth where, one day, it started raining and never stopped. As part of the research for this I’m reading three books at the moment; Against the Grain and Seeing Like a State by James C Scott, and David Graeber’s last book Dawn of Everything. They’re all books that cover pre-agricultural civilization and see agriculture not as an inevitable step in the march of progress, but as a decision that was made and had oppressive consequences, which many peoples and civilizations deliberately avoided for those reasons.
Probably my favourite highlight from Dawn of Everything so far is in making this case, that when looking at east coast indigineous cultures of the United States, it’s obvious that fishing cultures would be more warlike, and more prone to slavery, than their acorn foraging neighbours, and it said this with the dismissive air of something truly obvious.
And the explanation is fascinating! Because, once you know the explanation, it kind of is.
The difference is surplus. Acorns need a lot of work to process into food: Treating, leaching, grinding into flour, and then baking into breads and biscuits. None of this work is needed to make them storable for long periods of time. This means you can have a large supply of acorns gathered, and they’ll keep without going bad, but most of the work needed to turn them into food still isn’t done. All that being said, they’re not worth stealing.
This is compared to salmon fishing, and other inland freshwater fish that have their season. During the salmon runs, the fish were said to be so numerous that you couldn’t even see the water for them. Many of these cultures were dedicated not just to the harvesting of fish during these times of year, but in knowing how much could be taken safely. Still, fish goes bad very quickly if not treated. This means a short burst of harvesting, followed by what Graeber refers to as a ‘heroic’ effort in brining, smoking, cleaning, gutting, and all the work needed to keep fish for long periods of time.
However, once that work is done, that creates a high-value surplus that has to last for the rest of the year. Unlike acorns, you can just eat smoked fish. That means much of the work of a fishing community requires protecting their large storage of food wealth from raids and rivals, which necessitates a warrior culture. Smoked fish being so obviously valuable that John Darnielle is still writing songs about stealing it contemporaneously.
But once you have that bored, year-round warrior culture, you have a community with a capacity for violence, a community with an outsized investment into its capacity for violence than the neighbouring foraging and gathering communities. Once that inequality is established, over time that advantage becomes leveraged to steal and raid from neighbours rather than just to protect from outward aggression.
This is less inevitable, not all cultures with warrior cultures will develop in this way, but the initial seed for this different outcome was planted when the community chose to fish instead of forage acorns. And I think that’s really cool and interesting.
I’ve never been super into worldbuilding before, but observations and stories like this are so rich in storytelling potential that it’s becoming hard to resist seriously incorporating more of it into my writing going forward.
It's also difficult to remember in our era of supermarkets just how *much* effort and time primative cultures required to keep themselves fed, and I'll extend that on up to the Medieval ages. The 'tooth to tail' ratio of armies in that era was godawful lopsided, and slanted so that warfare could only really happen during certain times of the year. Too early, nobody plants so nothing grows. Too late, not enough people around to harvest and everything rots. Winter, everybody freezes to death trying to march to your country. Technology and farming practices had an immense lever effect at that time. If it takes 20 farmers to provide for a footsoldier and 100 to equip a knight, a few percentage points of efficiency can double an army in size.
Interesting, I never would have considered that.
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This is something all of these authors are at least partially critical of. Graeber and Wengrew estimate that for most of these societies, the average work-week was only 11-14 hours total. It's just that you couldn't efficiently get more food out of people doing more work than that, because of how much of it came in huge bursts. The need to do that, though, is basically what Seeing Like a State is all about, so I'll have better thoughts on that when I'm deeper into that. I'll also plug A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Brett Devreaux for a great online source for this, This Isn't Sparta being my favourite starting point to recommend.
On the other hand, China growing rice instead of wheat and barley, etc. is a big factor in the reason why Three Kingdoms armies were so much bigger than their European equivalents, and in doing the actual book behind this, a big factor of the alternate history is just how much longer sieges could last for if marauding armies could rely on their own agriculture and forage rather than be supported by supply lines.
Seeing your depiction as david graeber in aragon’s comic helped nudge me into reading his books, sincere thanks for that
What about wandering hunter-gatherers? How they will develop their culture?
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In that, we could be describing steppe peoples like the Timurids or Mongols or Plains people of the United States, or we could be describing peoples like the Inuit, or the First Nations peoples of Australia, or,
One thing that Graeber tries to emphasize in Dawn of Everything is that agriculture was introduced to, say, Australians, but was rejected rather than misunderstood. The societies they wanted to live in weren't compatible with sedentary agriculture, so they didn't do it. Arguably they were much happier for that decision
Fascinating stuff... though I'm just wondering where all the water for that eternal rain is coming from.
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What if water cycle go zoom
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I believe it was in Sapiens where the argument was made that, according to the definition of 'domestication', humans were domesticated by wheat, not the other way around.
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Graeber actually dedicated a huge chunk of Dawn of Everything to dissecting that, and I think Against the Grain will be very explicit about it! But it's a very fun idea that I love a lot.
Paraphrasing; "Basically, from wheat's perspective, it went from a fairly fussy grass to a very competitive mammal species spreading it over all corners of the globe, serving its needs. If wheat doesn't like rocks in its fields, it gets humans to move them and till the soil. If wheat doesn't like competition, humans weed and get rid of it. The agricultural revolution can be considered, from this perspective, as how wheat tamed humans."
I'll probably have more to say about it ages from now
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As an aside, one interesting theory that has a lot of sway in the academic community is that the domestication of cereal grains had less to do with food production, and much more to do with the production of beer. All of the oldest records and archaeological remains we have of early agricultural communities show bread and beer existing simultaneously.
I love David Graeber's work! He so often makes incisive observations that are capable of altering my world-view. His Bullshit Jobs was directly responsible for me quitting my corporate slog and returning to artwork, for which I will be always grateful. It's a terrible shame he isn't around any longer; After devouring his book on debt, I'd love to have read his thoughts on Cryptocurrency and NFTs!
Good luck with the book. It sounds like a fascinating concept and I'd like to know what comes of it.
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I can see that; I believe it was XKCD that pointed out how the process of making bread is so convoluted that it's a wonder anybody ever figured it out. Getting drunk makes way more sense as a motivation, especially since it was the best water purification technique they had back then.
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Is there a book you would you recommend to delve more into the China/rice end of that? I'd love to read more there, that sounds fascinating.
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Unfortunately not! It's something that's a passing mention in a lot of the books I read, rather than a dedicated subject. The food chapter of How To Invent Everything, by Ryan North, would be one of them, though
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Cool, thanks!