Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense About Primitive Society

by C.R. Hallpike

Dr. Hallpike spent his first ten years as an anthropologist living with mountain tribes in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea and writing up his research for publication. He learned that primitive societies are very different from our modern industrialised societies and that it takes a considerable amount study to understand how they work.

But since all Man's ancestors used to live in a similar manner, understanding these societies is essential to understanding the human race itself, especially when speculating about our prehistoric ancestors in East Africa. Unfortunately a wide variety of journalists and science writers, historians, linguists, biologists, and especially evolutionary psychologists erroneously believe they are qualified to write about primitive societies without knowing much about them.

The result is that many of their superficial speculations have about as much scientific credibility as The Flintstones. The various critical studies contained in Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society examine some of the most popular of these speculations and evaluate their scientific merit.

Among the learned fools whose works are critiqued are:

Yuval Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Emma Byrne's Swearing is Good For You
René Girard's theory of learned behavior
William Arens's The Man-Eating Myth
Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Science, History

206 pages, Paperback

Published October 16, 2018

About the author

Christopher Robert Hallpike (born 1938) is an English-Canadian anthropologist and an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada. He is known for his extensive study of the Konso of Ethiopia and Tauade of New Guinea.

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

C.R. Hallpike is a serious anthropologist concerned with human development and the misunderstandings of mischaracterizations in a variety of fields. This book is his introduction to various ways evolutionary biologists, historians, comparative biologists, and others use anthropology. There is much to love in this book despite the ways C.R. Hallpike's own religious-political agenda shows through in his characterization of the implications of Darwinian evolution as ethically normative, which I will get come back to later. Hallpike's gift is for marshaling empirical evidence against a variety of uses of anthropology for theoretical bends where the conclusions seem more tenuous and the characterizations seem questionable.

In the first chapters, Hallpike reads like "War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence H. Keeley or "Not Out of Africa" by Mary Lefkowitz in which historical, anthropological, and logical data are used to clarify some points. Some of the chapters were clearly papers first while others were overviews. What sets Hallpike apart is his use of his findings with the Konso people of Ethiopia and the Tauade of New Guinea often as solid counter-examples of arguments. In the first chapter, clearly written for the book, he takes a survey of various mistakes made by people using anthropology with either economic or evolutionary psychological theories with glee and strong counter-examples.

The chapter on Yohann Harari's strange macro-historical categories is strong and hilarious. However, Hallpike's insistence that egalitarianism in contradiction with Darwinian evolutionary pressures is an is/ought fallacy on his part--in the sense that he insists that the normative (egalitarianism) is ethically incoherent with a descriptive theory (Darwinian evolution). Given how logically he is on other points, this seems odd until you read that Hallpike has done semi-apologetic work before and states his feelings on egalitarianism explicitly. Furthermore, he is quite correct that most of the anthropologists who use categories in a particular way are often themselves doing the same kind of is/ought conflation. That said, aside from that and one error of ancient history (where Hallpike says that Epicureans were atheistic materialists, which is not strictly speaking true for Epicurus who clearly believed in Gods in the same way Buddhists do while it may have been true for Lucretius ), I found the chapter on Harari to be solid.

The chapter on Rene Girard, where Hallpike points out that Girard is working from literature and his speculative anthropology is reductive and over-generalized is also excellent. Although I noticed that Hallpike did not mention Girard's religious commitments that informed his theories of mimesis and scapegoating. Hallpike treats Girard's anthropology as entirely secular, which it is clearly not.

The chapter on cannibalism is fascinating about the overclaims in this regard. Aside from cranky rants about post-modernism in anthropology, which to be fair did plague the field between the late 1970s and the 1990s in ways it didn't even other social sciences, Hallpike marshalls plenty of evidence that complete dismissal is unwarranted.

The last chapter on universal grammar and the problems with both Sapir-Wharf and Chomskyian linguistics is excellent. While Hallpike does take issue with Daniel Everett's relativism, but in general uses his work. Hallpike also points out that early languages are often complicated in syntax, but also context thick and lexicon thin. Hallpike points out that literacy and numeracy matter and significantly change the need precision in language in ways that Chomskyian theories about recursion don't justify. He gets a few jabs in at Steven Pinker here as well.

Hallpike's conclusion that left and liberal egalitarianism have often lead to damage to the sciences is where he falls down a bit and yet is correct in specifics: "[t]he most effective way of protecting the sacred idol of equality, the Great Fetish, against the assault of facts is, therefore, to dispense with the idea of truth altogether and replace it by moral earnestness. So anyone who doubts that the syllogism is a universal mode of reasoning is a “colonialist”, anyone who claims that there is such a thing as primitive thought is a “racist”, and anyone who thinks that biology plays a significant part in human nature is a “fascist”. Not surprisingly, then, Leach could say that “Social anthropologists should not see themselves as seekers after objective truth”, but more like novelists. Welcome on board the Ship of Fools."

In this Hallpike sounds like Steven Pinker, but then is missing that some of his own anti-Darwinism and his framing of materialism is itself coming from motivated reasoning. Furthermore, the conflation of descriptive and normative is as much the problem: valuations about equal validity of modes of life can still fit under a liberal paradigm without the politically motivated reasoning. In fact, Hallpike clearly thinks that Christianity does have grounds for human equality, but not the type that many post-modernist and evolutionary biology bend the data to achieve. Ironically, while I am not a Christian and am generally on the left, I have a lot of the equality talk in academic circles either too vague or too limiting to be useful.

Despite these caveats, this is an excellent book and an excellent breakdown of the misuses of anthropology. It does tend to hit a little more left than right, but I would be interested in what Hallpike would have to say about the misuse of anthropology on the right. I suspect he would have strongly negative things to say about the political use of socio-biology.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, the social sciences: the land where the blind lead the blind! 'Tis a land scattered with p-hacking, with non-replicable studies, or even with assertions that find no basis in studies. "How can that be?" you may ask. Well, well, well — you appear to have not met modern academics.

Hallpike tells us of one anthropologist who states that cannibalism has never existed in an society, ever — it's just one of those "colonialist, racist, Fascist myths", you know. Of course, this goes against the tens to hundreds of explorers who witnessed cannibalism with detailed descriptions, not to mention the various ethnographers who have gotten testimony from primitive peoples themselves. Our modern "social scientist" can easily refute that claim, though. "Ha! Every one of those 'explorers' was really just a racist European — oh, those silly Europeans with their fantasies. We might have to diagnose them with hallucinatory racism: not a single objective fact can escape their fragile White Sight."

Hallpike takes academics like these to the anvil of Truth and straightens them out. He touches on evolutionary fairytales (which taint the otherwise strong explanatory power of sociobiology), "universal grammar" (the notion that all people have the same linguistic capability acquired genetically — test this one out at your local slum!), Rene Girard's literary anthropology (more like literary fiction), and some other bozos who extract ever more dollars from our "follow your dreams"-hypnotized youth.

Postscript/Fun fact: the centers of your brain which control hand movements (especially your right hand) and the language center of your brain are linked. So, when people are not allowed to move their hands while talking, they tend to get messed up in their speech. This is (one) reason why I despise talking on Zoom, because I can't move my hands around like a mad conductor directing his symphony. On the other hand, I can perfectly do so when talking on the phone as I move throughout my house. Who knew this little preference of mine had a neurological basis?

[Darrin Buxman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Wonderful Antidote to Popular Junk Science Evolutionary Psychology

We see more and more bestselling garbage these days peddling cultural equivalency and the modern day Noble Savage motif. This wonderfully concise book eviscerates many of the popular egalitarian arguments with factual analysis and the personal experiences of the author. It is well written, organized and readable.

[Amir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brutal takedown of some of the nonsense spewed by famous neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists(such as Byrne, Harari, etc.) about language, culture, primitive societies and similar topics.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please give my review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...

Modern Scholarship is all about knowing what camels to swallow and what gnats to strain at.

This book goes on the shelf next to "War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence H. Keeley and "Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony" by Robert B. Edgerton. All three books turn tropes that the modern readers are fed on a daily basis, and don't even get enough of a warning to challenge, on their heads by pointing out hard, irreducible empirical data that cuts against the received image of what most of us falsely think is received anthropological truth.

The author, C.R. Hallpike is a British anthropologist with extensive fieldwork among the Konso people of Ethiopia and the Tauade of New Guinea. Hallpike uses his empirical experience as a testing ground for criticizing several overarching tropes, theories or buried premises that are popular among anthropologists and the modern world.

The structure of the book appears to be a collection of prior essays. Each chapter basically addresses some theory postulated by some anthropologist. The essays are lucid and coherent and readable. The style of addressing particular theories sharpens up the discussion for those of us who are not anthropologists. Along the way, a lot of fool's gold is pointed out.

For example, I had incorporated into my mental software the notion that language developed in large part to spot and guard against "freeloaders." I've read this repeatedly stated by experts in the field....and who am I to argue?

Hallpike efficiently decapitates this nostrum by pointing out that for most of human history, humans have lived in bands of 20 or so people who knew each other intimately. How, he asks, in that setting was a freeloader or cheater supposed to have escaped detection? Hallpike offers examples of such societies from his experience with the Tauade and Konso.

*Mind-blown*...good point. We have to worry about freeloaders in our culture because we have the ability to have "one-off" transactions. But I have noticed that even in our culture, freeloading and cheating inevitably have diminishing returns as more and more people refuse to deal with the cheat.

Another example that left me embarrassed involved my reading and immediately incorporating into my storehouse of received wisdom the recently discovered "factoid" that the human face developed to protect against punches. Hallpike points out that, in fact, primitive people are more inclined to kill using spears and clubs, which makes you wonder why evolution hasn't fitted us out with a hide?

Theories litter the ground as Hallpike passes.

In one chapter, Hallpike takes on the myth that cannibalism is a myth. Hallpike marshalls the historical evidence of explorers - historical and more modern - who observed cannibalism. His own experience among the Tauade involved admissions of a recent history of cannibalism (and we are, apparently, talking about, in some cases, as recent as the 1950s.) Along the way, we get some interesting and disturbing insights into the practice of cannibalism, e.g., did you know that human flesh cooks up "white," like pork and chicken?

In the final chapter on the reality of "primitive" language, Hallpike takes on Chomsky's "Universal Grammar ("UG")." I am educated just enough to be dangerous and I had no idea that Chomsky was actually proposing that UG was a quasi-biological organ, like a heart, that was wired into people. Calling on his actual experience, and the linguistic research of others, Hallpike explains that mental structures are innate, not a language as such. Humans have the mental ability to make tools; the particular tools are not innately wired.

Hallpike cites Daniel Everett against Chomsky. I recently read and reviewed Everett's "How Language Began." I was surprised to see this:

"Daniel Everett, in an interview with Geoffrey Sampson (2009b: 215) is obviously deeply committed to cultural relativism: “The Piraha’s culturally constrained epistemology can only be evaluated in terms of the results that it gives the Pirahas relative to their own values. Since it serves them very well, there is no sense in the idea that it is inferior.” We might choose to avoid terms like “inferior” as vague and tendentious, but it is entirely valid to compare Piraha culture with that of other societies, and in this more general scheme of things it appears to be unusually primitive, and the fact that the Piraha themselves appear quite happy has nothing to do with the matter. (Remarkably, in his book (2008: 272) Everett also says that he no longer believes in truth, a strange position for one who has spent a great deal of time and effort trying to prove that Universal Grammar is false, or who wishes his work to be taken seriously at all.)"

I didn't pick up that Everett was a complete relativist.

I also didn't realize this:

"Indeed, the unfortunate Professor Everett, celebrated for claiming that the Piraha have no grammatical recursion, has been denounced as a racist for implying that they are therefore subhuman, and denied permission to return to them (Bartlett 2012: 5)."

But this all goes to show the truth of my maxim: "Never read a book; read multiple books on the subject."

Hallpike's theory on the complexity of language is that literacy matters. Humans get complex features like the embedding of phrases and ideas into a sentence, using comparators, and the like, from reading and writing, which is a line that separates the primitive from the complex. It also separates readers in our culture from non-readers. As an attorney, I've noticed how difficult it is for most people to follow questions that are more recursive than a single iteration, and never mind about comparators. Simple declarative factual questions are best.

Hallpike offers the example of innumeracy. Some cultures simply do not have numbers. They have one, i.e., "this thing", and they have words for a pair of grouping, "these things," but the idea of adding together things that are similar in some way is not necessary because everything is unique. Thus, Hallpike gives the example of the Cree hunter who could not say the number of rivers in his territory but who could describe each and every one.

An interesting feature of this book is Hallpike's explanation for why so much misinformation is spread concerning anthropology. As in so many areas, the answer is political ideology, namely a kind of leftist egalitarianism. In his conclusion, Hallpike lays it on the table, which is worth quoting in full:

"But what is really fascinating here is the underlying but obvious assumption that a moral belief, in this case in equality, can become the basis for accepting the truth of cultural relativism, and then for accepting the further truth of Chomskian linguistics because this produces the desired conclusion that all cultures are, like all languages, essentially equal. The most effective way of protecting the sacred idol of equality, the Great Fetish, against the assault of facts is therefore to dispense with the idea of truth altogether and replace it by moral earnestness. So anyone who doubts that the syllogism is a universal mode of reasoning is a “colonialist”, anyone who claims that there is such a thing as primitive thought is a “racist”, and anyone who thinks that biology plays a significant part in human nature is a “fascist”. Not surprisingly, then, Leach could say that “Social anthropologists should not see themselves as seekers after objective truth”, but more like novelists. Welcome on board the Ship of Fools."

This ideology has done great damage to science. Hallpike should be commended for doing what he can to oppose it.

[!-!-! · Rating 3 out of 5]

When someone's personal website attacks "cultural Marxists", evolutionary psychologists, and atheists alike, you know that you're in the presence of a committed grouch. And when the grouch is (mostly) on your side, that can be quite fun! In my case, we've both been terrorized by Yuval Noah Harari.
Hallpike is so, so tired of hearing evolutionary explanations and just-so stories for human behavior. I can hardly blame him, because I am also so tired of this and I'm not an anthropologist. As he points out:
- Ideas of disgust as an evolutionary adaptation are somewhat undercut by many groups' predilections for eating rotting meat and hanging out with corpses.
- Romantic love as a measure of genetic/parasitic/whatever compatibility is a little weird when most marriages are not freely chosen.
- Dialects are not deliberately chosen to express solidarity; that's not how language change works.
As you'd expect of a man convinced that he's right and everyone else is wrong, he's a bit overconfident. I was skeptical of some of his assertions, namely that concern for free-loading is a non-issue because in primitive societies everyone knows everyone else and would notice it, and therefore game theory is bullshit. I've been fairly impressed by game theory predictions, and I think that there's some psychological reaction to free-loading, both of which argue that there's some reason to be concerned. In any case, this doesn't actually contradict Hallpike - it could be that concern for free-loading is a learned cultural trait or a rational calculation rather than an evolved one.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Primitive societies differ from modern, industrialized ones in various ways:
They’re rural, not urban.
Everything is made of local materials, not synthetic materials in far-away factories.
Populations are tiny, not huge.
Everyone knows everyone, no one’s a stranger,
There’s no literacy and concomitant cultural skills that come with this.
“Money” serves relationships, not the other way around.
Jobs don’t form the basis of social identity, but age, kinship, and gender do.

Hallpike tries to demonstrate that those who attempt to speculate about early man or human nature have no idea about these distinctions.

Examples:

In ‘Sex at Dawn’, Ryan and Jetha claimed that hunter-gatherers lived in communities where there was no marriage, only an extended sexual free-for-all. However, pair-bonding is a key feature of human behaviour (which doesn’t mean humans are exclusively monogamous) that must have a deep evolutionary history and, secondly, marriage is a well-attested social institution among primitive peoples that links lineages or clans together in interdependent political and economic webs of alliance.

Pagel and Bodmer proposed that hairlessness, and a subsequent rise in wearing clothes, evolved to rid us of parasites, ignoring the fact that woven fabrics are difficult to produce and emerged relatively late on the cultural ladder (contra their theory) and, secondly, hunter-gatherers in tropical climes don’t actually wear clothes. Jablonski provides a better theory for hairlessness; our hunting required physiological adaptation in the form of bare skin for evaporation, since this is a highly efficient means of dissipating excessive heat.

Cosmides and Tooby have difficulty in accounting for cooperation in early human groups because they don’t differentiate between living in hunter-gatherer groups (which humans spent the large majority of their evolutionary history living in) and modern, industrialized nations. Defection is relatively easy in the urban jungle because of numbers and anonymity, problems that our cooperating ancestors would never have had to deal with.

Wade commits the same mistake as above in relation to the emergence of religion: he states that it began as a mechanism for a community to exclude those who could not be trusted, as a means of defense against freeloading. But this is an overly cognized conception of religion and has nothing to do with religion found in primitive societies, unconcerned as it is with excluding the ‘other’. Wade is here describing a modern function of religious thinking that was largely absent from our hunter-gatherer forebears.

Byrne’s ‘Swearing is Good for You’ makes the claim that joking about tabooed subjects may have been a social lubricant from the most ancient times, but swearing requires three conditions (taboos, vocabulary to refer to them that’s impolite, and willingness to tolerate its occasional use); these latter two conditions are lacking in primitive societies. Swearing thus appears to be a relative newcomer on the cultural scene.

Arens’ ’The Man-Eating Myth’ makes the claim that cannibalism is a racist and colonialist myth perpetuated by Westerners; Hallpike marshalls the relevant evidence to dismiss this idea.

A few closing remarks. While dismissing those theories that are the result of ignorance, Hallpike criticises the political agenda of several anthropologists who cannot claim ignorance at all and who are motivated, not by the available evidence to justify or dismiss their claims, but by ‘moral indignation’. You cannot sacrifice just moral causes at the altar of truth; “the most effective way of protecting the sacred idol of equality, the Great Fetish, against the assault of facts is therefore to dispense with the idea of truth altogether and replace it by moral earnestness.”

First you must be able to differentiate fact from value, otherwise your facts will be forever tainted with values that will serve to confuse and disorient, with the effect that you won’t know up from down. The idea of humans as nothing more than collections of atoms in motion is thus the necessary first step before, of course, eventually reunifying fact and value. But you must first differentiate them, this stage is crucial, since their fusion produces questionable anthropology in the form of Arens, Boas, or Schneider.

Coleridge wrote: “In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having done so, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy.” Differentiate and integrate, a la Spencer.

[Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixture of essays by an anthropologist. Not going to comment about the things not in my area of evolutionary biology, but Hallpike mostly gets that wrong. His discussion of cheating shows how deeply he gets evolutionary mechanisms wrong, by concretising “cheater” into a literal cheat. One thinks instead of variation and variant strategies, across time. Hallpike’s analyses are almost exclusively based on apparent current function and he shows an odd incuriousness for history and mechanisms and change over time. Current human rituals develop for a wide variety of reasons, sometimes very rapidly, codifying behaviours for stated reasons that may be far from the actual origins. There is a lot of room for analysis within and between “primitive” societies, but Hallpike’s use of his own fieldwork here is disappointingly more as a source of anecdotes. I look forward to reading Hallpike’s primary literature but at least so far, want to rely on others for insightful syntheses.

[Eidid Norazam · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a sociology graduate, this book alone has probably taught me more about anthropology than my entire faculty for the whole 3 years of me studying there.

C. R. Hallpike has spent his first decade in research living with tribal and mountainous societies ranging from the Konso people of Ethiopia and the Tauade of Papua New Guinea. The premise of this book is basically Hallpike refuting pop-science writers (particularly Harari) on how their findings are baseless and speculative, coupled with their lack "on-the-ground" and zero empirical research. In his own words, Hallpike states that in our "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) culture, we experience the physical world to a great extent indirectly through our technology (basically we don't touch grass).

Not gonna lie, this book left me chuckling the whole time.

[David M DeVore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book as much as it is a series of academic papers along the same topic. That topic is refuting arguments made about how primitive cultures work (or if there is even such a thing as a “primitive culture”) with in the field research. It does that well, even if somewhat densely at times. I learned more about primitive cultures, religion, ways of thinking, etc. in this one book that in all my sociology, geography, and human diversity classes in college.

It soundly disproves the multiple ways that it is claimed that primitive man/cultures are no different or “less than” modern society. It is well worth the read.

[John Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enlightening

Although I have read very little anthropology, I wrongly concluded that this social science still maintained a quest for truth. “Ship of Fools” reveals how far the field has fallen and how wide spread its errors. In rebutting so many false claims, this wonderful book provides a wonderful introduction to what can be learned about humanity.

[Sablehawk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very educational

The argument against language equality got a bit bogged down in evidence, but the other sections moved well. Clearly shows the failure of modern cultural anthropology to 'throw the bums out'. Chomsky being head bum. Pretty much a generation of kids have been taught a pack of lies pretending to be science.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smashes up a place that deserves smashing.

[Masse Manet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Old grouch writes amusing rant about the lack of rigor in postmodern social science.

[Grips · Rating 5 out of 5]

A riveting book. I read it all in one sitting without even realizing when the time had passed. Informative and entertaining.