u6.

Main sources for this entry: Marvin Harris (1977), Cannibals and Kings; and Karl A. Wittfogel (1957), Oriental Despotism. Wittfogel’s work has had its critics, notably among historians, who have suspected a political motive, and also objected that a society’s character is shaped by its inherited culture as much as by its physical environment. But it was quickly recognised by anthropologists such as Julian Steward, and later by Marvin Harris and Robert Netting, who argued simply that there are basic environmental and technological forces that shape a society, and that we will get nowhere in understanding how cultures work if we blithely assume that a people’s ideas simply come from other ideas. The debate surrounding Wittfogel’s work, and Steward’s and Netting’s contribution to it, is described by Donald Worster (1993), The Wealth of Nature, pp 32–41. Note that, even if a society’s culture were substantially shaped by its inheritance of ideas rather than by its environment, it would not follow that it had much choice in the matter, as there is “path dependence”: its inheritance of ideas shapes its mindset and there is little that it can do about that inheritance. If it does succeed in doing something, it is a slow process (Systems Thinking > Feedback > Path Dependence).