Name_________________________________ Period_________

RJ Stangherlin

Honors English 11: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Review and Advance Organizer: Deconstruction, The Prologue, Yali’s Question

NB: I am trying to achieve a “voice,” making the notes read as if I were there.

EXTRA CREDIT:

                  What does NB stand for, and why is it italicized?

                  Why is were correct?

What is Deconstruction?: The Easy Version

1. Deconstruction [D] accepts that as readers we think in terms of:
   1. Binary opposites

                                                               i.      e.g.

_{+                                -}

1.        good                bad

2.      green               red

3.      right                wrong

4.      yes                   no

5.      civilization        prehistory

6.      farmer-herder hunter-gatherer

2. Privileging one pole [the generally accepted “positive pole”] over the “other” [negative pole]

                                                               i.      e.g. 

1.        good is better than bad [no elaboration needed]

2.      green has a better connotation than red [“Red scare”]

3.      right is better than wrong [who wants to be wrong]

4.      yes is generally better than no [who want to hear no for an answer?]

                                                              ii.      EXTRA CREDIT:

                        What is the grammar rule supporting why certain words in the

above examples in i. Are italicized?

3. Emptying out the importance/value of the privileged pole [positive] and inscribing [adding] meaning that is different from what is the commonly accepted notion of, for example, why red is/can/or should be the privileged pole, or, in plain English, why red is better than green
4. Looking for the “presence of an absence”

                                                               i.      D assumes that what is not said [hence “present”] is as important as what is said [hence “present”]

                                                              ii.      D asks us as readers to invest meaning in what is absent and consider why what is missing is also important [“what you don’t hear…”]

Why is Deconstruction important to our study of GGS?

1. Jared Diamond is a deconstructionist.
2. His method of operating in his text:
   1. To deconstruct commonly-held [think “Eurocentric” white male] notions of history
   2. To empty out the meaning popularly held by asking an “overarching essential question”  [think “Yali’s Question”]
   3. To attempt to answer the question through a series of Q/A, but…
   4. Diamond’s answers refine information and end in yet another EQ

                                                               i.      This method of layering questions to achieve meaning is often called “scaffolding”

5. Each subsequent question is essential to the meaning/answer of the “overarching essential question”; hence, they are called essential questions [EQ]
6. Each EQ reduces or narrows the possibility of an achieving an answer
2. The HooK:
   1. Most deconstructionists [I saved this for last] believe in the impossibility of achieving a “fixed” meaning because language is constantly changing connotatively [our “subtexts”] and denotatively [our definitions]
   2. Diamond actually tries to achieve meaningful answers, but accepts that some of his work cannot answer EQs definitively

The Prologue: Why IS world history like an onion?

1.  World history is like an onion because:

2.  Diamond believes that we must invoke “proximate” and “ultimate” forces to peel away the layers                                                                      $

                                                                        Capitalism

                                                                        Mercantilism

                                                                        Scientific inquiry

                                                                        Technology     

                                                                        Guns, germs, steel

                                                                        Horses, livestock, “domesticables”

EXTRA CREDIT: Why is IS listed in all caps?

Prologue: Yali’s Question

1. Yali’s question [p. 14]:

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea,

but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

            [definition of “cargo” on p. 14]

2. Diamond’s “answer”:
   1. Europe and eastern Asia, transplants to North America dominate the modern world by wealth and power, but that leads to:
3. New EQ:
   1. “Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way”?
   2. Answer: technological and political differences, but…
4. New EQ:
   1. “How, though, did the world get to be the way it was in AD 1500”?
   2. Answer: agriculture, farmers-herders, writing, but…
5. New EQ:
   1. “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?
   2. Answer: “The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide.  Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down…” [my emphasis]

$

                                      of political, economic, and linguistic consequences = big three

                                      [if you lose language, you lose culture]

Counter/points to Yali’s Question or “they say”

6. New EQ: A counter or what “they say”
   1. “If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, man this not seem to justify the domination?”
   2. Answer—Diamond’s Point: understand the chain of causes to interrupt the chain
7. New EQ: Another counter or what “they say”
   1. “Doesn’t addressing Yali’s question automatically involve a Eurocentric approach to history…”
   2. Answer—Diamond’s Point: Eurocentricism is an ephemeral [note the vocabulary word from Q1] phenomenon of the last few centuries, now fading behind the preeminence of Japan and southeast Asia
8. New EQ: Another counter or what “they say”
   1. “Don’t words such as ‘civilization’ and phrases such as ‘rise of civilization,’ convey the false impression that civilization is good, tribal hunter-gatherers are miserable, and history for the past 13,000 years has involved progress toward greater human happiness?”
   2. Answer—Diamond’s Point: the “so-called blessing of civilization are mixed”

EXTRA CREDIT: Who are the they of “they say”?

9. New EQ:
   1. “Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, despite what I believe to be their superior intelligence?”
   2. Possible Answers:

                                                               i.      Cold climate

                                                              ii.      Warm climate

                                                            iii.      Lowland river valleys [water/irrigation is not equal to centralized political organization

                                                            iv.      Diseases, steel tools, and manufactured tools, BUT

1.        all of the above are only “proximate” or first stage answers that invite the search for ultimate causes, AND that leads to a [you saw this coming, didn’t you]

10. New EQ:
    1. “Why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?”
    2. Answer: Africa is the big mystery because they had a “head start”: protohumans evolved for the longest time
11. New EQ:
    1. “…why didn’t guns and steel arise first in Africa, permitting Africans and their germs to conquer Europe?
    2. Answer: no answer despite some efforts at comparison of human societies

What is the answer to Yali’s question?

1. “…there is no generally accepted answer to Yali’s question.”
2. Proximate explanations [first level]: some people developed guns, germs, and steel = political and economic power; others did not develop these power factors [if you are beginning to understand D, then you are already asking, why didn’t some peoples develop these power factors…]
3. “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”
4. Which lead to the subtitle of the book:  The Fates of Human Societies"fate is a factor.

All of which leads to my EQ for this unit:

 Why do some societies fail to succeed? [which is borrowing, of course, from Diamond

from Yali]

Your Turn: [Answer the following questions; MLA format; may hand write or type; remember the Extra Credit]

1. If a society possesses guns, germs, and steel [GGS], what did these people have to enable them to acquire guns, germs, and steel?
2. Read pp. 28-32.  Diamond gives a short summary of each chapter within each Part of his book.
   1. Find the key word or phrase that summarizes each chapter
   2. Each chapter has only one key word or phrase, except for:

                                                               i.      Chapters 7, 8, and 9, which Diamond lumps together, so one for each chapter

                                                              ii.      Chapter 10 should be represented by a symbol, so see if you can figure that out [no words]

                                                            iii.      Epilogue

3. I am defining a phrase as NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS
2. Why do some societies fail to succeed? [not longer than a paragraph; no bullets]