How Rice Farming Shaped Culture in Southern China (2018) | Hacker News Reader

How Rice Farming Shaped Culture in Southern China (2018)

papers.ssrn.com

27 pointsKhoomeiK23 comments

Can we replace the editorialized title with the original?

> How Rice Farming Shaped Culture in Southern China

Agree, I like this article because it makes an interesting study of how our work shapes our culture, and if we're looking for parallels to tech, this sounds a bit like Conway's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

The way you grow crops helps determine the social structure of the society that grows the crops, and vice versa to an extent.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” - John Culkin (1967) A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan

Actually this is just Marxist history (which isn't the same thing as political Marxism btw, it just means a history that looks at how material conditions create reality).

I didn't read the article, I am not going to but the abstract suggests it is a pretty severe interpretation (talking about relationships is risky ground imo)...you have to be careful because material conditions tend to be correlated to other stuff but it is a well-developed branch of history (particularly, economic history).

Honestly that's the most convincing thing about Marxism - economics drives everything else, because if you ain't got the money you can't do anything else in the game.

That’s a puzzling assertion - Marxism is one of few isms that reject the fundamental principle of voluntary exchange which says in order to get what you want you need to provide the other party with something of equal or better value (in other party’s opinion) in return.

In Marxism everyone should get what they “need”. Which means no one does which eventually results in shortages and corruption.

> because if you ain't got the money you can't do anything else in the game.

And how does one “get money”? By looting? What would Marx do?

You ought to read Economics in One Lesson.

This isn't Economics...I tried to explain this in my first post. Marxist history != Marxism. They overlap significantly but most economic history until the 1990s was Marxist because it emphasised economic determinism (and, in fact, a lot of economics these days is Marxist in this sense too). The implications of economic determinism are slightly more complex (even Lenin did not completely buy it) but it is different from the layman's understanding of Marxism.

To give you an example, Adam Tooze (who has written a ton of very good books on economic history) is a Marxist historian.

I thought about it, but the abstract does a pretty bad job of stating that hypothesis, which I think is the most interesting finding in the paper. It's definitely a bit sensationalist but I don't think you would've read the paper if that were the title. :)

The thesis of the article appears to be, in broad strokes, examining how material conditions shape patterns of thought. If there is truth in that, perhaps it's not the best idea to push the tone of thread titles on a discussion website in the direction of sensationalism and forwarded emails.

the ultimate resource in all things history of crops and how people came about to cultivate rice (or stay clear of it) has to be James C. Scott[1][2] "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia"

> For two thousand years, the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe—2.5 million km2—that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée, epidemics, and warfare—of the nation state societies that surround them.

he has several chapters on crops and why they play a key role in survival among hill tribes throughout history. A brilliant book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed

[2] https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf

Scott also mentions in another book how cultures based on roots (potato, manioc) tend to be less hierarchical as they don't easily support taxing and strong states, whereas grain can be easily quantified and taxed all at once at harvest time

Honestly this argument has run before and can run in many different ways

Let me try and count a few

- Subsistence vs agricultural revolution : with a subsistence culture everyone lives on the and by the land, and that is the biggest driving force in your culture. The differences between Chinese village and French village C1000AD would be tiny compared to that of Chinese village 1000AD / 1900.

- subsistence and mono-crops : the European agricultural revolution was arguably less about productivity in a single crop, and more about resilience to crop failure - ie adding potato farming to a wheat culture put a stop to famines every few years (I mean few - one a decade or so). Rice tended to fail less often (technically growing different kinds of rice I suppose rather entire species).

- Politics - China created political stability early on across a vast area - and that massively helped avoid famine. While there are many counter examples, a singular political authority able to move food around to offset famine for best part of a millennia was the peak of human civilisation and for all the faults, you would choose to live there if you travelled back in time.

- finally we come to the bread vs rice - once rice leaves a farm, it is storable and needs no further professional processing - you just cook it. But wheat needs grinding and usually baking was a specialty procession. This actually argues a bit against the collectivism thread I think - it it could go either way. But to my mind it's a weak force in culture setting.

I guess I am trying to say that "culture" is a tough thing to define and find drivers for - it is ultimately what the people do. And for most of history what they did was grow crops, and pray they did not fail. Getting past that mattered more than the species of crop

Edit: rereading i think i got a clearer grasp of their idea - i would fall it commitment - rice needs more labour and dedicates land just to rice (it's much easier to keep a paddy a paddy than grow maize or soy next year). And this commitment then rewards people who commit together thus creating _culture_.

it's a nice idea, but watch out for those pesky wheat growing puritans and other co-operative well glued societies humans make :-)

> - finally we come to the bread vs rice - once rice leaves a farm, it is storable and needs no further professional processing - you just cook it. But wheat needs grinding and usually baking was a specialty procession. This actually argues a bit against the collectivism thread I think - it it could go either way. But to my mind it's a weak force in culture setting.

Efficient milling isn't just a specialized skill. It's also a bunch of specialized equipment and often required specialized construction and siting. Controlling the local mill meant controlling the local economy and food supply.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a bunch of Europeans leveraged this into political power and multigenerational wealth.

Reading the irrigation and labor sections, it seems related to the hydraulic despotism theory.

> Such is the power of the Narrative Fallacy — the backward-looking mental tripwire that causes us to attribute a linear and discernable cause-and-effect chain to our knowledge of the past.

https://fs.blog/2016/04/narrative-fallacy/

Potatoes = Eutopia?

What about maize?

FTA:

> In China, we use wheat, corn, and soybeans statistics to represent dryland crops that are grown more or less similarly (and at the very least, very differently from paddy rice). [...] Thus, we say “wheat” for simplicity, but this also includes crops like millet and corn.

Curious. That omits the Three Sisters, the agricultural practice that I think of when somebody says "maize farming".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)

If we're talking about pre-industrial systems, this seems to be the way to go:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk_four-course_system

Learned about it in the book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch:

* https://twitter.com/KnowledgeCiv

* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/

I'd wager they're doing crop rotation with corn and soybeans, which is pretty popular in some parts of the US. Soybeans are good for putting nitrogen back in the soil.

I recall reading an article about this before 2018. IIRC, it said that corn came to Europe a bit late to change the structure of that society. But, it's contribution was to be a high-variance crop where the booms helped a lot and the busts could be covered by reserve stores of wheat.

And a favorite derivative thereof, high fructose corn syrup.

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