This has been bothering me for a bit, so I hope you wonderful folks can help. A common presumption is the transition from a predominantly foraging lifestyle to a predominantly agricultural lifestyle was necessary, good, and irrevocable. In pop history interpretations of the Neolithic Revolution range from "humanity's greatest mistake" to the origin of enlightened civilization. During those quiet moments between waking and sleeping I've been trying to wrap my head around this transition, and now the time to pester my friends has arrived. Forgive me if these questions are basic level stuff, I didn't really study the theory surrounding of the development of agriculture in school. I just focused on the bones.

My background is anthropology of the Americas, where the supposed clear distinction between foragers and farmers is messy as hell. Across the continent semi-sedentary agricultural populations plant part of the year and then disperse to forage in the winter. Even groups subsisting on maize based diets still have abundant evidence of foraged foods in middens. Sedentary groups in the Pacific Northwest subsisted on foraging, fishing, and marine resources without the need for agriculture. Other groups abandoned maize based agricultural and transitioned to foraging on the Great Plains. We even have construction of monumental architecture at places like Poverty Point in the middle of the Archaic Period, before agricultural and sedentary populations exist. Basically, the common presumptions and explanations about the importance, permanence, and dependence on agriculture don't seem to work for many groups in the Americas. So, some questions...

First, am I wrong is presuming theory argues for a clear cut transition between foraging and farming? Is there theoretical wiggle room to bounce between foraging and farming during the transition, and what does that look like for different cultures across the globe? What is the current status of this literature and debate overall?

Second, does current theory support the idea of an irreversible transition once the seeds of agriculture have been sown? In your area of expertise does the population in question ever abandon farming and return to foraging? What prompted this change?

Finally, what are the common pitfalls in this debate, and what do I need to read to further my understanding?

Thanks, friends.

So, theory time: check out this picture. This is from a graduate seminar at Berkeley in 1983. The fellow in the hat is Michel Foucault, a person who, whether you like him or not, has had an immense impact on the historical profession in the last forty years.

The guy kneeling front and center is Kenneth Pomeranz, a historian of China and one of my dissertation committee members. He's also a really important historian, and his book The Great Divergence has been one of the most important works in world history in the past generation.

What's interesting here is just how different the work these two historians do is: Foucault is, broadly speaking, a key figure in the "cultural turn," a critique of the older varieties of social, economic, and political history that dominated the academy. One of the key elements of this shift is a fundamentally theoretical point. For social historians especially, change over time is connected to the lived experience of people, typically rendered through their economic class. The idea builds from Marx: that the working people in a capitalist society perceive their own exploitation at the hands of the bourgeoisie, and come to recognize their collective ability to change the world through their shared exploitation. Social history, then, is a story of the experiences we share.

But social history has a big set of problems. It tends to reduce things to quantitative metrics, for one thing. So you can have historians who are trying to figure out why working class people so often do not seem to act in their own class interests. Marx called this "false consciousness," which always seemed to me to be code for "these guys don't get it." And yet, lots of working people apparently don't "get it," since the actual communist revolutions have happened in countries that did not look at all like what Marx pictured, like Russia and China. He thought the revolution would happen in the most capitalist, the most industrialized nations, and yet we haven't seen those revolutions in places like Britain or Germany, and the French Revolution is pretty clearly NOT an economically driven, class-based revolution as Marxian theory would predict. Plus, there's the whole "What's the matter with Kansas?" issue. In 2004 (12 years rounds up to 20 guys), Thomas Frank pointed out that Kansas was once a very economically-left population of voters, but is now, in the early 20th century, firmly Republican, so that they routinely vote for economic policies that at best do not benefit them, and at worst are actively destructive of their society. Instead, they seem to care most about moral issues, voting on issues like abortion and gay rights. So, for Frank, these poor saps are getting duped, and just don't really get that it's all about how capitalism is screwing them, and has fooled them into caring about certain things and not others. This obviously doesn't accord a whole of agency to these people, which is ironic for someone coming out of an ideology meant to empower the working classes.

On the other hand, you get the same problem with critics of Marxian views, like Jeffrey Williamson, who does a whole bunch of math and concludes that the standard of living for the industrial working classes in Britain was improving in the late 18th and early 19th century. (Therefore, stop complaining about industrialization, it was obviously terrific--he was also writing this during the Thatcher years, so stop complaining about closing mines, the breaking of unions, and the neoliberalization of society, you've never had it so good!) Because he has Mathed the Math, is his numbers are Super Objective and Cannot be Wrong Because Math, he then has to explain away the conditions that people actually describe when they discuss living in industrial cities and doing industrial work. Those conditions are terrible, and people living in them make very clear that they suck, badly. But to Williamson, these are just "disamenities" for which people are obviously fairly compensated by their increasing "real" wages (an index of the relationships between nominal monetary wages and prices to assess purchasing power), or else they wouldn't go into the cities, right? RIGHT???

The cultural turn comes at the problem of historical change differently. See, the thing with social history (with its economic component) is that agency--the ability to act in history, to create change--is located in the laboring subject. This is under the hood of the almost obsessive focus on British historians on the working class; E. P. Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class is Year 0 for British historiography because he took that central element of British history, the industrial revolution, and reframed it in an attempt to rescue the working class from "the enormous condescension of posterity"--but he still saw the laboring subject and his (and at the time, it was definitely HIS) experience, and his response to those experiences, as the driving force of change.

If social history says that "change happens because of the experiences we share," cultural history says "change happens because of [or with? or through? causality is a bit of a problem here] the stories we tell." And these "stories" are basically the ways of speaking that give meaning to our lives. Cultural history recognizes that power is not centralized in the state (or at least not ALL power), and nor is it even necessarily located in working people and their perceptions. It is, instead, in the ways that we speak about things and give them meaning. The power of the idea of the nation, and the ways of speaking about national states (e.g., they exist, we are part of one) actually matter a lot more than the state's ability to blow people up. The power of the idea of progress, the idea that "progress" is a thing that exists and is happening, matters a lot more for affecting people's behavior than for the "actual progress" that might be happening--and from the perspective of cultural history, it's difficult to see what "progress" actually means, because as a cultural idea, as a way of speaking about things, it's a construction and its meaning changes over time!

Foucault was one among many scholars in the 1970s and especially the 1980s who began to really push these ideas and challenge the prevailing metanarratives of political-economic-social history. As you might guess, this provoked a LOT of ire among the established historians of the day; they said of cultural history that it had no real substance, that it was too "soft," without social-scientific precision (read: numbers) and accuracy, and thus couldn't really "prove" anything; at the same time, many of those same critics of cultural history also said it was too jargon-y, too technical. Put them together, and the critique becomes "I don't understand this new set of theories," which is not to be too hard on the established historians of the day; we're all products of our training, and you can't blame them at all for resisting that which they did not understand and which was really critical of their work, but on terms that were alien to them.

Which all brings me back to Foucault and Pomeranz. I read The Great Divergence as an MA student, and it blew my mind. It was such a thorough deconstruction of the existing explanations for western ascendancy in the modern period that it upended what I though I knew about capital-H History. I went to UC Irvine for my PhD in significant measure because he was there. I don't do Chinese history, but I am interested in world history, and I got to take Ken's classes, we worked well together, became friends, and he served on my committee as I mentioned above.

My research also uses a TON of Foucault; it's not a stretch to say that I own a copy of every bit of Foucault that I could find, and there's a whole shelf in my office to testify to this. And what's funny is that Foucault's work and Pomeranz's work are really different: Foucault is a cultural historian, studying discourses, the operation of very diffuse structures of power; Pomeranz's core skills are as an economic historian, albeit one with a particularly environmentally informed view. (Foucault only speaks of the non-human world in very oblique terms, but his work has important implications for it.) And yet, here they are, two of my most important intellectual influences, right there in one photograph from 30 years ago. And this, I think is where cultural history and social (and economic) history help each other. I think that most of us end up specializing in one or the other, and I'm certainly on the "cultural" side. But, learning and knowing the other side is SOOOOO important, and it makes you better at your core skill. I think Ken is so good at economic history because he took seminars like this one. I know that I'm without a doubt a better cultural historian because I spent months reading every bit of British economic history I could manage. I can't really assess the mathematical formulas they use or the more arcane details of their debates, but I have a pretty good grasp of the terrain on which economic historians have fought their battles. And this, I hope, gives the cultural history I write a great deal more depth than it might otherwise have.

Anyhow, theory is fun!