Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

I've been having Thinky Thoughts about the racist, colonialist gatekeeping that goes on in archaeology and anthropology around which groups of people get to be called "agriculturalists" and which end up labelled as "hunter gatherers". Sources like wikipedia say the distinction is important because agriculture enables settled living, with higher population densities, and that in turn enables craft specialization, surplus resources, long term infrastructure, having nicer things, and so on.

But there are so many groups of people who did live in permanent or semi-permanent settlements and were able to have some or all of those knock on benefits, but who continue to be classed as "hunter gatherers" because they didn't *farm*. Or they didn't *plant crops*, even though they did maintain and harvest vast stands of edible wild plants. As research continues to turn up more and more examples of people who weren't nomads living sparsely in small groups and collecting only naturally occurring food sources, the "hunter gatherer" category looks more and more like a catch all for "anyone who doesn't make a living like our wheat growing ancestors."

The gatekeeping isn't only about restricting admittance to the sacred precincts of the "agriculturalist" club, it's also about preventing the creation of additional in-between labels to properly encompass the spectrum of strategies humans have used to feed themselves other than farming. Maintaining the dichotomy is vital to preserving the specialness of the agriculturalist in group and the subaltern status of everyone else. Instead, you find half-assed labels like "enhanced," "complex," or "affluent hunter gatherers." Even though the adjective and non-adjective groups share little in common apart from not being farmers. And even though the closer you look, the fewer regular food collecting cultures there were compared to (pick adjective) cultures.

( Read more... )

I originally planned to say something about forest gardens and some of the other people in the world who get classed as (adjective) hunter gatherers instead of farmers or farming-adjacent, but this post has grown too long, so there will be a part 2.

Recent as in the past few months. The bad stuff mentioned below is all recent - I know I watched some forgettable crap last month and the month before, but I remember none of it.

Hellboy (the 2019 version) - what could have been mindless fluff, ruined by excessive violence and gore.

Men in Black International - mindless fluff. Nice to have a female MIB co-star, but the male partner still got most of the screen time. Getting so tired of that, Hollywood.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters (2019 version). Monsters destroy several large cities around the globe. Sometimes, some humans appear on screen for a while, mainly it seems in order to demonstrate that nobody gave a damn about the human storyline in this film, from the typists who can be blamed for the so-called script to the director to the actors themselves, who seem to have all either phoned it in or had zero talent.

Dark Phoenix: Remember "X-men, the last stand"? Way back when Patrick Stewart was playing Professor X and they hadn't yet decided to reboot the whole thing with even younger actors? This was inferior to that in every way.

Captive State: Another SF story about alien invaders who occupy America and do bad, totalitarian dictatorship sorts of things to Americans, who of course fight a guerilla war against the evil alien invaders. I think there was a TV series a couple years ago with essentially identical themes to this, it was awful too. At least this time the heroes are mostly poor and brown people who are struggling to overthrow their oppressors, the TV series IIRC was mostly white people who resented being treated like they'd been treating poor brown people for centuries.

Magellan: White Man goes into space (because that's something we have never seen before) using cold sleep to investigate a series of ET signals from the outer planets. Incredibly bad science in the script. I think we were supposed to care about the human relationships in this, but considering that the characters would have been vastly improved if they were made of cardboard, it didn't work very well.

The Frame (2014): This was actually rather interesting. Alex does large scale drug heists for a living. His dad is dying in a hospice. In the evenings, he unwinds by watching a TV show about a paramedic named Sam. Sam is a paramedic with a troubled relationship with her mother. In the evenings, she unwinds by watching a TV show about a criminal named Alex. About fifteen minutes into the movie, Alex and Sam happen to be watching TV at the same time, and see nothing but the other person watching them back, hearing and seeing what they are doing in the privacy of their own living rooms, and talking back to them. Each of them discover that their world is the other person's fictional universe. It's an interesting urban fantasy about reality and fiction, free will and fate.

But I had trouble liking it. Because of sexism. Alex gets at least twice the screen time and character development as Sam. The set up promises us a portrait of two people, but we really only get a portrait of one person, since nearly all of Sam's scenes are about her relationship with Alex. Alex gets to have a complicated life; Sam gets to be the platonic love interest who (avoiding spoilers here) puts the welfare of this man in the TV ahead of her own safety.

Majorie Prime: Another rather interesting film, about rich white people who can afford to buy an AI companion that, over time, learns to simulate a dead loved one. The more you tell it about the person it's trying to imitate, the better a replica it can become. Majorie is old and losing her memory. Her daughter and her son in law have moved in with her to take care of her, but they still have lives to live, so she spends most of her time talking with the AI who looks just like her dead husband when he was young, and who remembers all of the stories she has to tell about their relationship.

The daughter thinks the AI is creepy and refuses to talk to it, the son in law thinks it's helping and tells it as much as he can. This film started out as a stage play, and it shows - it's a thinky, talky piece that explores the interplay of memory and story, in which not a lot happens. Geena Davis plays the daughter, and she is as usual brilliant. The real pity about this movie is that it's so very, very white and wealthy. Because that's the best way to portray universal truths about the human condition, dontchaknow.

Ocean's Eight: Like Ghostbusters before it, this all girl genderswapped remake of an all-boy film is wonderful and fun and doomed to never have any sequels made of it, because angry sexist internet manbaby trolls have seen to it that we are not allowed to have nice things.

Fast Color. A family of three generations of African-American women, all of whom were born with superpowers. The FBI wants to study them, they just want to live their lives in peace. This is an original movie, not based on a comic book or graphic novel, and that probably explains a lot about why it is so damn good.

See You Yesterday: Two African American teenage science nerds build a time machine for their science fair project, a nerdy girl genius and her sidekick. When the girl's brother is killed by white cops, she decides they have to bring him back to life by travelling back in time and preventing the shooting. Complications arise - turns out changing the past for the better is hard. This is a brilliant movie and definitely deserves to be nominated for a Hugo next year.