
How Rice Farming Shaped Culture in Southern China (2018) - KhoomeiK
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3199657
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_bxg1
Can we replace the editorialized title with the original?

> How Rice Farming Shaped Culture in Southern China

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codezero
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](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.

~~~
hogFeast
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).

~~~
lifeisstillgood
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.

~~~
Proven
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.

~~~
hogFeast
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.

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DyslexicAtheist
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed)

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

~~~
ornel
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

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lifeisstillgood
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 :-)

~~~
Kalium
> \- 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.

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trynumber9
Reading the irrigation and labor sections, it seems related to the hydraulic
despotism theory.

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bezmenov
> 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/](https://fs.blog/2016/04/narrative-fallacy/)

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sharker8
Potatoes = Eutopia?

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bhaak
What about maize?

~~~
Kerrick
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.

~~~
klyrs
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)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_\(agriculture\))

~~~
throw0101a
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](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](https://twitter.com/KnowledgeCiv)

* [http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/](http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/)

