Communications

ARTICLES

To the Editor:

While the facts may be correct in Thomas W. Gallant's article "Honor, Masculinity, and Ritual Knife Fighting in Nineteenth-Century Greece" [/journals/ahr/105.2/ah000359.html], what those facts may mean leaves us unconvinced. For example, words the article uses to show Greek culture instead reveal Italian: stiletto (pp. 361, 364, 366, and 382), causae belli (p. 363), onoré (p. 365), sappiamo ch'e la vostra madre, ma suo padre il Dio sa (p. 366), pericolo di vita (p. 367).

     The northern Ionian Islands are within a hundred miles of Italy. For a thousand years, these islands were under many different foreign rulers, often Venetian. The influence of the Italian invaders is pervasive in the Ionian Islands. Gallant passes over the consideration that the Italians introduced and encouraged violence in general and stiletto knife fighting in particular. To keep the Greeks divided among themselves?

     Whereas the Italians are essential to his story, the United States may not be. Gallant introduces dueling in the United States into the body of his text, nonetheless, at nine places (pp. 362, 371, 372 [twice], 373, 374–75 [twice], 380, and 381). If Gallant is going to introduce the U.S. perspective to his sense of aristocratic violence, he should also include the black reaction in the courts of the land. We still wonder whether the Greek reaction in the courts of their land was about eliminating foreign injustice rather than learning something new from the foreigners.

     While we think Gallant has done commendable work researching his facts, we are not convinced he understands the relationship of those facts to Greek experiences.

Raymond J. Jirran and Van Polyson

Newport News, Virginia

Thomas W. Gallant does not wish to respond.

The Editors

To the Editor:

Daniel A. Segal's article in your June issue [AHR 105 (June 2000): 770–805] is based on a false assumption: that authors of Western Civ and World Civ texts are free to write what they want. Anybody who knows anything about the college textbook business knows that this is not true: these textbooks are produced under the closest possible supervision of a publisher's staff.

     It costs a minimum of a quarter of a million dollars to bring out a new Civ text; no publisher will allow the academic authors to roam free. A market has to be assured.

     The authors first have to submit chapter outlines, which the publisher's staff approves, after submitting this outline to a group of college teachers in community and state colleges for comment and approval. Then as each chapter of the book is submitted, it is send out for detailed review and comment by at least two—sometimes four or five—of these academic critics. Their proposals for revision are then sent back to the author of the chapter, with a checklist of changes the publisher's staff demands. When the revised chapter is submitted, the review process starts all over again.

     In the end, a writer on the publisher's staff may write the final, published version, which can be at substantial variance from the original draft.

     With this process, the finished book represents the publisher's sense of the market, not the ideas of the authors. This system makes the textbooks' contents intellectually conservative. One Civ book varies not more than 20 percent from any other; the differences lie more in the pictures, maps, and graphics than in the prose.

     A radically new Civ text along anthropological lines that Segal wants will never see the light of day, will never even get contracted for. Segal, you and your referees are living in a dream world.

Norman F. Cantor

Hollywood, Florida

To the Editor:

We have read with interest and some degree of dismay Daniel A. Segal's "'Western Civ' and the Staging of History," in AHR 105 (June 2000). The article presents an interesting review of the development of "Western Civ" as a field of study and challenging analysis of the concept of world history. It raises a number of methodological and epistemological issues that all historians, and especially those interested in comparative history and world history, let alone anthropological approaches to history, will find provocative. The article provides a very useful analysis of the origins of the genre, but in the closing section, which examines contemporary World History texts, we found Segal's description of the text in which we collaborated (Stearns, Adas, and Schwartz, World Civilizations) to be something of a caricature: misleading in some places and simply wrong in others.

     Segal questions the use of "civilization" as a basis for the inclusion of societies in a World History text. He suggests repeatedly that there are alternatives, but he, in fact, offers none explicitly, so it is difficult to imagine what his World History text would look like, what would be gained and what would be lost by removing "civilization" as the organizing principle. His point that we cannot know the future so it is wrongheaded to normalize the present is well taken, but while he claims that he is not advocating the impossible task of telling all human histories, he seems to negate the principal task of World History to be the description and analysis of interactions, contacts, and comparisons between societies. He seems, rather, to be suggesting that the principal goal should be to discuss the variety of human experience. If interactions, contacts, and comparisons can be accepted as legitimate themes for World History, then his desire to move away from a focus on "civilizations" seems to us misguided, a strategy perhaps more suited to a text in anthropology than one in history.

     "Civilization" seems to be burdened by Segal with a heavy load of evolutionary prejudice, and by concentrating on its role in human history, he suggests that other "alternative" ways of life are being slighted in reviews of the past. For him, to concentrate on civilizations is to imply that those who did not live in them are less "civilized," or "evolved" in some kind of Victorian evolutionary scheme. We cannot speak for other authors or texts, but we did not see "civilization" as an evolutionary stage and explicitly said so. In our text, "civilization" was given a very limited meaning: societies relying on sedentary agriculture able to produce surpluses that support elites and craft specialization, with a degree of social stratification, as well as population concentrations in urban areas. We emphasized that this lifestyle has existed for only about 9,000 years of the 2.5 million of human existence and that other lifeways were possible and quite viable, but we believed that since, in recent times, the vast majority of the world's population has lived in civilizations, it is not unreasonable to use them as an organizing principle and to focus on their role in history.

     Hunter/gatherers seem to be the peoples that Segal feels are slighted in World History texts, but there are other lifeways as well. In fact, World Civilizations devoted two substantial chapters to the nomadic peoples of the Arabian peninsula and Central Asia, and long sections to the cultures and peoples of Polynesia, as well as the "stateless" societies of Africa. We were not unaware of the tendency toward "social evolutionary" understandings, and we sought in a number of places to point out the dangers of using Western measuring rods of technology and writing as the only means of evaluating human accomplishments. We would agree with him that we should be careful not to conflate living peoples who subsist by hunting, gathering, herding, or simple forms of agriculture with those of the ancient past, but the truth is that not only are fewer and fewer peoples able to live exclusively by those means, but even those practicing sedentary agriculture are diminishing today. There are many histories and many possible audiences. Which are the histories to be told and to whom? What are the trends to be emphasized—at this point in time? Authors of textbooks have to make choices.

     These are matters of theoretical emphasis, selection, and interpretation, and we look forward to seeing his alternative to the dreary sameness of the World History texts he reviews in the article. We are troubled nevertheless by his reading of the evidence used to draw his conclusions about the existing texts, particularly our own. On one point, Segal is just wrong. He claims that in World Civilizations Native Americans disappear from historical analysis after the period of contact. Segal displays in his Table 2 a chart based on our volume that claims to demonstrate that Native Americans are not mentioned in our text after the eighteenth century. In fact, the chapters on Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries pay a considerable amount of attention to indigenous peoples. The Caste War of Yucatan (p. 740), the effects of the Reforma on Mexico's Indian peoples (p. 741), the Argentine Conquest of the Desert (p. 743), the role of indigenous peoples in the nations of Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico (p. 747), the Mexican Revolution (p. 917), indigenism (p. 918), Guatemalan politics (pp. 925–26), the Bolivian Revolution (p. 927), and, in later editions, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas all received attention. In addition, a long documentary section gave space to indigenous voices such as Domitilia Barros de Chungara of Bolivia (pp. 929–30) and in later editions Rigoberta Menchu of Guatemala. Now Segal's table is based on "Indexed Passages," but we cannot believe that he limited his research to looking up "Native American" or "Indian" in the index as his modus operandi for this article (nor that the AHR would have permitted him to do so). Perhaps if our volume had a more detailed or sophisticated index, his characterization of the book might have been different on this point, but if this was indeed the technique that produced his conclusion, it indicates an unfamiliarity with textbook publishing as much as a flawed method of research. More important, such a method suggests that his preconceived categories of analysis are the only legitimate ones. Thus we should talk of the Maya-speaking campesinos of Chiapas in the twentieth century not as peasants or as revolutionaries but as Native Americans, and if we do not, then supposedly Native Americans have been left out.

     Clearly, he is wrong in our case that "Native American histories do not continue past the selected moments of 'contact,'" but he is correct in that little is said about North American indigenous peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To some extent, that is because this is a book of World History, not U.S. History, and because the process of interaction of Native American peoples with the industrializing societies with which they were in contact is paralleled and represented by similar processes in other places, specifically southern Africa and South America. This is a strategy we think he might applaud since he did admit that not everyone's history can be included in a World History text.

     We would also like to note that our discussion of Native American peoples emphasized the similarities between those who lived in "civilizations" and those who did not, how social and material complexity was sometimes achieved by non-agricultural societies (p. 398), and how the history of Native American peoples confounded many assumptions about the evolutionary nature of civilizational development. Finally, one small point: we are taken to task for suggesting that the Aztec tribute system created a "peculiar" economy and interrupted the normal function of the market (p. 387). This is held out as an example of "naturalizing" capitalism and denying the possibility or value of other economic forms. Segal might have read farther in the chapter to see that non-market arrangements and state-sponsored reciprocity in Inca Peru (p. 396) were also discussed in some detail and compared favorably with the extractive and exploitative Aztec system, which in the last analysis was a major factor in the fall of that empire, not because it was an evolutionary dead end but because the Native American peoples who had been forced to live within it seized the first opportunity to destroy it.

Stuart B. Schwartz

Yale University Michael Adas Rutgers University

Daniel A. Segal replies:

The thoughtful letter from Stuart B. Schwartz and Michael Adas does much to answer Norman F. Cantor's claim that today's textbooks represent only "the publisher's sense of the market, not the ideas of the authors." Much to their credit, Schwartz and Adas demonstrate that they care about the ideas present in the text they wrote with Peter Stearns and, equally, that as scholars and teachers they are open to reflecting on and debating those ideas. Happily, this belies Cantor's deeply cynical view of our colleagues whose names appear on the covers and spines of undergraduate survey textbooks.

     In regard to Cantor's must scurrilous allegation—that "the publisher's staff may write the final, published version"—let me say that after interviewing many textbook authors and a smaller number of editors, I know of no case where such a strong claim can be sustained in regard to the textbooks discussed in my article. Cantor is also mistaken in his claim about the cost of producing a new survey textbook: $500,000 would be a better figure than the $250,000 he provides.

     Yet though Cantor has gone astray on many points, his letter is animated by a genuine insight. It is indeed the case that undergraduate level Western Civ and World History textbooks are today lodged in, and standardized by, a constellation of mutually reinforcing relations, including, but not limited to, the financial relations between publishers and textbook. I would add that the relations between course faculty and the institutional employers of faculty matter as well, as do still other relations, which I discuss elsewhere (Daniel A. Segal, Educated Pasts, forthcoming). Theoretically and politically, it is of the utmost significance that such a constellation of relations can produce so much uniformity in textbooks, in the absence of anything like the Texas State Board of Education, much less the sort of state control of publishing found historically in both fascist and Soviet regimes. Strategically, we must ask, "How can we exercise agency in the face of such a constellation of relations?" In writing and publishing my article, I acted on the view that presenting reasoned arguments to historians through the AHR was one way I could exercise such agency. Cantor thinks otherwise, declaring that I live "in a dream world." In response, I would note that there is a large body of scholarship, much of it amassed in recent years, decrying the racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism of various mass-mediated cultural artifacts. For my part, I see virtue in diverting some of this critical attention to our textbooks, precisely because as faculty we have some authority and control when it comes to the textbooks we teach and author—at least relative to the influence we are likely to have on, say, the next Disney flick or Eminem rap song. But we should expect no improvements in our textbooks if we do not let publishers know that we are disappointed in the highly limited range of textbooks now available to our students. My hope is that my article might catalyze such feedback to publishers.

     Turning to the letter from Schwartz and Adas, let me say first that I appreciate their interest both in the historical portion of my argument and in the article's larger theoretical concerns. I also want to acknowledge—as I should have in my article—that working within the confines of a journal article, and writing about a set of textbooks as a set, I was not able to do justice to the complexity of each textbook I discussed, theirs included. Nonetheless, after reviewing their letter, the passages of their textbook they highlight in that letter, and the full chapters those passages appear in, I am not able to revise my overall conclusions about contemporary textbooks, theirs included.

     The most fundamental allegation in their letter is that I, Daniel Segal, have "burdened" the concept of civilization "with a heavy load of evolutionary prejudice." Sure. And Al Gore invented the Internet. What I mean to suggest, of course, is that undergraduates do not read the word "civilization" fresh, without preconceptions, as they might read the term "infrastructure," were they to encounter the latter in an undergraduate textbook. Rather, "civilization" is both in wide circulation and heavily freighted with the violence of social evolutionary and racial distinctions. In noting in their letter that their textbook offers some caveats in its use of "civilization," and that in some passages it attempts to make the word mean a great deal less than it does in ordinary circulation, Schwartz and Adas fail to face up to the profound difficulty of writing against received or institutionalized meanings. Imagine, if you will, an author proclaiming innocence after using the "s" word ("savage") on the grounds that she had provided a definition that gave the term a "limited meaning," ostensibly free of associations with racial distinctions and/or judgments about worthiness. The rub is that the re-making of meaning is a much tougher business than inserting such a definition into the flow of a larger narrative. But let us not be content with only such a theoretical response; let us look again at World Civilizations, in light of the letter from two of its authors.

     The letter tells us that their textbook takes the "principal task of World History" to be the "analysis of interactions, contacts, and comparisons between societies." Yet in the textbook itself, we find this task identified as but one of "two principle subjects" of World History—the other being the study of "the evolution of leading civilizations" (Stearns, Adas, and Schwartz, World Civilizations, 2d edn., xxi). Somehow, this second "principal subject" goes unmentioned in their letter, where they claim that I—not they—have put social evolutionary thinking into their textbook.

     Similarly, in their letter, Schwartz and Adas claim that their textbook "emphasized . . . that other lifeways"—outside of civilization—"were . . . quite viable." Yet their textbook offers students this sketch of life outside of civilization, depicted "on the average": "They crouched around their campfires in constant fear of animal predators and human enemies. They were at the mercy of the elements . . . they had a few crude tools and weapons; their nomadic existence reflected their dependence on the feeding cycles of migrating animals" (Stearns, Adas, and Schwartz, World Civilization, 2d edn., 13). I will not repeat here the line of interrogation I provided in my article in response to similar passages from other textbooks, since the relevant point is again that their letter either overlooks, or is blind to, their textbook's reinscription of social evolutionary images of Others outside of civilization.

     Schwartz and Adas's most specific, and best documented, charge of misrepresentation on my part concerns the table on page 795 of my article. The table is unfair to their textbook, they argue, because it is a table only of "Indexed Passages." As such, it fails to register passages about Native Americans that are present in their text but missing from the entries in their index that I used when making the table. According to the letter, the linking of Native Americans to a past that is complete and superseded is an artifact of the index, and is safely absent from the text itself.

     As Schwartz and Adas recognize, the larger question here is one of method and, I would add, representation. Analyzing a set of twenty textbooks, each composed of some 450,000 words, poses significant practical problems, in terms both of looking in any systematic way through so many words and of presenting one's findings after one has done so. I certainly do not claim that I have read each and every word of these twenty textbooks, nor did my article present, without substantial distillation, the results of what I found by sifting through them. Instead, I have adopted a number of strategies for looking systematically at specific topics in the entire set of texts and for presenting, in a concise form, the general patterns I believe I uncovered. The use of indexed passages for a given topic—found by reading through all the headings in the index, not by restricting myself to a preconceived heading or set of headings—is one such strategy I adopted, though one I supplemented by reading each section within which each of the indexed passages appear and, in most cases, the entire chapter in question. So, too, my article used tables, in conjunction with a narrative synopsis of the general pattern of coverage of Native Americans in world textbooks, so as to spare the reader the task of slogging through separate summaries of this coverage in each textbook. The relevant question is not, then, whether my tables of indexed passages leave out some relevant but unindexed passages—who would expect otherwise?—but whether the pattern changes if we attend to the unindexed passages that are absent from my tables, such as the passages highlighted by Schwartz and Adas for their own textbook.

     In this regard, I would note that if one reads the nine unindexed passages Schwartz and Adas specifically identify in their letter, one finds a significant range in terms of how much or little each passage is concerned with Native Americans. In some, Indians are genuinely a if not the focus of attention, but in at least two cases (pp. 740 and 917), I think the absence of indexing is indicative of the quite small role Indians play in the narrative, or to put this slightly differently, for these two passages at least, I think the index is a reliable detector of coverage of Native Americans. A third passage (p. 918) is really not about Indians; it is about the romantic appropriation of "the Indian past" by Mexican nationalists. Turning to the remaining passages, I do not see, for instance, that a short discussion of "the final defeat of the Indians" in nineteenth-century Argentina—to quote from the unindexed discussion on page 743 of their textbook—disturbs the pattern I described, in which Native Americans are represented as superseded in and by history. So, too—to provide a response to the nine passages considered as a whole—though Schwartz and Adas celebrate their text's (unindexed) attention to Native Americans in Latin America after 1800 as evidence of a lack of U.S. parochialism (after 1800, but not before?), we should consider the allegory that is likely set in motion by a narrative in which Native Americans disappear first in the United States and then appear (and disappear) some chapters/decades later in Latin America: for our students, such a narrative may well read as if history lags "south of the border." The general point here—and much in my analysis depends on this point—is that we must look at the distribution of areal coverage over the course of a narrative in its entirety, not just in one "period" of history, to see how a text links peoples and places, on the one hand, to times and stages, on the other.

     Nonetheless, let me affirm that among the unindexed passages that Schwartz and Adas highlight in their letter, we do indeed find some good material on Latin American history and specifically on Indians in Latin American history. Stuart Schwartz is, after all, one of our leading scholars of Latin America. Without question, contra Cantor, such local moments of excellence were not written by editors at a publishing house. The problem is a more difficult one: these local moments of excellence have been written into a conventionalized framework and plot organized by social evolutionary understandings of humanity. To break out of, or even to disturb, such an overall framework and plot requires more than the presence of exceptions reflecting, and produced by, an author's own area of scholarly expertise; it requires both a substantial reworking of the overall outline of these textbooks and a mode of writing, quite the antithesis of textbook prose, that would encourage students to interrogate, rather than reconcile themselves to, such concepts as civilization."

     This brings me to Schwartz and Adas's claim that though my article criticizes mightily, it fails to indicate what an alternative World History textbook or course might look like. In this regard, let me say that I tried in the concluding section of my article—and in particular in the final paragraph—to extract and distill from my argument what I hoped were useful guidelines for producing better textbooks and courses than the ones available to us now. I also used my biographical note to provide readers a web address for the syllabus for the World History course I teach at Pitzer College. Yet while I am happy to share that syllabus, I would stress that the arguments in my article and the guidelines offered in its conclusion open up a wide range of new possibilities, and do not correspond to one and only one "correct" way to teach world history. Indeed, I think it best at this juncture to encourage experimentation within this range of new possibilities, rather than attempt to anoint a single model to replace the extant genres of Western Civ and World History. I would be quite pleased to see Schwartz and Adas participate further in this process of experimentation; they clearly have much to contribute.

Daniel A. Segal

Pitzer College

To the Editor:

I enjoyed Daniel A. Segal's article about textbooks in the June 2000 AHR ("'Western Civ' and the Staging of History in American Higher Education"). Segal is convincing that a discredited version of "stages" in social evolution (also known as "cultural evolution") is still at least implicit in most of today's Western and World History textbooks. I have found and adopted an exception, however—namely Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past by Jerry H. Bentley and Herbert F. Ziegler (New York, 2000).

     I have two quibbles about Segal's article: first, he spends six pages (including three tables) documenting the absence of Native Americans after 1800 in Western and World textbooks, blaming their omission on textbook authors' alleged assumption that "'the backward' inevitably and automatically . . . gives way to 'the developed'" (p. 797). But surely most AHR readers are aware that post-1800 Native Americans (along with most other U.S. survey topics) are omitted from Western and World texts because they are covered in the U.S. texts.

     Second, the main point of Segal's article seems to be "that we [should] recognize the contingency of any and all historical outcomes and, in response, that we [should] robustly bracket our sense of already knowing the trajectory of human existence" (p. 802). So far, so good, but Segal could have been more forthcoming about the actual claims of today's social evolutionists (a.k.a. cultural evolutionists). Segal says that in anthropology "social evolutionary theory is a 'dead horse'—a 'Victorian' one at that" (p. 800). But this is not entirely so. The insight that natural selection tends to favor the survival of organisms and organic systems that are more complex (and thereby more adaptable) is still used by cultural anthropologists such as Robert L. Carneiro.

     Furthermore, this insight is still plausibly useful in history, especially if we think of social complexity the way today's biologists tend to think of organic complexity—as enhancing feedback processes and as multiplying possible responses to environmental challenges. Such survival advantages, conferable by complexity, were emphasized in Brett Fairbairn's 1994 AHR article, "History from the Ecological Perspective: Gaia Theory and the Problem of Cooperatives in Turn-of-the-Century Germany" (AHR 99 [October 1994]: 1203–39). Fairbairn's promising hypothesis there was that history is often analogous to biology: that, in each, the existence of "cooperation" among separate beings within symbiotic systems often furthers survival through natural selection.

     Thus, although Segal in his June 2000 article makes a convincing case that "the capitalist world familiar to our students" is not "something inevitable in the course of human development" but rather is something "historically contingent" (p. 799), I do not agree that historical contingency rules out all hypotheses about social or cultural evolution affecting human history. Fairbairn's 1994 analogy between Gaia theory and historical processes might yet, with further application, show us that human survival through natural selection tends to be furthered by cooperation.

Paul Salstrom

Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College

To the Editor:

Daniel A. Segal ("'Western Civ' and the Staging of History in American Higher Education," AHR 105, June 2000), in his examination of World History textbooks, does not seem to make a distinction between whig history and cultural parochialism, lumping them both together under the rubric of evolution. However, these are two different things and need to be dealt with separately. One could certainly imagine a textbook written in the vein of Immanuel Wallerstein or Eric Hobsbawm, which would be resolutely anti-whig and yet would treat non-Western populations in an essentially similar manner as the textbooks Segal dissects. Such a book would presumably contain phrases like "North America did not offer impressive resistance to the capitalist juggernaut," or "Capitalism was contained by Asian peasant guerrillas." Such an approach, while not presenting Western civilization as the pinnacle of evolution, would nonetheless dismiss non-Western societies, save as a foil to Western civilization.

     The issue of cultural parochialism is a bit more complicated. To deal with it, I think we have to recognize that the enterprise of anthropology differs in certain important respects from that of history.

     The enterprise of anthropology is summed up in the phrase "man's many ways," which, if it hasn't been used as a textbook title, ought to be. One of the standard clichés of freshman anthropology is Rudyard Kipling's ditty about there being "nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays / And every single one of them is right!" (From "In the Neolithic Age.") A tribe of fifty people off in the jungle somewhere is important because they offer an alternative design for living. One can always go and do likewise. Modern anthropology's semi-mythical culture hero is Bronisaw Malinowski, going gloriously native in the Trobriand Islands over the course of several years during the First World War. Put another way, at a certain level, anthropology is about what could happen, rather than what actually did happen.

     The enterprise of history is inevitably concerned with the antecedents of the present. I suppose a comparable tag phrase would be George Santayana's line about those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The whole premise of history is that you can't simply walk away from your own past. That said, a great many antecedents of the modern non-Western world are of Western origin. To take one example, it is all very well to talk about Amazonian Indians, but the incontrovertible fact is that the overwhelming majority of the population of Brazil consists of urban, Portuguese-speaking Roman Catholics of Caucasian and/or African descent. Short of a nuclear war in which all of humanity perishes, these people, all hundred and sixty million of them, are not simply contingent. They are there, living more or less within the tradition of Western civilization, and a world history must necessarily deal with them. The numerical smallness of a given population is a legitimate reason for minimizing its coverage. If alternative World History textbooks are to be written, they will necessarily be based on alternative central interpretations of Western civilization (for example, Dependency Theory), rather than on an attempt to portray Western civilization as parochial and unimportant. History, ultimately, has to pay a certain attention to Leopold von Ranke's dictum: "how it really was" (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

     History and anthropology are both worthwhile subjects. It is, however, far from self-evident that they can be synthesized as a general principle, nor is it valid to criticize one for not carrying out the enterprise of the other.

Andrew D. Todd

Morgantown, West Virginia

Daniel A. Segal replies:

Andrew Todd distinguishes "whig history" from "cultural parochialism," and complains that I have mistakenly conflated them. But his letter does not identify where such error occurs in my argument, and I do not on my own see that it does, so I am at a loss to know how to respond to this charge. The "ditty" from Kipling is one I had not before been exposed to, and I guess I am better off knowing about such things when all is said and done, but I certainly hope that this ditty is no staple of "freshman anthropology." Malinowski is well described as "semi-mythical," but in the wake of the publication of his diaries in 1967, we can say with much certainty that he did not "go native" in the Trobriands, gloriously or otherwise (A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, Norbert Guterman, trans.) Finally, I see no connection at all between recognizing the contingency of existing social orders, in Brazil or anywhere else, and the probability, great or small, of "nuclear war"—though I confess that claiming something to be true "short of nuclear war" gives me the willies, since I think it dangerous to belittle the possibility that the historical experiment with industrial capitalism will come to such a terrible end.

     Nonetheless, Todd is absolutely right to suspect that my argument advocates new sorts of history courses inflected by anthropology (as well as vice-versa, I would add). Todd clearly would prefer to keep each discipline pure and on its own. My view is that if recent disavowals of the distinction between "Europe" and "peoples without history" are to be something other than a sham, then we must be open-minded about, and even welcoming of, reconfigurations of history and anthropology. (My phrasing here is lifted from the ironic title of Eric Wolf's wonderful work, Europe and the Peoples without History, 1982.) How could it be otherwise, given how much the parsing of humanity into historical and non-historical peoples has been lodged in the intellectual division of labor between these two disciplines? Yet let me stress that I think it neither possible to magically transcend existing disciplines nor desirable to try and do without them. Indeed, rather than believing that I or anyone else possess a blueprint for some super-duper "anthro-history," my brief is merely for greater cross-literacy between anthropologists and historians, as a condition of possibility for "working through" both disciplines, in both senses of "working through."

     Turning to the letter from Paul Salstrom, his first line of criticism echoes Schwartz and Adas in suggesting that exclusions of Indians of the United States from World History textbooks can be rationalized as an effect of avoiding U.S.-centrism. But unlike Schwartz and Adas, Salstrom has missed that I did not claim that the disappearance of Indians from history in these texts was limited to the United States. Rather, I claimed to identify a pattern of temporal coverage of Indians in the Americas overall. It thus makes no sense to suggest that the pattern of exclusion, as I described it, is due to a purported division of labor between World and U.S. textbooks. Quite similarly, though I indicted clearly that it was World History texts, rather than Western Civ texts, that were the appropriate test case for my argument—due to the global aspirations and claims of the former—Salstrom has lumped together Western Civ and World History textbooks in responding to me, as if I had equated the absence of Native Americans from Western Civ texts with their absence from World History texts. But beyond sorting out what I did or did not argue in my article, we should note the painful irony of a view that would permit U.S. Native Americans to be excluded from World History textbooks in the name of resisting U.S. parochialism. Surely, a satisfactory globalizing of history must pay attention to, and treat as historical, both marginalized persons within the United States (and within the West) and persons outside the United States (and outside the West). I am, moreover, skeptical about the strategy Salstrom in effect endorses of accepting a division of labor between World and U.S. survey courses, since I think it unrealistic to expect students to fill in and integrate the missing U.S. hole in the World History donut this strategy would create. But the most important point here is the same one I stressed in responding to Schwartz and Adas: we cannot explain exclusions from these textbooks on a piecemeal basis. Rather, we must consider the overall pattern of coverage of an area or identity-grouping if we wish to understand, rather than rationalize, the linkage in these textbooks between peoples and places, on the one hand, and times and stages, on the other.

     Regarding the rest of Salstrom's letter, I am not quite sure what there is for me to say, since the remainder seems to be primarily an invitation to discuss a broader set of issues—and some of these are matters of which I am largely ignorant, for instance, Gaia theory. For what it is worth, however, I will note that, in my view, attempts to understand social life by analogy to biology have yielded precious little insight into human affairs, though certainly not for a lack of true believers. At the same time, I think a second cross-literacy for which there is a crying need today is between history and biology (broadly construed), since I do not see how we will gain a better understanding of such matters as, say, the long-term environmental effects for humanity of centuries of industrialization, except by combining skills in reconstructing the past with knowledge of ecology and human biology.

Daniel A. Segal

Pitzer College

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

To the Editor:

It is somewhat disconcerting to learn from Esther Kingston-Mann that Martin Malia's Russia under Western Eyes, greatly praised by Jack Matlock, among others, as the book "likely to stand as the definitive treatment of the subject for years to come" is, "[a]s a work of history . . . rather an embarrassment" [AHR 105 (April 2000): 643]. While one may appreciate the reasons why the editor of the AHR might have thought it appropriate to approach a Marxist to review the book of one of America's most eminent historians of Russia, known for his anti-Soviet opinions, one cannot but wonder what a Marxist historian as accomplished as Eric Hobsbawm, for example, would have written about Malia's profound and learned work. While he might have expressed certain reservations about Malia's anti-Soviet views, he would almost certainly have seen the work as instructive and illuminating. Regrettably, Kingston-Mann's review is neither.

Stephen R. Graubard, Emeritus

Brown University

Esther Kingston-Mann replies:

As I understand it, Stephen Graubard's frustrations are threefold: 1) although the book has been praised by others, I described Martin Malia's Russia under Western Eyes as "an embarrassment"; 2) the AHR assigned the book for review to "a Marxist," but to the wrong sort of Marxist; and 3) my review is neither instructive nor illuminating.

     I will respond to points 1 and 2, and hope that my responses will prove both instructive and illuminating, if not to Graubard, then to the general readership of the AHR.

     1) My review was not intended as a personal attack on Martin Malia, whose scholarly monographs in the field of Russian intellectual history have been required reading for undergraduate and graduate students in the United States and elsewhere for many decades. However, in my judgment, Malia's book is extremely problematic when considered as a scholarly work published in 1999 rather than 1950.

     To take one significant example: the book's treatment of the Soviet era is wholly and unapologetically unhistorical. The Soviet Union is portrayed as unchanging and unchangingly malign, the site of "the greatest mass hallucination in modern history" (pp. 366, 377). In this rendering of over seventy years of political, economic, social, and cultural crisis and struggle, the scholarship of historians who have researched the rise and fall of the Soviet Union counts for nothing. Instead, we are presented with powerful images of Russia's "Eastern" hordes unceasingly manipulated and terrorized by "an incomprehensibly Oriental" Stalin (labeled here as "the Great Khan") (p. 370).

     Recalling the more unfortunate terms of historical discourse that prevailed in the 1950s, the book uses words such as "Asiatic" and "Oriental" as codewords for every possible variation of evil thought and activity. I confess that I would not have expected a historian publishing a book in the year 1999 to assume that readers would find a description of Stalin as "incomprehensibly Oriental" to be either instructive or illuminating.

     2) Outside the United States, there are many distinguished and "uncloseted" Marxists, such as Eric Hobsbawm and the late E. P. Thompson; that there are far fewer in the United States may be attributable to precisely the sort of "Marxist = pro-Soviet" caricature featured in Graubard's letter. However, before labeling me a Marxist, I would suggest that Graubard read my work. "Marxism and Russian Rural Development: Problems of Evidence, Experience and Judgement," AHR 86 (October 1981): 731–52, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (1983), or In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics and Problems of Russian Development (1999) would be good places to start. If on the other hand, he has already read my books and articles and still wants to make the same argument, I can only recommend that he read them again.

Esther Kingston-Mann

University of Massachusetts, Boston

To the Editor:

In writing my History of the Byzantine State and Society, I decided not to catalog the many places in which later research had superseded George Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State (first published in 1940, last revised in 1963). I hoped that readers who were surprised that I differed with Ostrogorsky would check my references to see why. Lawrence Tritle seems not to have done this before writing his review in the June 2000 AHR: 986–87.

     When Tritle says I "seemingly [fail] to appreciate the internal and external crises" that Diocletian faced in 284—crises I describe in some detail (pp. 5–10)—he apparently fails to appreciate the findings of Ramsay MacMullen and others that the empire had already made substantial progress toward resolving those crises (admittedly not in my references, limited to the period after 284). I nonetheless conclude (pp. 26–27), "Diocletian had assumed power when the empire was in apparently hopeless disorder, and he gave up power . . . when peace and stability had returned." My lack of emphasis on the foundation of Constantinople is deliberate, based on the excellent book of Gilbert Dagron (cited on p. 900), which shows how much more slowly Constantinople developed than had previously been assumed with the help of historical hindsight. My characterization of the Arab attack on Constantinople in 674–78 as a "raid in force," which according to Tritle "ignores what was a major effort by the Umayyad Caliphate . . . to complete the destruction of the empire," follows a demonstration by Paul Lemerle (cited on p. 936 n. 2) that this raiding never amounted to the formal siege long supposed without evidence. As for middle Byzantine society, Tritle seems to expect a restatement of the obsolete views of Ostrogorsky that the "powerful" formed a homogeneous group or that the problematic Farmer's Law is vital evidence; my discussions reflect the work of Michel Kaplan, Michael Hendy, Jean-Claude Cheynet, and Alan Harvey (cited on pp. 908, 912), though I follow only Hendy and Cheynet without significant qualifications (compare p. 894).

     If read without preconceptions from Ostrogorsky, my book answers the questions Tritle raises. "How Constans [II], who shared his reign with regents and lived away from the capital for prolonged periods, could establish a system of military grants that would become a provincial system is unclear" to Tritle. But at the dates I propose for the establishment of those grants, 659–62, Constans was between twenty-nine and thirty-two years old, had had no regent for fifteen years, and had spent most of his life in Constantinople, though he soon left, probably to finish implementing his system in the provinces (see pp. 314–20). On page 667, my reference to "disorganized nomads" means not the Seljuk Turks in general, as Tritle assumes, but the Turks outside the Seljuk sultan's control who invaded Anatolia (as explained on p. 614). The question of "the rapid success of these newcomers in rolling back millennia of Hellenism" I answer a few pages later when noting that the interior of Anatolia (which was not fully Hellenized even in the early Byzantine period; see p. 5) had always been sparsely settled and was soon deserted by much of its Greek-speaking population (see p. 672). I see nothing "confused" in my thinking that regular Byzantine monks were important but that freelance "holy men" were much less so; if Tritle thinks "holy man" is just a synonym for "monk," he has misunderstood not only me but Peter Brown as well.

     Since practically every emperor from Constantine I on claimed authority in religious controversies superior to a priest's, Leo III's claim to be emperor and priest is not "a critical omission" from my discussion of Iconoclasm, but a detail not worth mentioning in a single-volume history. Tritle's assertion that "the name of the . . . church of St. Saviour in Chora means 'in the country' and not 'dwelling'" disregards the mosaic in the church showing Christ labeled "the dwelling (chora) of those who live."

     As I researched my book, I myself was dismayed to find how often my lectures had repeated ideas taken from Ostrogorsky that had since been refuted. Admirable for its time, his history needs replacing precisely because its prestige is perpetuating errors like some of those in Tritle's review.

Warren Treadgold

Saint Louis University

Due to a death in the family, Lawrence Tritle does not wish to respond.

The Editors

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