Part 1: Choosing Mobility
At its largest (and smallest) scale, history (and the end of prehistory) is the story of competition for power and resources. Individuals, families, states and empires have competed with each other for ten thousand years and more. Much of that story is about the different strategies employed in this competition: hunting vs. gathering, herding vs. farming, raiding vs. trading... These strategies represent different ways of accumulating resources, and thereby power.
Early on, the critical resource was food - enough to feed the individual and the small group. Families with better strategies for their time and place had more food, and were more likely to thrive. At the beginning of history, the neolithic revolution - domestication of plants and animals - had made food relatively plentiful; people (and to a lesser degree large animals like horses) became the critical resource. States that could control more people (and horses) could win wars, build pyramids and leave records for us to read. Arguably, this continued until the advent of modernity and the arrival of fossil fuels. Coal and oil outweigh human power by enormous factors, and have changed global dynamics - powerful states were now the ones that could control fossil fuel, and later nuclear power.
In each of these periods, there were many different strategies for accumulating food, people and oil. However, we can generally divide these into mobile strategies and sedentary strategies. Hunting requires covering more ground than gathering, and is riskier, but the reward is a big bunch of good food at once. Farming focuses on extracting as many nutrients from a limited space as possible, herding makes up for sparse natural wealth by ranging animals across greater areas. The escalation of these strategies - nomadism and irrigation further differentiate these. Nomads, by covering even more ground can survive in areas of even sparser biomass. Irrigation, as well as fertilizer, pesticides and other farming inputs enable even larger crops out of a small area. There are intermediary strategies - hybrid farming-herding, swidden farming and so on - but these represent the two basic models: stay in one place to concentrate returns, or move faster and further to cover more ground.
The empires that formed on the basis of these divergent strategies looked vastly different. On the one hand, places like China built huge population densities and stored tons of grain. They built walls to keep people in as much as to keep raiders out. They ramped up investment in agriculture, and built standing armies. On the other hand, places like Mongolia remained sparse. People, sheep and horses ranged across large areas. Armies were generally temporary and made up for their inferior numbers with superior mobility. With a horseback army, leaders like Genghis Khan could take on ground-bound forces more than ten times the size, simply by avoiding fighting them all at once. Mobility vs. density. The balance of power between these strategies went back and forth.
Having covered the basic concept of mobility, let's return to the argument that inorganic power sources have changed the game in modernity - that human power is no longer the determinant of strong states. I don't buy that premise on the grounds that food and labor are still clearly important. There are certainly states that are powerful on the basis of their energy resources - Saudi Arabia, Canada... But most of the big powers in the world are populous - China, the US... More importantly, control of money and information has clearly become a major determinant of world power: England is a financial power, Germany a technological power...
So what have been the financial and technological strategies of these powers? For much of the so-called "Information Age" (which I would argue has origins far earlier than the computer), the sedentary strategy has dominated. Learning was kept in books in libraries, and money was kept in banks. This is where computers and the internet came in. Just as nomadism came after farming, the mobility strategy of information followed the sedentary one. Information has become diffuse, and we have begun to domesticate horses that allow us to range across it.
The earliest nomad-farmer battles of the information age came from the horse-breeders - the computer scientists. Hackers were the Scythians, the earliest barbarian raiders. Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman are our Attila and Timurlane. Open-source software distributes the labor for its creation across hundreds of volunteers, just as nomadic armies were made up of thousands of part-time warriors/full time herders. Wikipedia does similar things (imperfectly) with general knowledge. In perfect irony, open-source hardware is now growing to include technology for building farm equipment. The increasing treatment of financial instruments as pure information has caused all kinds of chaos, and its hard to tell who the barbarians are...
Anyway, this is all a lead-in to what I hope will be an extended meditation. Academia is a largely feudal/bureaucratic institution built to house and control the distribution of knowledge. When the Universities of Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca and Paris, and for that matter the Hanlin Academy and the Library of Alexandria were founded, hand-copied books were the best we had. Knowledge beyond what a single person could create and remember had to be housed in sedentary locations, and it made sense to collect it. But for scholars, the printing press was our wheel, movable type our chariot, the computer our saddle and the internet our stirrup. So I ask, in the middle of our nomadic revolution, what would it look like for an academic to choose mobility?
Reading List
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Own Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China
David Christian, "Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History"
3 comments:
Well, first of all, I'm glad you were paying attention in the Inner Asia lecture.
Let's not forget that human endeavors are, in part, about celebrating our humanness. Scholarship, as the creation of information, doesn't necessarily have to be social: A computer could, theoretically, produce and test hypotheses. Ultimately, a person has to read and make use of them, of course. But scholarship as creativity, as the production of meaningful information, needs a community. (Imagined, perhaps.) (My little mantra: Creativity is a social phenomenon.)
So, I ask you to look beyond the Eurasian Steppe as a Cartesian plane and see its human geography, post-stirrup: What did the Mongols do with that technology? They raided. They changed warfare. (Maybe this is where you were headed.) But they didn't do it with thousands of individuals in a faceless horde! They did it by uniting small, hierarchical groups held together by loyalties, charisma, and patronage. Wow, sounds like Harvard!
Individually, one such group could ride into the great centers of the world's learning and civilization and carry off a few scraps. But was the knowledge distributed among the hordes (Mongol word, here used in its Mongol sense) equivalent in some sense to that stored up by the libraries and scholars of Bukhara? Scholars are not scholars unless they are producing monuments, whether the Hagia Sophia or a child's grave marker. Furthermore, intellectual creativity appears primarily when two distinct schools of thought of a certain size are in interaction. It has to be part of the superstructure.
A nomadic horde-member in the computer age is only an information-gatherer, maybe an information-sharer. A nomadic scholar will always be part of a group, and one that closely resembles academia. What might *that* look like, now that we're stirrup'd in? Arguably, it's already happening: I've organized a panel with young colleagues from universities around the world, and we're forming a tactical propaganda brigade of historiography, mounting a raid on a major conference with the intent of future conquest.
On the other hand... Okay. You can be what's called a manaschi, someone who can recite the days-long Kyrgyz "Epic of Manas" from memory. Is this where you want to take information and scholarship? An artistic, continuous process of recitation and subtle alteration of compelling narratives?
I got to writing a long comment, and so put it up over in my Infopolitics space. Would love to continue this conversation!
http://infopolitics.net/2011/09/the-nomadic-mode-of-scholarly-production/
Tewpiq
First, I am wowed that people are actually reading and posting responses, so it took me a while to get to this.
I agree that scholarship is to a large degree about what we leave behind (for later scholars). Your point that this is largely about records and the scholarly community is well taken. Nonetheless, I think we must consider our position as scholars in terms of class and not just culture. Traditional scholars are not just sedentaries, they are elite sedentaries atop the information heap. Even graduate students are like knights or minor functionaries. By extension, a nomadic academic would not simply be a member of the information horde, but rather a member of its leadership class. My question is, how can we build alternative forms of information-controlling and -distributing institutions.
I think, to extend the Mongol metaphor, what I would like to focus on is one of the other results of nomad empires, which is to say trans-ecological trade. To me, being a nomad academic would mean feasting off this type of exchange - interdisciplinary and between the academy and RL - rather than sitting atop a disciplinary storehouse of specialized knowledge.
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