Cloud Atlas and Marvin Harris

Cloud Atlas and Marvin Harris

Memories of graduate level anthropology from the 1970’s seem now like they are from some parallel universe. Being like something from out of the Australian shaman dream time. It was a era full of Lorenz and Leaky and rational thought about human behavior based on biological observations and physical archeology. One of the books students were forced to buy was Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris.

The book may have remained forgotten in my large collection had it not been for a movie called Cloud Atlas. After watching the movie I immediately started thinking about Marvin Harris. Thus stimulated I found myself digging out his book Cannibals and Kings and rereading it.

So like real-life Cloud Atlas characters in a long chain of bearers of some ancestral wisdom let us rediscover Marvin Harris in the context of Cloud Atlas.

The book Cloud Atlas was of course written by David Mitchell and he has mention little concerning his inspiration. If there is some comet-tailed link back to the anthropologists of the 1970’s we may never know. Yet that quintessential anti-establishment saga and movie directed by Lana Wachowski did not come out of the belly of neo-liberal Hollywood.

Anthropologist Marvin Harris likewise did not come out of the belly of the prevalent postmodern academia. Harris was assigned for the purpose of critique not necessarily adulation. Rather than disregarding human hierarchal relationships in anthropological study, Harris was defiantly pursuing the opposite. By 1977 non-western and ancient cultures were already being redefined at great speed from being mindless heathen savages directly to untouchable bucolic icons without regard to physical evidence.

In the first few sentences of Cannibals and Kings Harris lays down the radical theory that there is no progression from the savagery of “lower” cultures to the enlightenment of modern cultures. As we will learn human inequity and suffering transcends technological advancement and cultural refinement. During his time notions of Marvin Harris landed with the grace of a gunny sack full of lead bricks.

 

Similarly through a series of flash backs and flash forwards the Wachowski movie shows that this singular story will equally traverse the span of human cultural development. Cloud Atlas first settles in to illuminate the character Dr. Henry Goose who is an amateur anthropologist excavating cannibal teeth. The audience is quickly introduced to the concept of weaker humans being the prey of stronger humans in the most literal sense.  In an ironic twist we will find that Dr. Goose is as much a cannibal living off the lives of others who are under his care.

Marvin Harris will likewise make the argument of sacrificial cannibalism as a policy of economics not religious peculiarity. Harris then goes on to classically define the progressions of culture from the Pristine State to the Hydraulic State and beyond. His central theme being that oppressive hierarchy develops where humans do not have the ability to easily leave. Where the Pristine example is an area of high density food production surrounded by desert or in the Hydraulic example where the need for irrigation requires cooperative efforts. And from these we get class differentiation and the concept of humans being trapped by physical conditions unable to leave. Harris writes:

“Under the tutelage of the state, human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grovel, kneel, and kowtow. In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery.”

Cloud Atlas explores the class struggle in the obvious form of slavery but also in the more subtle form of modern 1930’s characters trapped at an estate by a capricious upper class manipulator. The wife Jocasta Ayrs is a Jew who has fled Germany and is treated more like a home decoration than human. The other is a talented homosexual assistant who is to be robbed of his work and also controlled in a slave-like fashion.

Layering these concepts of control and exploitation regardless of technological advancement clearly echo back to what Marvin Harris wrote.

”The technologies of earlier cultures failed again and again, only to be replaced by new technologies. And limits of growth have been reached and transcended only to be reached and transcended again. Much of what we think of as contemporary progress is actually a regaining of standards that were widely enjoyed during prehistoric times.”

In the next vignette Cloud Atlas ponders exploitation by the contemporary corporate state in the form of a 1970's crime drama. Reporter Luisa Rey is pitted against corporate executive Lloyd Hooks.

This is where both Cloud Atlas and Cannibals and Kings uniquely converge. Harris writes of dynastic infrastructure:

“In hydraulic societies pauperization and dynastic collapse were typically associated with the decay and disrepair of the waterworks. The first order of business was to restore the hydraulic infrastructure. This was up to the new dynasty, which acted not out of altruism but out of attention to the maximization of its own political and economic welfare.”

Harris then writes in his Epilogue:

“The fuel revolution has opened up the possibility for a more direct form of energy despotism. Energy is now being collected and distributed under the supervision of a small number of bureaus and corporations. It comes from a relatively small number of mines and wells. Hundreds of millions of people can technically be shut off from these mines and wells, starved, frozen, plunged into darkness, rendered immobile by the turn of a few valves and the click of a few switches.”

So how bad can it realistically get? Both Cloud Atlas and Cannibals and Kings entertain the potential of complete dehumanization both figuratively and literally.

The Cloud Atlas character Sonmi experiences complete dehumanization under the future “corporcratic” state. The movie is graphically explicit at this point giving it an R rating. Likewise Marvin Harris is quite lurid in his excessive details of similar dehumanization and exploitation in his book. One might chastise both creators or wonder if it was gratuitous pandering.

Ironically Harris writes:

“I have no intention of asserting that it is part of human nature to enjoy seeing people bruised, burned, and dismembered. But it is part of human nature to pay rapt attention to unusual sights and sounds such as blood spurting from wounds and loud shrieking and howling. (And even then, many of us turn away in horror.)”

Perhaps the point here is that humans instinctively start strongly paying attention when people are seriously harmed or brutally killed? The timid character Sonmi is only moved to action upon witnessing the most gruesome atrocity.

So in closing the modern deluge of spam information increasingly separates us from our classical foundations like anthropologist Marvin Harris. Like the movie character Somni we are now reduced to getting our political positions from a tag line in a comedic movie. I am encouraged that there may be in our future a rediscovery of our intellectual foundations.

For those who have seen Cloud Atlas perhaps this discussion my allow you to watch it again in a new light. For those that have not seen the movie this review should not be a significant spoiler.



Commentary By
David Schultz