How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed By Jared Diamond: Article Analysis

In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond describes the experiences of seafaring Vikings and Polynesians. In each case, Diamond alludes to the fact that people’s biases – both ancient and modern – have clouded our understanding of these two groups. In this paper, I will demonstrate how bias can affect understandings – both past and present – of Vikings and Polynesians. I will do this by briefly describing some of those biases, as recounted by Diamond. I will then utilize documents from chapter 6 of Merry Wiesner’s text, Discovering the Global Past, to show examples of how bias has clouded our interpretations of Vikings and Polynesians. To begin with, the biases recounted by Diamond are subtle, but not impossible to find. In both cases of

In other words, there is little to no authentic writing from both cases. This in itself causes a sense of bias for every document that is read, as said documents could be written by an individual who did not like the Vikings or Polynesians; one could see this clearly in Document 1, Chapter 6, of Merry Wiesner’s text. Titled, History of the Archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen, the document refers to an incident when the Vikings, “landed in Saxony and devastated all the coastland of Frisia and Hadeln” (Adam of Bremen qtd. In Tschan 1). The document describes the Vikings as “barbarians” and “mighty and memorable” (Adam of Bremen qtd. In Tschan 1). The Vikings were said to have then “attacked the entire province with impunity”, meaning leaving no person untouched from their force (Adam of Bremen qtd. In Tschan 1). After that, the Vikings took captives upon their huge ships to become slaves (Adam of Bremen qtd. In Tschan 1). During one night, one of the captives escaped, causing the Vikings to become eminently angry and sever the hands, feet, and noses of their captives and throwing them onto land, probably to die (Adam of Bremen qtd. In Tschan 1). Of