Social Relations as Adaptive Technology ( people and cultures of the middle east )

write an essay that shows how Middle East social orzanization has helped the region's population (a) to adjust to environmental changes and (b) to create magnificent civilizations. 1. The history chapter by Arthur Goldschmidt reviews the rise of these civilizations. It reviews the rise of agriculture, cities, writing, monotheistic religions, and centralized governments ("states"). These all took place as result of the social inventions invented by Middle East people to better adjust to the changes in their environment so that they could survive and even thrive, and not just kill one another and die out. 2. The gender segregation of space article by Rayna Reiter where, in the 2nd part of her article, she shows that Middle East societies historically avoided the disaster of mistaken central government policy/decision-making ("central planning") by keeping the single-ruler government at a great distance and by reinforcing kinship as a means of efficiently organizing people based on birth, marriage, and trust. Before the modemperiod, the kinship system was "decentralized" - there was no single paramount ("supreme)leader/ruler who ordered communities to adjust but perhaps made bad decisions and mistakes that ruined -people's lives. 3. The Eickelman and Adra articles discuss tribes and their segmentation. Segmentation allows entire groups of people (and not just single individuals as is the case today) that are sub-tribes (clans and lineages) to leave and migrate away from an area in times of over-population (or, the same thing, under-resourced) or to move in and be adopted in times of under-population (or, the same thing, over-resourced). Entire communities, or sub-communities adjust to environmental changes (no water, too little rain; floods, too much rain). 4. The cousin-marriage articles, especially Keyser's article, discuss marriage as a way of linking 2 families so that their separate resources are conserved ("kept together") or else mutually accessed (obtained or used), but the latter done in a dependable, trustworthy way. It allows a grandfather's descendants to (a) conserve internal resources (such as land) if they are under- resourced, or scarce, but it also allows them to (b) reach out and access othe external sources, yet still knowing that reciprocity requires the "outsiders" to also acces granddad's wealth. Building iron-clad trusted relationships of artificial kinship guarantees (t much as possible) that in-laws don't become out-laws.