The Rice Theory Of Culture

Summary

Thomas Talhelm’s overview of a bold idea: that what people farmed shaped how they relate. Paddy rice “required twice as much labor per hectare as wheat farming”, plus shared irrigation, so farmers built customs to share the work. The result, he argues, was “a tight society, where people depended on each other, and individual farmers had less freedom of movement”.

Rationale

It’s a vivid case of what we mean by dispositions grown from what people do together, day after day, on the land. We’d hold its neat rice–wheat contrast more loosely.