I too have read Never in Anger, the ethnography mentioned in this blog post, and the way I found it was by reading a survey of egalitarian societies called Hierarchy in the Forest, by Christopher Boehm. Many of the personality traits that the author seems to think are special about people who share the East Asian phenotype are actually common amongst fiercely egalitarian societies. It is normal to highly police socio-emotional expression and to regard angry tribe members with suspicion. The !Kung San live in a hot climate and are like this. The Montenegro Serbs live in the Balkans, a rather different climate, and are also like this. I finished Hierarchy in the Forest with the strong impression that no member of any modern society could tolerate the lack of personal expression required to suppress any would-be chiefs.
This person could've spent a lot less time going down a rabbit hole with a couple introductory anthropology classes and by asking themselves if there were any societies with these same traits in a warm climate. It is poor scientific reasoning not to check for examples of this personality type in hot climates. Not exactly PhD material.
> Many of the personality traits that the author seems to think are special about people who share the East Asian phenotype are actually common amongst fiercely egalitarian societies.
This is an obvious mischaracterization of the hypothesis, though.
The author says nothing about whether other cultures and groups share this egalitarian tendency.
Just that East Asians tend to share this tendency and that it must transcend cultural specifics such as Confucianism, by comparing East Asians to Inuits who predate Confucianism by at least 8000 years, and positing that cold environment adaptation was the driver.
Whether the paper’s data and analysis is PhD worthy is a different matter, but it’s an interesting hypothesis.
As a Brit, I thought "are they just describing the 'stiff upper lip' or something?".
Which is doubly odd, because here that is more associated with upper-middle-classes. That cold stoicism that causes people to act 'gentlemanly' regardless of circumstance, or parents to pressure their children to be upwardly mobile, generals to describe an unwinnable position as "a bit of a pickle" etc. etc.
In Britain this is definitely seen as a class characteristic rather than a climatic one (we all live in a similarly temperate environment).
Something can be special without being unique. That there exist a handful of other cultures with similar traits, does not disprove those traits are not also selected-for by cold climates, or (in at least some cases) genetic in origin.
This person could've spent a lot less time going down a rabbit hole with a couple introductory anthropology classes and by asking themselves if there were any societies with these same traits in a warm climate. It is poor scientific reasoning not to check for examples of this personality type in hot climates. Not exactly PhD material.