“the first book-length work of ethnography I’ve read”
Somewhat uncharitably, I’d suggest that you still have the first work of ethnography to read. I think the key feature of any ethnography since about 1920 is the search for meaning rather than superficial features of the observed. It’s not what sense the observation (no matter how accurate) makes to you, it’s about what sense it makes to those described.
The question of whether you can generalise these observations is really the wrong one to ask in this sense. The things Semyonova describes are commonly found across cultures but they do not necessarily ‘mean what you think they mean’. You should really be asking, can I particularize my assumptions about what the ‘good life’ is?
An example of this is conflating rituals with their surface meanings. For instance, the examples of brides wailing at their wedding or mothers insulting their children are not particularly disturbing if you think of them as conventionalised expressions. Many cultures will be hesitant to compliment children lest they attract attention of evil spirits. The idea of children being constantly told that they are being loved or they will be forever scarred is a recent American invention. Sure, the children’s lives were pretty miserable because of the poverty and disease but gruesome lullabies are not an evidence of this. Neither were 9-year olds taking care of younger siblings. Semyonova didn’t have the advantage of reading other ethnographic accounts, so her observations were colored by assumptions about normative families. I recommend David Lancy’s “The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings”—the subtitle says it all.
Also, it is dangerous to equate ritual humiliations to real ones. Many cultures will sanction vicious practical jokes while at the same time placing great value on individual dignity. They just differ on what constitutes such dignity. The conditions of brides in patrilinear societies were often ritually very degrading but the actual conditions were more complicated. The women were not be brides forever.
The question of gender is always a complicated one. You will notice that women were as much perpetrators as victims of the oppression of women. While domestic violence would have been rampant, it is hard to know the extent of it compared to other cultures just based on Semyonova’s account. It would probably not have been that unusual even in the cities of her time.
Of course, Semyonova had a point. The Russian peasant or the Kalahari bushman (of Sahlin’s ‘original affluent society’) are not some noble primaeval exemplars unspoilt by modernity’s alienation from what it means to be a true human being. If you want many more much worse examples, go to Robert Edgerton’s ‘Sick Societies’. (Pinker mentions some of those.) But even Edgerton cannot help but acknowledge that individuals can and do find personal happiness and fulfilment even in these contexts.
In the case of Russian peasant women in particular, their “connection” to husbands who beat them, in-laws who scorned and humiliated them, and a community that offered no support, was not enriching but immiserating.
This is where Semyonova fails you the most. Those people were connected in myriad of ways which made any survival at all possible. She essentially treated everyone as little middle class nuclear family units—but the peasants would have been a part of much wider kinship networks which is what would have ensured survival. A modern ethnographer would have started with outlining kinship networks and their interconnectedness. At least from your account, she did not do that.
The peasants would have also been involved in a lot of religious observance with a political dimension. I can’t find the reference, but there was a lot of turmoil even in the 1700s to do with religious reform and the politics of baptism. These were not just stereotypical wife-beating drunks, who ate gruel and kicked their children when they annoyed them.
It is also important to note that East European peasantry of that time were less than 2 generations away from the abolishment of serfdom—so essentially dealing with the legacy of conditions that were only marginally different from that of slavery. Those conditions would have also imposed limits on social structure and organisation that were to persist until collectivisation and mechanisation—when they came to be seen as ‘the good old ways’.
The escape from those “connections,” provided by wealth, education, and opportunities for jobs and migration, would have been a boon.
This is a very ahistorical statement. To escape to the opportunities provided by wealth in the last 40 or so years, perhaps, when it is backed by socialist state capacity (and America is socialist in this sense). But to escape to the cities of their time, particularly women, would have been much more exposed to exploitation and most would have found it very psychologically stressful. Accounts of the urban poor are, after all, not any more difficult to find or less harrowing to read.
There are no easy conclusions here. It’s hard to imagine living in those conditions and find any sense of thriving or wellbeing. But people did. Not all, not all the time. There was no inherent virtue nor nobility in those conditions, but there was humanity—in all that it involves. I think any notion of progress needs to start with the acknowledgement of that complexity.
Opponents of progress make the opposite mistake because they see themselves as defending some imaginary romanticised essence of humanity. But progress studies, should take contextual meaning more seriously. Because without meaning, what are we?
Two thoughts.
The 10x productivity number is (as you say) only for specific tasks - and even for core tasks, anything that can be sped up by a factor of 10 is unlikely to be more than 50% of the job—and probably much less. This is because pretty much nobody does the core thing they do more than about 70% of the time. And 10% time savings across ten tasks does not add up to 100% saving.
But I think you underestimate how useful “vibecoding” has become for many people with agent tools. So, instead you’re getting expansion and not replacement. People with existing codebases are getting small productivity increases, people who could barely code are going things they would never even attempt. And those tools are new—months to weeks, so they will take a while to show up in our lived lives. And they may never show up in existing software because the code is too complex and getting it into a feature takes too much effort. The bottle neck is not the ability of programmers to produce the code but the coordination of getting multiple code changes into productoin. This is not just AI. Any start up going from MVP to product seems to be shipping features daily but eventually this slows down as the software gets bigger.