Culture: Mormon returns to describe “the more idle part of the Lamanites.” Rather than living in cities under the rule of kings, these Lamanites dwell in “tents.” Whatever structure this might be, it is not urban. This description suggests that they are only loosely part of the Lamanite polity—perhaps “Lamanite” only because they are not Nephite (Jacob 1:14). Many of these “idle” Lamanites are along the coast “in the place of their fathers’ first inheritance,” or the landing site on the Guatemalan coast.
Conditions there were such that Mormon’s pejorative adjective “idle” might have an environmental explanation. John Sorenson notes:
As Nephi tells the story, the Lamanites down in the hot lowlands were nomadic hunters, bloodthirsty, near naked, and lazy (2 Nephi 5:24; Enos 1:20). The circumstances of life in that environment could account for some of those characteristics. Many centuries later the Spaniards spoke in like terms of natives in the same area. The Tomas Medel manuscript, dating about A.D. 1550, just a generation after the first Spaniards arrived in the area, reported that the Indian men on the Pacific coast of Guatemala “spent their entire lives as naked as when they were born.” That practice may have seemed a sensible response to the oppressive climate. In the late seventeenth century Catholic priest Fuentes y Guzman contrasted the “lassitude and laziness” of the same lowlanders with the energy of the highland inhabitants. As for getting a living, the tangle of forest and swamp along the coast itself may have been too hard for the Lamanite newcomers to farm effectively, since they wouldn’t immediately get the knack of cultivation in that locale. (They, or their fathers, might not even have been farmers in Palestine.) It may have been economically smart for them to hunt and gather the abundant natural food from the estuaries, while again the damp heat would make their lack of energy understandable.
Geography: Sorenson suggests that the following data may be extracted from this information:
This strip [of wilderness] is “on the west of the land of Zarahemla,” not in that land., hence the greater land of Zarahemla was not conceptualized to reach the west coast, while the general land of Nephi was. No hint is ever given that Nephites settled or traveled in the strip between the west sea and the (obviously mountain) boundary of the (Sidon basin or) land of Zarahemla.… The Lamanites may have controlled this west strip formally from early on, as 22:28 suggests, or perhaps only Lamanite squatters occupied it. Either arrangement would explain how their armies could move to attack Ammonihah undetected by Nephites (16:2, 49:1). But possibly the territory was neutral, occupied primarily by a population unconnected politically with either Nephites nor Lamanites, the inhabitants not sufficiently strong to oppose a large Lamanite army if it determined to pass through, let alone to cause any problem for the Nephites on the other side of the wilderness mountain barrier.