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Jared Diamond: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

sparkchaser

sparkchaser

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The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.

The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today.

This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. A characteristically provocative, enlightening, and entertaining book, The World Until Yesterday will be essential and delightful reading.
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It's been added to my shopping cart. :buttrock:
 
Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies
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Why did my BS alarm go off when I saw this?

Anyway, when I pine for the old days, I don't go back any further than the 1960's. Newspapers, printed books, no Internet or Wikipedia. I could talk like a damfool know-it-all without some wiseass going to Wikipedia and proving me wrong.

I volunteer sparky to go to the Amazon rain forests and chronicle how he deals with jungle rot and spear wounds.
 
I forgot to post this bit

Jared Diamond, the popular anthropologist with an endearingly apparent comb-over and a tendency toward overgeneralization, is in trouble with the indigenous rights group Survival International because of his new book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Director Stephen Corry wrote, "Describing tribal peoples as more violent than industrialized societies sounds much like the arguments put forward by missionaries, explorers and colonial governments from the 16th century onward."
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I think violence is a relative term ... and comes in many forms ... farmers are more "violent" than city dwellers because many of them will happily slaughter animals for their own consumption. A hunter is more 'violent' than a non-hunter because he/she actively goes out and hunts down an animal and kills it. Societies that are more directly involved in the process of hunting and killing their own food as a daily necessity are more exposed to blood n guts n stuff which we could term 'violence'. Also societies for whom war is a intimate close contact 'sport' unlike our own removal from the process could also be termed more violent. Although I do think that in other regards such as murders / thefts / crime modern society is more 'violent' than your average small village from yesteryear.
 
Can you trust Jared Diamond?

In Diamond’s usual fashion, he supports these arguments by way of anecdote. We learn, for example, that “no civil cases were being tried in Riverside County” as he was writing the book and that “one close friend” was involved in a contentious inheritance battle that was so traumatic that the “friend and her sister expect never again to speak to their brother as long as they live.” Diamond provides us with no way of knowing if these examples typical or exceptional. Are they constituent elements of the administration of civil justice or aberrant featurescaused by local conditions? For example, we never learn how common it is to wait “five years” for a civil case to be resolved. Other questions arise: Are there traditional societies that postpone the resolution of disputes for such a length of time? Do traditional societies ever postpone the resolution of certain kinds of disputes because of an intervening crisis, as Riverside County has done? Do the individuals who participate in traditional dispute resolutions actually feel reconciled with the individuals who harmed them?
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In criticism, his work is faulted among the lines of Malcolm Gladwell's. The use of nebulous and generalized findings that reek of "correlation is not causation" reminders from grad school. Sounds like a good book, too bad I'm in to about three right now! Argh. :rolleyes:
 
Um without having read the book but that sounds like a spurious criticism, I find using an example to illustrate a point a. helps make an abstraction real but b. leads to the kind of nit picky criticism illustrated above. It is meant to be an illustration to help people understand the point you are trying to make because a lot people can't think in the abstract.
 
This is a subject which I find enormously interesting and to which I have given a lot of thought. I will certainly try to find this book.
 
Although I do like the idea of development I wouldn't go so far to say humanity has evolved beyond its primitive ties. Especially since things or fads seem to continuously recycle. Tribes used nature to cures themselves and we have holistic services and 'super foods'.

We can read from psychological experimentation that humans can adapt to their environment. Thus a conscientious could possibly become a killer should it suit their surroundings.

Technology has helped the illusion of the gap between then and now but what do we really know? Society has not been without technology since it was made.
 
Perhaps we learn what we wish to learn, and not learn what we don't wish to learn. (I'm clearly in a Turing-Test frame of mind today.)
I read his earlier (unrevised) version of Collapse and (thought) I learned a lot from it. (Or not).
 
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