The World Until Yesterday

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

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.

Collapse

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is a 2005 book by academic and popular science author Jared M. Diamond, which reviews the causes of historical and pre-historical instances of societal collapse—particularly those involving significant influences from environmental changes, the effects of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trade partners—and considers the responses different societies have had to such threats. While the bulk of the book is concerned with the demise of these historical civilizations, Diamond also argues that humanity collectively faces, on a much larger scale, many of the same issues, with possibly catastrophic near-future consequences to many of the world's populations.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 transdisciplinary nonfiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations (including North Africa) have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures, and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.

Black Folk Here and There, Vol. 1

Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, Vol. 1
by St. Clair Drake

Professor Drake's Black Folk Here and There is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history and legacy of slavery and race in the contemporary world. This book provides the best review of the specialized literature on race and slavery, making available a great deal of knowledge heretofore confined to university libraries. St. Clair Drake was one of the deans of Black Studies as well as American Sociology, and he applied that rare background to an analysis and evaluation of modern theories of race and racism. His main targets are the theory of black inferiority and the theory of universal black contemptability. Did every civilization develop racism against "blacks"? In order to challenge that idea presented by some psychologists and historians, including the prize winning Professor Carl Degler, Drake reviews the history of Egypt, Ethiopia, Europe and Christianity in the Middle Ages, slavery and Islam, and the rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade. And he finds that there was no universal contempt for blacks. The evaluation of blacks throughout the ages, depended on their status in various civilizations. The high point of black social and cultural status was in ancient Egypt and Ethiopia as well as during the Middle Ages as revealed in such folklore as Prester John and the Black Madonna. However, with the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade as the modern world took shape, Black Africans took on a distinct ly degraded social and cultural status that was spread by modern communications throughout the world. In terms of encyclopedic knowledge on this subject and hard hitting analysis, Drake's study is unrivaled! As a professor of history, I use it as the best introduction to the global problems of race and racism left behind by modern slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. No one knew this subject or wrote with the scope as did Professor Drake.

"Trade in Prehispanic Philippine Complex Societies"

"The Organization of Intra-Regional and Long-Distance Trade in Prehispanic Philippine Complex Societies"
by Laura Lee Junker

"In this paper, I have made a preliminary attempt to construct such a model through ethnohistoric analyses of Philippine lowland societies examining systems of social stratification, the nature of chiefly authority and regionally integrating political structures, and chiefly control over the regional economy, in the early to mid-second millennium. Focusing specifically on the central role of the chiefly political leader in coordinating and controlling both intra-regional and inter-regional systems of resource mobilization and exchange, I examined archaeologically testable predictions about the development of these economic systems, using data on regional settlement and artifact distribution patterns from one region of prehistoric complex society development in the Philippines."

"Why Settle Down?"

"Why Settle Down? The Mystery of Communities"
by Michael Balter

ÇATALHÖYÜK, TURKEY--This 9000-year-old settlement in Anatolia was once hailed as the earliest city, with a population of 10,000, shared institutions, a division of labor, and a reliance on agriculture. But a meticulous new excavation of the site, being conducted by a team including on-site specialists in human and animal remains, fossil plants, pottery, and stone tools, is challenging the long-held assumption that the first settlements and the transition to agriculture were part of a single process dubbed the "Neolithic Revolution". By using the techniques of a relatively new field called micromorphology, which puts archaeological remains under the microscope to provide the maximum amount of information about how people lived and died, it now appears that the people of this high-density settlement, and other early communities, still depended heavily on hunting and gathering and may have settled down for some still-mysterious cultural purpose.

Read the full article here.

See Michael Balter's website here.

"Religion as a Cultural System"

"Religion as a Cultural System"

by Clifford Geertz

Geertz does not only talk about theory in broad terms – he also delves into particular theory, such as the anthropology of religion. In accordance with his emphasis on symbols, Geertz defines religion as “1) a system of symbols which acts to 2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by 3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and 4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that 5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (Geertz 1973d:90). Geertz then breaks down his definition to examine exactly what the study of religion as a cultural system should be.

The important aspect of symbols in this definition is that symbols are models – and importantly, both models of and models for (Geertz 1973d:93). Systems of symbols function similarly; that is, systems of symbols act as models of reality and models for reality.

Religion also must establish something. What this “something” is differs from culture to culture, but in each culture this “something” must make sense of the lives people are leading. In addition, this something must be perceived as “uniquely realistic”; i.e., this feeling should be the ground-level interpretation of a culture. A man may not be religious, but when a man needs to find meaning at its deepest level, religion will be the system of symbols he uses.