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Book of the week: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond's insightful survey of traditional cultures examines what’s been gained and lost in the move toward the modern nation-state.
If you need parenting advice, consult the nearest tribe of hunter-gatherers, said Steve Weinberg in CSMonitor.com. That’s one of several provocative ideas that highlight this “fascinating” survey of traditional cultures, “the newest in a line of impressive works” from Guns, Germs, and Steel author Jared Diamond. Across the half century he’s spent doing fieldwork in New Guinea, this polymath scholar-author noticed that in small tribes, children behave very differently than their Western counterparts. Often raised with few prohibitions and with plenty of close contact with caretakers outside the nuclear family, they were strikingly self-sufficient; often, he found that young children were also multilingual. For Diamond, such traits offer evidence that today’s surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t backward: They’re frequently worth emulating.
Diamond doesn’t romanticize tribal cultures, said Stephen J. Lyons in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He freely acknowledges that we wouldn’t want to adopt certain hunter-gatherer practices—such as routine infanticide, abandonment of the elderly, or, in one case, the ritual strangulation of widows. Small societies also display a troubling penchant for warfare: Despite the millions of lives that developed nations have lost to mechanized warfare in recent centuries, small societies have throughout history lost a much larger percentage of their populations to war. But in examining the approach of such groups not just to child rearing but also to health, justice, danger, and religion, this “dense, challenging, and smart” book provides an expansive view of what’s been gained and lost in the move toward the modern nation-state.
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Yet Diamond’s latest is “satisfying only in spurts,” said Julia M. Klein in ChicagoTribune.com. It’s hard not to admire his “seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of fields such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, physiology, nutrition, and evolutionary biology,” and he’s “an audacious generalist.” But he lays out most of his insights here in “a plodding, repetitive, academic style.” Anytime a list of points is coming, he tells us so, then circles back to summarize. In this book’s 500 pages, Diamond includes a laborious treatise on state justice, a chart providing 16 detailed definitions of religion, and three full pages on the definition of war. Diamond is a serious scholar, but most readers will wish as they plow through this worthy book that he didn’t write so much like one.
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