The world until yesterday : what can we learn from traditional societies?

by Jared Diamond

Hardcover, 2013

Status

Available

Call number

305.89

Library's review

Indeholder "List of Tables and Figures", "Prologue: At the Airport", " An airport scene", " Why study traditional societies?", " States", " Types of traditional societies", " Approaches, causes, and sources", " A small book about a big subject", " Plan of the book", "Part 1. Setting the Stage by
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Dividing Space", "Chapter 1. Friends, Enemies, Strangers, and Traders", " A boundary", " Mutually exclusive territories", " Non-exclusive land use", " Friends, enemies, and strangers", " First contacts", " Trade and traders", " Market economies", " Traditional forms of trade", " Traditional trade items", " Who trades what?", " Tiny nations", "Part 2. Peace and War", "Chapter 2. Compensation for the Death of a Child", " An accident", " A ceremony", " What if ...?", " What the state did", " New Guinea compensation", " Life-long relationships", " Other non-state societies", " State authority", " State civil justice", " Defects in state civil justice", " State criminal justice", " Restorative justice", " Advantages and their price", "Chapter 3. A Short Chapter, About a Tiny War", " The Dani War", " The war's time-line", " The war's death toll", "Chapter 4. A Longer Chapter, About Many Wars", " Definitions of war", " Sources of information", " Forms of traditional warfare", " Mortality rates", " Similarities and differences", " Ending warfare", " Effects of European contact", " Warlike animals, peaceful peoples", " Motives for traditional war", " Ultimate reasons", " Whom do people fight?", " Forgetting Pearl Harbor", "Part 3. Young and Old", "Chapter 5. Bringing Up Children", " Comparisons of child-rearing", " Childbirth", " Infanticide", " Weaning and birth interval", " On-demand nursing", " Infant-adult contact", " Fathers and allo-parents", " Responses to crying infants", " Physical punishment", " Child autonomy", " Multi-age playgroups", " Child play and education", " Their kids and our kids", "Chapter 6. The Treatment of Old People: Cherish, Abandon, or Kill?", " The elderly", " Expectations about eldercare", " Why abandon or kill?", " Usefulness of old people", " Society's values", " Society's rules", " Better or worse today?", " What to do with older people?", "Part 4. Danger and Response", "Chapter 7. Constructive Paranoia", " Attitudes towards danger", " A night visit", " A boat accident", " Just a stick in the ground", " Taking risks", " Risks and talkativeness", " Chapter 8. Lions and Other Dangers", " Dangers of traditional life", " Accidents", " Vigilance", " Human violence", " Diseases", " Responses to diseases", " Starvation", " Unpredictable food shortages", " Scatter your land", " Seasonality and food storage", " Diet broadening", " Aggregation and dispersal", " Responses to danger", "Part 5. Religion, Language, and Health", "Chapter 9. What Electric Eels Tell Us About the Evolution of Religion", " Questions about religion", " Definitions of religion", " Functions and electric eels", " The search for causal explanations", " Supernatural beliefs", " Religion's function of explanation", " Defusing anxiety", " Providing comfort", " Organization and obedience", " Codes of behavior towards strangers", " Justifying war", " Badges of commitment", " Measures of religious success", " Changes in religion's functions", "Chapter 10. Speaking in Many Tongues", " Multilingualism", " The world's language total", " How languages evolve", " Geography of language diversity", " Traditional multilingualism", " Benefits of bilingualism", " Alzheimer's disease", " Vanishing languages", " How languages disappear", " Are minority languages harmful?", " Why preserve languages?", " How can we protect languages?", "Chapter 11. Salt, Sugar, Fat, and Sloth", " Non-communicable diseases", " Our salt intake", " Salt and blood pressure", " Causes of hypertension", " Dietary sources of salt", " Diabetes", " Types of diabetes", " Genes, environment, and diabetes", " Pima Indians and Nauru Islanders", " Diabetes in India", " Benefits of genes for diabetes", " Why is diabetes low in Europeans?", " The future of non-communicable diseases", "Epilogue: At Another Airport", " From the jungle to the 405", " Advantages of the modern world", " Advantages of the traditional world", " What can we learn?", "Acknowledgments", "Further Readings", "Index", "Illustration Credits".

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Publication

London : Allen Lane, 2013.

Description

Diamond reveals how tribal societies offer an extraordinary window into how our ancestors lived for millions of years -- until virtually yesterday, in evolutionary terms -- and provide unique, often overlooked insights into human nature.

Media reviews

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While he never takes on his critics directly, Diamond’s book could be viewed as a showcase for the author’s sincere admiration of traditional peoples and the way they see the world. Instead of taking on the whole world, Diamond takes on this other world as his own. And the book’s value
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depends on the question of whether taking on another’s world is really possible.
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Unlike some critics, I take Diamond at his word: I believe that he does want to show traditional lives in their complex reality, to demonstrate what they have to teach us without unduly idealizing them. He wants us to see people who live careful, attentive lives in a world of want and uncertainty,
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people who know how to love their children without reading books on how to do so. He wants to show us the dangers of war, and the bittersweet comforts of industrialization. Above all, he wants to show us how he has been changed by the life he has led. In the end, however, his scientist’s eye plays him foul. Diamond’s stories give one a clear understanding of the exact physical locations of the objects he describes, but leave the culture and emotion of Papua New Guineans unexamined. His description of the lives of traditional people accurately describes their digestion and gestation, but not their thoughts and feelings. And in the end, despite his attempts to be nuanced, his portrayal of the life of traditional people is straight out of Hobbes: nasty, brutish, short, and escapable only by submitting to the authority of a sovereign.
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Diamond has a gift for storytelling. He presents his examples in a seductively readable voice with unflinching confidence, which makes his conclusions about the similarities and differences between traditional and modern society seem like common sense. But as I read the text, I found that I agreed
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with Diamond in inverse relation to my pre-existing knowledge about whatever subject he was addressing.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member Gwendydd
I confess that I didn't get very far into this book at all, so maybe my review is unfair. However, there were so many major methodological problems at the beginning of the book that I was afraid to read on - I wasn't willing to trust any of Diamond's conclusions, because he is so cavalier with his
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evidence.

My problem is that he treats "traditional societies" as a single homogeneous thing. He acknowledges at the beginning that he is oversimplifying his terminology, but "oversimplify" doesn't begin to describe it. He only briefly touches on the fact that gathering reliable information about "traditional societies" is extremely problematic. For pre-modern traditional societies, we have to rely on archaeological evidence, which can only tell us so much and can be extremely difficult to interpret, especially depending on the quality of the archaeological dig. For traditional societies who have come into contact with modern societies, the evidence is even more difficult to interpret - the very act of gathering the evidence taints it, because it requires interacting with these people. Diamond briefly mentions these facts, then goes on to totally ignore them. He will make a statement about traditional societies, and then he will provide 5 examples, but these examples are all from different time periods and different parts of the world. It is very problematic to make generalizations based on such disparate evidence, but Diamond doesn't seem to mind at all. When he gives examples, he never discusses how certain we can be about the statements he is making, or what evidence he bases these statements on. I fear that he is cherry-picking the examples that back up his points and ignoring examples that do not.

So that's why I didn't read much of this book - Diamond's use (or misuse) of evidence made me distrust any conclusions he might make.
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LibraryThing member rivkat
Diamond contrasts traditional and modern societies in their treatment of harms (torts or crimes, in the language of the formal state), wars, the elderly, childrearing, languages, eating, and several other major areas. I learned a fair amount about New Guinea, but this isn’t really a book with a
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big idea in the way that his earlier two popular works were. He thinks we should do more to integrate the elderly into the broader society, and to a certain extent children too; we should eat less and exercise more; and we should make an effort to raise children with more than one language. Here’s Slate’s view, with which I sympathize: “By the end of the book, it is impossible to tell if one has finished reading a masterpiece of rigorous analysis or a masterfully written collection of just-so stories.”
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LibraryThing member ErlangerFactionless
Jared Diamond draws from many disciplines – biology, geography, ethnography, history – in writing enjoyable, insightful books about human civilization. This one is simply a pleasure to read. Relying heavily on his decades of experience among the peoples of New Guinea, he compares cultures and
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identifies many ways in which those of us living in modern societies might improve our lives by examining “traditional” peoples. He sometimes exhibits bias against Western culture, but, to his credit, he’s also unafraid to point out the benefits of living under the state. He does not romanticize the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, especially in regards to warfare, disease, and starvation.

Along with a wealth of factual information, this book contains a considerable amount of speculation and opinion. Diamond doesn’t try to hide it: it’s clear from the beginning that he only asks us to consider what he has to say before coming to our own conclusions. I happen to agree with him more often than not, and I rarely felt that he was trying to force his opinions on me - except in the chapter on language, which devolves into an uncharacteristic rant. The stronger sections are persuasive enough that they changed my mind on a few topics. I think there’s enough here to make anyone pause and think twice before their next decision, whether they are raising a child or selecting groceries.

I should mention that this book lacks footnotes, endnotes, and a bibliography. We are given only a Further Reading section at the end of book, and we’re directed to a web site that contains a more extensive Further Reading page, in paragraph form. This decision was apparently intended to make the book more accessible to a wide audience, but I think it does more harm than good. There’s a lot of solid factual information in this book, but without citations it’s often difficult to tell where the facts end and the opinions begin. This is not something I want to see again.
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LibraryThing member mbmackay
Jared Diamonds reflects on the aspects of hunter gatherer societies that might be usefully applied to the modern western world.
This is not his best book, but he sets such a high standard, so his near misses are better than most books. There seems to be a surplus of facts in the early chapters and
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not enough analysis and discussion. But later chapters - particularly the one on religion, make up for the slow start.
He suggests that the many variations on a theme demonstrated by the various early societies that have been studied provide a type of sociological experiment, and we can learn from the outcomes. He is at pains to point out that aspects on life, such as the violence and early death, are not ones we want to emulate. But things like gentle child rearing, extended family interactions, lack of processed food etc are open to us to include in our lives.
Read March 2013.
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LibraryThing member deusvitae
A study of the comparisons and contrasts between "traditional" societies, the hunter-gatherer and small agriculture societies of the past, with modern society, with a view as to what "we" have "lost" and what may be profitable to be "regained."

The author draws on his multi-decade experience among
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the traditional societies of New Guinea along with the work done by other researchers in societies in Asia, the Americas, and Africa. He discusses such matters as interaction among people of different groups, war, child raising, religion, and language.

The author attempts to remain objective and dispassionate in his analysis but his own inclinations are often clear enough, especially in terms of his seeming contempt for religion. This is most assuredly a "scientific" analysis, attempting to understand the challenges, situations, and explanations for them in terms of materialism/evolutionary philosophy.

The book does well at getting us to consider the many changes that have taken place throughout the years, many for the better, and some for the not so better. An interesting read.
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LibraryThing member trinkers
I really wanted to like this book, but I don't. It would have been better if he had refrained from repeating himself endlessly in the first few chapters. I may get back to this one eventually, but probably not.
LibraryThing member ljhliesl
Not as interesting to me as his previous two tomes. I like his tone and outlook but though I enjoyed his anecdotes, they were not data.
LibraryThing member ohernaes
Starting point: Evolutionary - traditional societies closer to the conditions we adapted to, this gives a prima facie reason to believe that practices they widely practice make sense. Much diversity among traditional societies - interesting to think of them as experiments and find the success
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stories. Can get the best of two worlds by combining such experiments with modern freedom? A problem with those societies is probably that people do not have an exit option, it's probably not easy to just join a neighboring band or tribe. But maybe we can organize ourselves s.t. we have smaller experimental zones/cultures while preserving an exit option today?

Possible selection problem: the tribes, etc that we see today are those that are from areas that were never conquered, e.g. because they lived in unappealing places or had some resilient features. But only a selection problem if what we are after is to learn about the past, not for the seeing more diversity part.

Diamond selects the following topics:
-where we can learn something personal: dangers; child rearing
-where we can learn something personal and use in public policy: treatment of the elderly, multilingualism; health promoting lifestyles
-mostly for policy: peaceful dispute resolution
-also: religion; warfare. The latter is said to be the field in which the benefits of modern states are most clear.

Conflict solving more about restoring relationships than establishing who is right. A story about a driver who killed a boy in an accident, but clearly by no fault of his own, but who still had to pay compensation and to a great extent fear retaliation from the boy’s family before that was done. The compensation process would have been much the same in the case in which the driver had been negligent or even intentionally killed the boy, although with higher compensation rates and a greater danger of physical retaliation. So maybe our concept of randomness or accidental is not something that they have? Related to Hacking’s Emergence of probability?

Moral inhibitions against killing humans not as prevalent in traditional societies as in modern, although typically knows the enemy and bears a grudge against him.

Friendship takes a much more local and kin-based form.

Lifelong relationships - norms against investing in a sewing machine to start a mending business, should rather help people for free and get other favors and services in return.

Crime, tort and contract law into one. Take into account how everyone in the community affected. Applications to Western world seems quite limited, like improving opportunities for mediation and closure meetings (between victim and perpetrator after the verdict).
-surprising that he does not mention what I see as one of the big dangers of centralization - the breakdown of the whole system - tribes cannot create world wars.

When it comes to bringing up children, Diamond speaks very much to the choir for my part. Carrying infants close, sleeping in the same room for a long time, exposing children to many caregivers, including from different education, letting children explore the world autonomously pretty much seems like common sense to me. The advantages of an abrupt response to crying infants, multilingualism and from spending time with different age groups are convincingly conveyed.

At times Diamond makes arguments that are not well sustained, for instance rationing health care by age is not about an obsession with a cult of youth or a view that lives of the old are little worth.

Thought-provoking parallel between the old’s right to food and young women in traditional societies and modern property rights.

The big point made about “constructive paranoia” is a bit overmade, as it is not obvious that one should make a different choice when facing a low-probability danger many times than when facing it once.

Maybe forest people’s fear of cars can serve as a fresh look upon what is relatively more risky, e.g. surgeries more than pesticides, and traffic accidents more than …, although many are mistaken about these. We can see their fear as stemming from not having learnt how dangerous crossing a street is. Also there is very little macho culture and hiding of fear. Maybe the macho culture in Western societies comes from us not facing many life-threatening dangers? Interesting to note that they have many wrong explanations, e.g. for male with a respiratory syndrome, which is blamed on female menstruation and other far-fetched things, and only partial explanations for causes for diseases. Learning is insufficient.

Diamond suggests that that traditional people may have a more realistic view of risk since get more direct feedback, whereas we get a distorted view through sensationalist news, etc. about rare types of accidents. American soldiers allegedly more risk-seeking than French in Iraq, speculates that may be because the French have more war history.

We should not forget the fact, underlined by Diamond, that many decide to move to cities or villages, not to be rich, but because life is safer and more stable and mosquitoes and diseases are rarer.

Food and sex have opposite roles in traditional vs. modern societies, they worry about food, but sex is plentiful, whereas we have enough food, but worry about sex.

Some have claimed that Diamond cherry-picks findings to fit his story, but this is less a severe criticism than it might seem, since he explicitly sees the world of traditional people as being full of small experiments that we might learn from, though by no means all or even a majority. To be fair, an extended argument also says that these people through trial and error often have converged on some good practices, but this is not necessary for the approach to make sense.

Overall a great book.
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LibraryThing member BillRob
Really enjoyed the exploration of traditional societies. He seems overly worshipful of the idea of political power and dismisses free societies as a possibility with no argument.

Great historical stuff in here, highly recommend.
LibraryThing member GlennBell
The book was interesting and had some specific areas of interest for me including discussion of religion, diet, health, and language. Some topics such as that of constructive paranoia were discussed to excruciating detail. Jared is excellent at detailed research and has an academic approach to his
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analysis. This is helpful to some extent and can also generate some lengthy discussion of minutia. Overall I liked the book and would recommend it. I am convinced to adapt some behaviors from ancient civilization including diet modification.
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LibraryThing member Opinionated
Jared Diamond has spent a lot of time with traditional societies, particularly in Papua New Guinea where most of the remaining such societies are based, and not surprisingly he finds much to recommend them, whilst accepting that he wouldn't want to spend much more than the 7% of his time there that
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he currently does, and also mentioning that "first contact" tribes are not at all sentimental about their life and quickly recognise the appeal of more rice and fewer mosquitoes.

In The World Until Yesterday, Diamond points out some of the benefits of traditional societies that he thinks modern society has eschewed to its detriment. One of the more interesting of these was his discussion of relative styles of child rearing - and it is probably true that a child benefits from continuous "skin contact" with its mother and other adults and rarely being on its own. But to do anything about that requires a complete restructuring of modern society which seems unlikely to happen. We are not going to stay in our community our entire lives; personally, from where I live, the nearest family member is 4,000km away. The next nearest is 11,000km away. This is the case for an increasing number of people. And it seems unlikely and is certainly undesirable, that women are going to depart from the workforce on mass to spend more time in touch with their child (although if workplaces where more child friendly, it would be another story entirely)

I enjoyed his reflections on "constructive paranoia" - yes, its true, we are certainly lax about everyday hazards - child rearing, the elderly, and traditional vs modern warfare. His comments on the benefits of a traditional diet are certainly true - no one doubts the epidemic of obesity and Diabetes 2 that a modern diet brings, but then why not explore why all societies are so keen to abandon it at the earliest opportunity? His comments on religion, though interesting, didn't really seem to fit with the rest of the narrative. Most sensible people accept that religion is the attempt of an inquiring mind to make sense of its environment with the information at its disposal; sometimes supernatural intervention must have seemed the most logical explanation. Why so many educated people still hang on to these myths is another question entirely - but then many books have all been written about that.

All in all I enjoyed this, although it was slow going at times. Rather than "The World Until Yesterday" though the book might rather have been titled "Why I enjoy spending time with traditional people in New Guinea, but am pleased to get home"
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LibraryThing member JeffV
While not the most prolific scientist when it comes to books, Jared Diamond has always produced high quality, thought provoking content. Ever since his days as a contributing editor to Discover Magazine, I've been a fan of his and read everything published. We are all getting on in years now, and
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Diamond is getting a little too old to keep adventuring to the rarely-documented areas of Papua-New Guinea and other exotic locales. As such, this book includes a lot of memoir material that deviates from the thesis of the book.

Tribal societies such as those in PNG are examples of what Diamond characterizes as "traditional" societies. As agriculture and urbanization took hold, our own western society (as well as equivalents in China, India, Japan, Egypt and the Middle East) deviated from the hunter-gatherer paradigm exhibited by modern "traditional" societies. These societies are most common on isolated islands or relatively recently colonized locations such as Australia, The Philippines, and sub-Saharan Africa. These tribes have their own languages...some islands might have hundreds of distinct languages (not dialects), most spoken by tenuously few people.

As in his books Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel; Diamond advocates the preservation of these dwindling cultures, arguing that loss of language will forever deprive the world of the collected wisdom and lore of these tribal societies. He also concedes it could be a losing cause -- much of the industrialized world just doesn't care about such things and believe that such people will be better off getting with the modern program. Diamond presents documentation on what effect can be expected...especially the introduction of non-communicative diseases (NCDs) like heart disease and diabetes. Some will argue shorter lifespans are one reason NCDs are relatively unknown to these societies. Accidental or environmental death (famine, weather disasters, etc) are far greater hazards that most of us face in the first world. But those who do survive to old age can stay remarkably healthy and active, with no sign of these NCDs. Furthermore, when people migrate to cities and become urbanized, they often embrace the western lifestyle too readily, and show greater instances of obesity and related problems (take American Samoa, for example). Among the dietary considerations covered by Diamond is salt intake -- there are tribes whose members take in as much dietary salt in the course of a year that some Americans use in just a day or two (and that the FDA guidelines specify as a month's intake). Diamond tries to provide take-aways by which tribal societies can contribute to the modern world. It's not all a one-sided bias, however -- he doesn't suggest, for example, that we follow the example of one tribe that kills the women when their man dies (with the full cooperation of the woman, I might add). On the plus side, Diamond discusses the benefits of bilingual education -- something that will soon be a topic in my own household and I was glad to see my own thoughts not only validated, but enhanced by his coverage of research that suggests those raised in a bilingual household are able to stave off dementia-related illness in late life by an average of four years.

I hope Diamond has another book or two in him. I'd love to read a more straight-forward memoir as he's certainly had some interesting times. Like an aged grandpa who often strays off topic to reminisce about long-past adventures, Diamond often goes a little off track, but the since the stories are interesting, we forgive him.
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LibraryThing member charlie68
An enveloping read on traditional cultures, ranging from New Guinea to South American Indians, and comparing them to modern mainly American society. Doesn't romanticize either and highlights in interesting ways the differences between the two. Topics from warfare to child rearing and health are
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explored.
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LibraryThing member GShuk
Another excellent audio by Jared Diamond. This audio delivers on its title and then some. Makes you appreciate who we are.
LibraryThing member DLMorrese
What can those of us living in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) societies learn from those who don't? More than you might think, according to Jared Diamond. This book provides several personal anecdotes of his time spent with hunter/gatherers and farming groups in New Guinea,
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but he speaks of others as well. By almost any measurable criteria you can imagine, people in WEIRD societies are much better off than those in what he calls traditional societies. We live longer, are less likely to be victims of war and violence, suffer fewer diseases, have more reliable access to food.... But these benefits come with costs. We eat a lot of junk (sugar, salt, fat), which brings on diseases, like hypertension and diabetes, that are uncommon in traditional societies. That's not because people in traditional societies are wiser or more virtuous or anything like that. It's because cheeseburgers, Doritos, and Snickers bars don't grow on trees and can't be dug out of the ground or brought down with a poison arrow. Still, there's a lesson here. Too much of a good thing isn't good for you. There are also personal costs relating to group identity and community interaction. In traditional societies, everyone knows everyone else in the group. Of course, that's only possible in small groups. I certainly don't know everyone in my city, or even in my neighborhood. For one thing, it's too large. For another, physical proximity does not imply the level of shared interests that it does in a traditional society. He also draws interesting comparisons on "legal" disputes, care of children and the elderly, and religion. Perhaps the most important lessons we can derive from the few surviving (and recently extinct) traditional societies are hints of where we came from. What kind of lives did our ancestors live? What challenges did they face? How did they overcome them? We owe much to those nameless ancestors. Because of them we can enjoy longer lives with much less risk of hunger, disease, and violence. This book helps us appreciate that.
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LibraryThing member ritaer
Diamond makes interesting connections between his book research on other cultures and his experience among New Guinea and Australian tribal peoples. Some of his suggestions about the virtues of these cultures are valuable, although he is weak on proposals to implement such changes in the West. He
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does avoid the myth of primitive paradise, although he may go too far the other direction in suggesting that pre-state peoples all lived in constant fear of attack by any stranger. Reviews by practicing anthropologists are relatively harsh, pointing out that every culture has had the same amount of time to 'evolve' and that anthropologists do not regard pre-literate peoples as any kind of time capsule of earlier human life.
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LibraryThing member LisCarey
In what ways are traditional societies similar to each other, and modern state-based societies similar to each other? In what ways do modern and traditional societies resemble and differ from each other--and is there anything that we can learn from the surviving traditional societies before they
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disappear?

Jared Diamond takes an in-depth look at what distinguishes traditional from modern societies, and what we can learn from them. This is not a hearts & flowers mash note to traditional societies; he's at some pains to make clear that the lives of traditional peoples, whether hunter-gatherers or farmers, are generally harder, shorter, and more dangerous than modern, state-based societies. Injury and disease are far more likely to be crippling or fatal. Death from violence, whether by murder or in war, claims a much higher percentage of the population, despite fond illusions of "the gentle !Kung" and the notion that war is a modern invention.

Diamond spent much of his career studying birds in New Guinea, and in the process found it necessary to become very familiar with the traditional-living peoples of New Guinea--hunter-gatherer bands and farming villages, groups strongly connected to the Papua New Guinea state and groups still living with relatively little contact with that state.

Some of the areas of human social behavior he examines are child-rearing, treatment of the elderly, dispute resolution, religion, and language. The subject of dispute resolution is especially important. Without a state-based legal system to use, individuals must settle disputes among themselves. On the positive side, the first step is nearly always an effort at peaceful resolution, even in very serious cases such as when a child is killed accidentally. When it's successful, the result is not a simple right/wrong determination with damages paid by the side at fault, but rather a resolution that addresses the aggrieved party's feelings of hurt, anger, or being wronged, and restores the relationship between the parties that existed before the dispute. When it fails, though, the result can be a series of tit-for-tat revenge killings or outright war between two clans, bands, or tribes. Diamond looks at the ways we might borrow from traditional people's peaceful dispute resolution methods, potentially relieving stress, anger, and expense in civil and sometimes even criminal disputes without weakening the state justice system structures that largely protect us from the danger of revenge-cycle killings and violence.

It's a fascinating and thoughtful book, and Diamond gives us his experiences of living between modern and traditional societies, and a glimpse of the world as it looks through traditional eyes. I've barely touched the surface; you need to read this one.

Highly recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the publisher via NetGalley.
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LibraryThing member jigarpatel
Unlike Diamond's other and better known works, The World Until Yesterday is a practical study of how we, today, in the 21st century, can learn from traditional societies. Diamond begins by describing the range of traditional social structures. Rather dull theory, but useful to understand how
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traditional societies evolved and to what extent we can "pick and choose" practices which we can incorporate today.

The most interesting chapters revolve around approaches to bringing up children; society's treatment of the elderly; and maladaptation of Homo sapiens to first world diets. Also interesting are anecdotes on conflict resolution; a chapter promoting multilingualism; tribal approaches to risk management (cf Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow); and a theory behind the evolution of religion.

Of course, given this is Diamond, there's a strong environmental angle à la Collapse, as well as overlap with The Third Chimpanzee. I personally value the focus on what we can learn, in particular the pointed criticism of first world countries promoting individual achievement above the success of societies as a whole. Unquantifiable mental well-being is as important as economic success, a fact the West is only just beginning to appreciate.

My only criticism is that while Diamond covers a wide range of topics, his examples are very select and targeted at a specific audience. There is a definite American slant, so solutions to conflict resolution are contrasted with the "blame & litigate" culture of the US. Possibly due to his own ignorance, South Asian societies are barely mentioned: I expected at least a mention of Sanskrit in the chapter describing how languages originate and disappear.

Overall, highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member Venarain
Reading through the other reviews, I've noticed a pattern. People who took the subtitle "what can we learn from traditional societies" at face value are disappointed. This book is not a how to book about incorporating the behaviors and practices of traditional societies - this book is an
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interesting look at how traditional societies have shaped our current society and what we have lost along the way. Diamond's theories about how access to different types of resources and food production influence how societies interact with each other is extremely interesting, but not exactly a guide on how to change modern society.
I think there is some fair criticism out there about Diamond's romanticism getting away from him, but he is an old white dude after all...
If you go into reading this curious about what our ancestor's cultures looked like and how that influenced our current lives, you won't be disappointed. If you're looking for a self help book - go elsewhere.
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LibraryThing member A.Godhelm
Diamond's home turf, and very good in those parts where he is an expert, weaker in the speculative areas and positively a dud when it comes to fulfilling the premise of the title. The ending musings over what we can learn from traditional societies is a very shallow set of ideas you don't need
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Diamond's background to come up with. Still it's a good read in spite of itself, with Diamond taking a hardnosed look at traditional societies and their faults and the reason for said faults, in a time when many are convinced they have none. Similarly what you gain and lose in the near instant transition from stone age to modern age is interesting.
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LibraryThing member quiBee
This book, by Jared Diamond, looks at traditional societies and the way they look/looked at the world and points out that our Western ways of doing things is not the only way of looking at the world, or solving problems.
Diamond is an American scientist who has spent a lot of time in New Guinea and
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his anecdotes and stories from this area are very interesting, though he does take a look at other societies as well.
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LibraryThing member steve02476
A little rambling, with lots of personal anecdotes. Really enjoyed the contrasting of traditional life stories with modern ones. A bit repetitive, but kind of in the way a series of conversations might be with an older friend (if the older friend was a scientist/naturalist). Some really great
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stories, including a near drowning from being ferried by an overloaded motorized canoe.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2012-12-31

Physical description

xi, 499 p.; 24.1 cm

ISBN

9780713998986

Local notes

Omslag: General Photos/Getty Images
Omslaget viser en hytte i baggrunden og en kvinde med et lille nøgent barn på ryggen
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi

Pages

xi; 499

Library's rating

Rating

½ (222 ratings; 3.6)

DDC/MDS

305.89
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