Homo Domesticus (French Edition)

by James C. Scott

Ebook, 2019

Status

Available

Call number

900

Publication

La Découverte (2019), 302 pages

Language

Description

An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrative. Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family-all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction. Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the "barbarians" who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member annbury
This book challenges the "conventional narrative" of the early history of humankind, and in doing so raises fascinating questions about history and about the idea of civilization. The "conventional narrative", of course, is that humans moved from hunting and gathering, to small scale agriculture
Show More
and pastoralism, and in time into states based on the surplus generated by agriculture. This narrative has been eroding for some time -- even a lay reader like this one is aware of discoveries that put it in question. Scott's book, however, doesn't just erode, it contradicts, and does so convincingly. Other reviewers have summarized the book so well that no further summary is needed. The conclusions, however, bear consideration. First, Scott emphasizes that until perhaps 1600CE most people did not live in what we would identify as a state. Second, because of this, they have very little effective history. Finally, the move from non-state to state existence may have produced monuments and art, but it may also have represented deterioration in the quality of life for most people. What price civilization? Read and ponder.
Show Less
LibraryThing member rivkat
Surveys the current scholarship on the first states, which Scott suggests were mostly worse places to live than non-states because of the imposition of taxes and the lesser availability of food. Argues that the state developed centralized agriculture to control people rather than developing because
Show More
of centralized agricutlure, and that this worked much more easily with grain than with other staple crops because grain needs to be harvested at a specific time and can’t just be left in the ground like tubers can, which allows the taxman to take a big share.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Stbalbach
An interesting Big History approach to the perennial question of civilization versus barbarian. Scott attempts to unwind common misconceptions, showing the civilizing processes as complex and nuanced. There is no steady stream of progress from hunter gatherer to city, rather back and forth
Show More
exchanges. Sedentary farming and hunting was a mixed thing for a very long time because it worked. The early city states were deadly due to disease, dictators, slavery. On the margin barbarians were a creation of civilized regions. One can not be understood without the other, there was not a clean dividing line. I agree with everything and have come to similar conclusions from my own readings - for many reasons primitive city states could be more deadly than living in the wilds (deserts, mountains), people tended to move in and out of the cities for various reasons such as times of famine or warfare, but it was often safer to be away. Manhattan emptied because of Covid. Some things never change. Now, more than half the world live in cities for the first time.
Show Less
LibraryThing member steve02476
Intriguing speculations about the origin of the first states, told by a Yale professor with anarchist leanings and a good understanding of the agricultural political economy. Sympathy for the barbarians!
LibraryThing member thcson
Calling this book a history of the earliest states stretches the term "history" too far. The author isn't a historian and his purpose is not to present new historical research. But he is an original political thinker, as his previous book "Seeing like a state" attests, and I assume he has
Show More
familiarized himself with a lot of historical research before writing this book. What he actually does is that he applies his anti-state views to the study of history by turning the table on traditional historical narratives.

The first few chapters of the book discuss how agriculture, ecology, war and slavery on the one hand facilitated early state formation, but on the other hand were so precarious that the balance could (and did) often turn to state disintegration as well. There was no linear development from hunting and gathering to agriculture and state formation, but complex back-and forth oscillation with lots of human traffic going in all directions for several millenia. These points are well taken.

The later chapters were in my opinion more interesting. The author argues that the historical record contains a state-centered bias because (p.214) "the self-documenting court center offered convenient one-stop shopping for historians and archaeologists". This bias should not lead us to think that early states offered a better life to its citizens than smaller communities, or that the "collapse" of a state necessarily had, in the long term, negative consequences. The population just dispersed, and they did not leave a written record. Our traditional power- and text-centered historical sequences of "civilization" (Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, Maya...) are quite myopic. Most of humanity lived in less powerful societies without written state records.

I think the book could have been structured a bit better, and the argument in the later chapters could have been extended in more detail almost up to modern history (as the author does very briefly at the end). But the title of this book is appropriate and I would recommend it to anyone who likes to think about human history from different perspectives.
Show Less
LibraryThing member TheoSmit
Didn't expect to like the book as much of what he says has also been written about in Dutch papers but it's well written and gives a good overview
LibraryThing member ritaer
Recent research has nearly completely overturned the traditional view of humanity's progress from save (hunting and gathering) to barbarian (pastoralism) to civilization (settled agricultural states. Scott points out that many communities were sedentary before developing agriculture and some
Show More
switched from one form of subsistence to another depending on weather, population and other factors. The rise of states required grain agriculture which facilitated taxation and control of the workers, whether free peasants or slaves. We have been taught that civilization was a great advance, but evidence now shows that early agriculturalists were less well nourished and often fled to neighboring areas to avoid taxation and conscription, epidemics and other problems of city life. As the Firesign Theater used to say -- "Everything you know is wrong."
Show Less
LibraryThing member Shrike58
Considering that the author has a well-known history as a critic of the state's capacity to control human behavior, it's no surprise that Scott has discovered a fascination with some of the new insights into transition from Neolithic "hunter-gatherer" societies, to the rise of organized states, as
Show More
facilitated by the creation of settled agriculture. It turns out that there's no such lock-step pattern of development to be identified. The question is still begged as to why states should have arisen in the first place, probably a combination of population and climate pressures, and the small issue that once you have a city-state for a neighbor that is waging war on you, you probably need to establish your own city-state in retaliation (not a point that Scott emphasizes). Be that as it may, Scott sees the early states as cranky engines of production that burned human life and labor as fuel, requiring a constant stream of impressed labor to keep functioning; not to mention the reduction of women to another domesticated animal. Not intended as the last word on anything, but a good introduction to why a lot of old social theory is no longer tenable.
Show Less
LibraryThing member mmparker
It's like Charles Mann's 1491 for Mesopotamia: a non-specialist summarizing the latest research for a field whose core myths are in the midst of being overthrown.

Goes well with Mann's 1491, Scott's Seeing Like A State, and basically anything by Ursula K. LeGuin. Maybe David Quinn's Ishmael, too -
Show More
it's been too long since I've read that.
Show Less

Awards

Connecticut Book Award (Finalist — Nonfiction — 2018)

DDC/MDS

900

Original publication date

2017 (1st US publishing, Yale university press)
2019-01-03 (1e traduction et édition française)
2021-01-07 (Réédition française, Poche, La Découverte)

ISBN

9782348042379
Page: 0.7019 seconds