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What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
Viking
January 2013
On Sale: January 1, 2013
499 pages
ISBN: 0670024813
EAN: 9780670024810
Kindle: B008EKOO46
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
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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