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by Jared Diamond

Jared_Diamond Americas English
  • ISBN: 0143124404
  • Category: History
  • Author: Jared Diamond
  • Subcategory: Americas
  • Other formats: txt azw doc mbr
  • Language: English
  • Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (October 29, 2013)
  • Pages: 512 pages
  • FB2 size: 1773 kb
  • EPUB size: 1195 kb
  • Rating: 4.2
  • Votes: 844
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The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? is a 2012 popular science book by American intellectual Jared Diamond.

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? is a 2012 popular science book by American intellectual Jared Diamond. It explores what people living in the Western world can learn from traditional societies, including differing approaches to conflict resolution, treatment of the elderly, childcare, the benefits of multilingualism and a lower salt intake.

Also by jared diamond. 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. April 30, 2006, 7:00 . Guns, Germs, and Steel. Why Is Sex Fun? The Third Chimpanzee. From traditional societies? Viking. I’m in an airport’s check-in hall, gripping my baggage cart while being jostled by a crowd of other people also checking in for that morning’s first flights.

Insofar as we can judge from archaeological evidence about the organization of past societies, probably all humans .

Insofar as we can judge from archaeological evidence about the organization of past societies, probably all humans lived in such bands until at least a few tens of thousands of years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago. When Europeans began, especially after Columbus’s first voyage of AD 1492, to expand around the world and to encounter non-European peoples living in non-state societies, bands still occupied all or most of Australia and the Arctic, plus low-productivity desert and forest environments of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa.

The World Until Yesterday book. Specifically, we could afford to learn a thing or two from traditional societies when it comes to conflict resolution (how to re-establish and mend relationships); raising children (that it really does take a whole village to raise a child); treating the elderly (that they are deserving of respect, and are still capable of contributing to the community in.

The World Until Yesterday explores the lessons modern humans can learn from the primitive hunter-gatherer societies that roamed the earth before centralized governments emerged. Anyone interested in what life was like tens of thousands of years ago. Anyone who wants to know lessons simple hunter-gatherer groups can teach us in modern society. Jared Diamond is a respected American scientist and a Pulitzer prize-winning author of several popular science books such as Guns, Germs and Steel.

This Ri event, titled "The world until yesterday', took place on 1 October 2013.

Traditional small-scale societies still occupied much of the world five centuries ago, before Europeans started on. .That’s why I chose as my book title The World until Yesterday.

Traditional small-scale societies still occupied much of the world five centuries ago, before Europeans started on their world-wide expansion of colonization and conquest. A century ago, there were still millions of people living outside state control and without knowledge of the remote outside world. Measured by the time scale of the 6,000,000-year history of the human evolutionary line, traditional societies really did blanket the world until almost yesterday. My readers will find traditional peoples fascinating to read about, for the same reasons that I’ve found them fascinating to live with.

In The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond holds up tribal societies as a mirror for our own lives and asks . What have they discovered and what might we learn from them? The most obvious difference between us is that pre-state tribal societies are just a lot more violent.

In The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond holds up tribal societies as a mirror for our own lives and asks what we might learn from them. The cycle of raids and revenge-driven counterraids goes on and on.

Unlike his earlier books, The World Until Yesterday is not concerned with constructing grand theories of historical . I do not dislike The World Before Yesterday, much of Diamonds thoughts are well argued. Mostly it lacks the clarity of purpose in the two earlier works

Unlike his earlier books, The World Until Yesterday is not concerned with constructing grand theories of historical change. Yet when his conceptual assumptions do surface, Diamond reveals his continuing debt to contemporary conventional wisdom. He remains in thrall to neoliberal politics and pop-evolutionary biological determinism. Mostly it lacks the clarity of purpose in the two earlier works. For all of its deliberate organization and systematic class room lecture style, it rambles and seems to be at cross purposes.

Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our lives as we emulate a few of their cultural practices. Jared Diamond: we have much to learn from traditional societies - video

Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our lives as we emulate a few of their cultural practices. Jared Diamond: we have much to learn from traditional societies - video. Jared Diamond, author of The World Until Yesterday, argues that tribal societies provide lessons for developed countries in everything from childcare, justice and care for old people. Drawing on his decades of fieldwork with tribes in the New Guinea islands he explains how his own attitudes have been changed – especially to risk taking. Published: 11 Feb 2013.

The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us?“As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book." BookpageMost 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. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.
Reviews about The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (7):
Datrim
Bottom Line First: Jared Diamond’s The World Before Yesterday is Ok. Diamond struck gold with Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Editionwhich was better than his Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies] but here he has lost his mojo.
The World Before Yesterday may pass as a backup read to go with a better undergraduate text in a real anthropology class or as a discussion starter for non-anthropologists but otherwise I am not sure who is the best audience for this book. Diamond makes a few good points, especially towards the end when he discusses how we in the modern or as he phases it the WIERD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) world might improve our diet to avoid modern world non-contagious diseases like hypertension and diabetes. Otherwise this is a collection of more or less well documented observations about how he thinks human society used to work before the centralized state.

It is good to know that in the WEIRD world we are less likely to kill each other, no matter how industrialized and deadly modern warfare has become. Then again he was writing without considering the new cycles of killing in modern killing growing from the asymmetric warfare based on revenge killing motivated by religious hatreds. A failing in this regard is a failing to redo some of his observations by cross tabbing analysis between societies given to ancient cycles of warfare and ancient attitudes towards strangers and traders.

A personal measure of my reaction to Yesterday is the fact that I had originally read it when it was first published about 5 years ago. I hat entirely forgotten reading it and was well into re reading it when I remembered anything from the first read. That is it is mostly a forgettable book.

His advice about adopting the Paleolithic diet or the Mediterranean diet or at least the Italian habit of eating slowly may still have the support of qualified medical opinion, but as a taint of food fad about it. Certainly it is no long out of the box thinking that in the modern diet we eat too much sugar and too much processed food. Though in the case of processed food, we may just need a better set of definitions. In the case of so called organic food, a term Diamond wisely avoids, one cannot be certain what it means other than expensive.

Against the criticism from the world of anthropology that Diamond gives too much weight to differences in climate. Diamond’s argument reads like the same economics argued by the folks behind Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Look at the win loss analysis for a given type of cultural response and that is how that culture will develop, Diamond argues the math behind the cultivation of widely separate plots of land against eh obvious efficiency of working one large plot. The inefficient scattered plots pay off better in the case of crop failure and so that strategy wins.

I do not dislike The World Before Yesterday, much of Diamonds thoughts are well argued. Mostly it lacks the clarity of purpose in the two earlier works. For all of its deliberate organization and systematic class room lecture style, it rambles and seems to be at cross purposes. Pre-state subsistence societies do have something to teach modern societies. Humans can learn from predator animals and flowering plants and the stars in the sky and from almost anything. I am not sure I can recommend all of those implied books or get too excited about this one.
playboy
This book is very anecdotal and at times condescending. It is very limited in scope and relies heavily on his own experiences in Papua New Guinea, with some discussion of a few ethnographic case studies--by no means a comprehensive review of the broad range of cultural expression around the world. While using this anthropological literature Diamond does seek to provide some support for his conclusions, much of this book reads like soft answers to a question posed to an undergraduate class in anthropology or geography. While I agree that it is problematic to romanticize what he terms "traditional societies," he does very little to problematize some of the more insidious aspects of state society. I also agree that there is much we can learn from cross cultural reflection, but it doesn't take 466 pages to suggest that we might do well to dispense with the salt shaker. I did enjoy some of the discussion regarding raising children and how risk is conceived and negotiated within different societies. Overall, the notion of learning from "traditional societies" is an important one, but this work falls a little flat to me. An okay book and easy read though
Dorizius
Jared Diamond's argument, there exist unsuitable things to the distinctive feature of human beings in our Weird (Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) societies, is clear and quite to the point. He says many small-scale societies possess some features that we could profitably incorporate into our state societies. What and how we left behind in the process of civilization.

New Guinean's remarks that they don't just go and visit someone without a purpose make me think of their harsh reality. We easily think we've acquired a relationship or friendship with someone we've just met and spent days with. This is most unlikely in the society where peace and safety is not fully assured. Blunting sensibility to danger may make us exposed in peril easily. Diamond alleges genes relate to the two big issues of adult diseases, hypertension and Type-2 diabetes, must have been advantageous to us under conditions of traditional lifestyles, but that have become lethal under conditions of the Westernized lifestyle.

Bodily punishment and bullying at school become the greatest problems in Japan. Most hunter-gatherer bands do minimal physical punishment of young children, Diamond says, while many farming societies do some punishment, and herders are especially likely to punish. It is said to be rare for hunter-gatherer games to keep score or identify a winner, whereas many Western games involve keeping score and are about winning and losing.

Bilingualism, common in the traditional societies, has advantages in solving problems in the constantly changing world with confusing information. He asserts bilingualism itself protects against Alzheimer's symptom. Modern industrial societies hasn't developed superior approaches to problems we face now. We could find some useful ideas from the huge range of traditional human experience.

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