Novo Livro de Jared Diamond: The World Until Yesterday

Resenha no The Guardian escrita por Wade Davis do novo livro de Diamond: Jared Diamond, a wide-ranging scholar variously described as biogeographer, evolutionary biologist, psychologist, ornithologist and physiologist. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond set out to solve what was for him a conundrum. Why was it that some cultures such as our own rose to technological, economic and political predominance, while others such as the Aborigines of Australia did not? Rejecting notions of race, intelligence, innate biological differences of any kind, he finds his explanation in the environment and geography. Advanced civilisations arose where the environment allowed for plant domestication, leading to the generation of surplus and population growth, which in turn led to political centralisation and social stratification. No surprises there.
    In Collapse, Diamond returned to the theme of environmental determinism as he pondered why and how great civilisations come to an end. Evoking the ecological fable of Easter Island, he suggests that cultures fall as people fail to meet the challenges imposed by nature, as they misuse natural resources, and ultimately drift blindly beyond a point of no return. Again nothing to suggest controversy, save for the shallowness of the arguments, and it is this characteristic of Diamond's writings that drives anthropologists to distraction. The very premise of Guns, Germs and Steel is that a hierarchy of progress exists in the realm of culture, with measures of success that are exclusively material and technological; the fascinating intellectual challenge is to determine just why the west ended up on top. In the posing of this question, Diamond evokes 19th-century thinking that modern anthropology fundamentally rejects. The triumph of secular materialism may be the conceit of modernity, but it does very little to unveil the essence of culture or to account for its diversity and complexity. (...)
      Jared Diamond's failure to grasp that cultures reside in the realm of ideas, and are not simply or exclusively the consequences of climatic and environmental imperatives, is perhaps one reason for the limitations of his new book, The World Until Yesterday, in which he sets out to determine what we in the modern world can learn from traditional societies. He begins by opportunistically selecting nine topics to explore, limiting the scope of his inquiry from the outset. He examines how indigenous peoples raise their children, treat the elderly, resolve conflicts and manage risk. He addresses the benefits of multilingualism and healthy diets. And he devotes two chapters to the dangers inherent in indigenous life, which lead to a chapter on religion, for "our traditional constant search for the causes of danger may have contributed to religion's origins". From certain of these topics – child rearing, for example – he distills lessons that might be incorporated into "our personal lives". The treatment of older people, healthy lifestyles and multilingualism suggests "models for individuals but also policies that our society as a whole could adopt". The discussion of dispute resolution suggests "policies for our society as a whole". Diamond is at his best when drawing on his lifetime of fieldwork in New Guinea, home to 1,000 of the world's languages, where his achievements as a naturalist and scholar have been truly remarkable. Stories of his time among the Dani, his years in the field studying birds, his random encounters whether in airport terminals or the most isolated of communities, are humorous and insightful. His observations in any given moment are invariably original and often wise. Yet the lessons he draws from his sweeping examination of culture are for the most part