ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
to feed themselves is much more likely to euthanize its elderly than a group that leads
a more settled existence. The amount of language diversity in an area is also primarily
caused by environmental factors such as climate and the productivity of the land in
which various groups live. But in his new book Diamond’s emphasis has changed
from the evolution of societies to a study of those societies whose environment kept
them from developing into more complex state societies, and what people living in
modern societies can learn from them.
According to Diamond, the answer is a lot. People have, after all, lived in traditional
societies until “yesterday” in the overall lifespan of the human race. As a result,
studying traditional societies both helps us understand our past and elucidates what
elements from these societies remain with us still. Studying traditional societies also
emphasizes the diversity of human nature and moves researchers away from basing
their findings just on the “narrow and atypical slice of human diversity” of modern
industrialized societies (8). Diamond seems rightly disturbed that 96% of
psychological research conducted in 2008 was from such societies. (Around 80% of
research was on an even smaller grouping: college undergraduates enrolled in
psychology courses!) Finally, he believes that both individuals and modern society as
a whole could benefit from adopting certain traits found in many traditional groups.
This final lesson is by far the most emphasized in The World until Yesterday. In
almost every section of the book, Diamond’s focus is on how we can better our lives
by adopting aspects of traditional societies into them.
Diamond’s emphasis on what his readers can learn from traditional societies does not
mean that he idolizes them. He recognizes that people living in traditional societies
usually adopt the trappings of modern ones when given the opportunity – and for good
reason. As he puts it, “Many traditional practices are ones that we can consider
ourselves blessed to have discarded – such as infanticide, abandoning or killing
elderly people, facing periodic risk of starvation, being at heightened risk from
environmental dangers and infectious diseases, often seeing one’s children die, and
living in constant fear of being attacked” (9). Diamond’s emphasis on the violence
present in traditional societies has even led him to be attacked by some supporters of
traditional peoples for supposedly portraying them as savages (The Observer, 2/2/13)
– an accusation that is not supported by the contents of the book. Diamond, however,
argues that even traditional groups’ negative traits can teach us the important lesson of
appreciating elements of our own society that we might otherwise take for granted.
Diamond’s writing is on the whole engaging, and his definitions and explanations are
easy to follow. His clear prose is sometimes marred, however, by the overly complex
and often unnecessary tables that he includes. Rather than assisting the reader like
they should, tables, for instance, listing examples of gluttony in traditional societies
when food is abundant, providing sixteen scholarly definitions of religion, and
describing in excruciating detail objects traded by a large number of traditional
societies instead bog the reader down. The book includes an excellent array of
relevant photographs, divided into separate sections of color and black and white
plates. But these, too, are marre d by poor organization. For example, why did
Diamond and the editors at Viking choose to make an image of Ishi, the last Yahi
Indian, the first black and white plate when he is not first mentioned until page 398?
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