The History Book Club discussion
ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
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ANTHROPOLOGY
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Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
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Jan 22, 2019 10:20AM
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"Some believe this book has no truth in it"
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Carlos CastanedaSynopsis:
The story of a remarkable spiritual journey, the first awesone steps on the road to becoming "a man of knowledge," the road that continues with A Separate Reality and Journey To Ixtlan. Includes The Teachings and A Structural Analysis
Note: Some say that Carlos Castaneda was a con and even though he was a young anthropologist that this book has no truth in it. We will leave it to the reader to decide. It was very difficult to classify where this book belonged and on which thread.
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Jared DiamondSynopsis:
"Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope ... one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.
In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal
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Note: The journalist, author and editor of the journal Public Archaeology, explains why the history of archaeology is a surprisingly bloody affair - 80% of the Polish archaeological profession died one way or another during WW2
by Gordon R. Willey (no photo)'Synopsis:
Neal Ascherson responds to the following statement: "By the 1960s we have seen the emergence of American ‘Processualist’ Archaeology. Can you tell us a bit about these so called ‘New Archaologists’ and your next book, Method and Theory in American Archaeology by Gordon Willey and Phillip Phillips?"
Willey and Phillips said: “American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing”. It was a huge breakthrough in archaeology, it was really breaking out of a narrow field and saying archaeology is about people. The archaeological purpose is to answer questions about humans and human society, not just to build up artifact classifications.
The thing about these New Archaeologists, Lewis Binford most prominently, is that they were cultural evolutionists. Binford was an American processulist, and was keen on something called ‘ethno-historical’ information, and went to live with Inuits to try to more deeply understand what life in upper Palaeolithic France was like, what mattered to them, and he considered that you can only do this by living a life that was similar, in some ways, to the European Palaeolithic.
They were interested in cultural evolution: the process by which human groups advanced from one stage of development technologically, and through the mastery of their environment, to another. But the processualists were always fairly definite that environment set limits to what humans could do. They liked to discover environmental reasons for the success or failure of particular groups. It’s a very deterministic way of looking at things.
Source: Five Books
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Note: By a very, very, very controversial anthropologist who is also a goodreads author. Some say that the book is dangerous but very interesting. It has made some very uncomfortable. Just an FYI.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
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David GraeberSynopsis:
Before there was money, there was debt.
Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.
Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.
Note: It has quite a few rave reviews.
Source: Savage Minds
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by Beatriz Manz (no photo)Synopsis:
Paradise in Ashes is a deeply engaged and moving account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. In this compelling book, Beatriz Manz—an anthropologist who spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala—tells the story of the village of Santa María Tzejá, near the border with Mexico. Manz writes eloquently about Guatemala's tortured history and shows how the story of this village—its birth, destruction, and rebirth—embodies the forces and conflicts that define the country today.
Drawing on interviews with peasants, community leaders, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces, Manz creates a richly detailed political portrait of Santa María Tzejá, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s. Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. With great insight and compassion, Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa María Tzejá, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives.
Source: Savage Minds
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by Edward M. Bruner (no photo)Synopsis:
Recruited to be a lecturer on a group tour of Indonesia, Edward M. Bruner decided to make the tourists aware of tourism itself. He photographed tourists photographing Indonesians, asking the group how they felt having their pictures taken without their permission. After a dance performance, Bruner explained to the group that the exhibition was not traditional, but instead had been set up specifically for tourists. His efforts to induce reflexivity led to conflict with the tour company, which wanted the displays to be viewed as replicas of culture and to remain unexamined. Although Bruner was eventually fired, the experience became part of a sustained exploration of tourist performances, narratives, and practices.
Synthesizing more than twenty years of research in cultural tourism, Culture on Tour analyzes a remarkable variety of tourist productions, ranging from safari excursions in Kenya and dance dramas in Bali to an Abraham Lincoln heritage site in Illinois. Bruner examines each site in all its particularity, taking account of global and local factors, as well as the multiple perspectives of the various actors—the tourists, the producers, the locals, and even the anthropologist himself. The collection will be essential to those in the field as well as to readers interested in globalization and travel.
Source: Savage Minds
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Philippe BourgoisSynopsis:
This powerful study immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug addiction in the contemporary United States. For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers on the streets of San Francisco, accompanying them as they scrambled to generate income through burglary, panhandling, recycling, and day labor.
Righteous Dopefiend interweaves stunning black-and-white photographs with vivid dialogue, detailed field notes, and critical theoretical analysis. Its gripping narrative develops a cast of characters around the themes of violence, race relations, sexuality, family trauma, embodied suffering, social inequality, and power relations.
The result is a dispassionate chronicle of survival, loss, caring, and hope rooted in the addicts' determination to hang on for one more day and one more "fix" through a "moral economy of sharing" that precariously balances mutual solidarity and interpersonal betrayal.
Source: Savage Minds
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by Setha M. Low (no photo)Synopsis:
Not much of a synopsis anywhere. Barnes and Noble had these Editorial Reviews:
"Provocative and disturbing, this much-needed book holds up an unsparing mirror to an unsettling sign of our times." - The New York Times
From the Publisher
Apart from their more obviously exclusionary aspects, Low finds gated communities insidiously antidemocratic and antisocial because they play into the increasing privatization of all aspects of our society.
Many municipal services are now provided by homeowners' associations rather than local government, removing accountability from publicly elected officials.
Provocative and disturbing, this much-needed book holds up an unsparing mirror to an unsettling sign of our times. — Martin Filler
The New York Times
The not inconsiderable irony is that, as Low quite conclusively demonstrates, the "vigilance necessary to maintain these 'purified communities' actually heightens residents' anxiety and sense of isolation rather than making them feel safer."
Inside the gates people may feel relatively safe, and they let their children play outdoors with relatively little concern for their safety, but the fear remains.
The "internal freedom" of the gated community "comes at a high social and psychological cost," particularly -- or so there is reason to believe -- for children. — Jonathan Yardley
The Washington Post
Why do people move to private gated communities, and what does this mean for the enclave within the gates and for the larger society without?
Inspired by an awkward visit to her sister's high-security home, Low (environmental psychology, CUNY), author of several books on the psychology of place, began to study gated communities in Long Island, San Antonio, and Mexico City.
She combines field observations, interviews with residents, and personal reflection to create an unusual combination of academic research and creative nonfiction. Her interviewees are overall satisfied with their residential choices, citing security and safety, control over neighborhood composition, resale value, and reduced home maintenance workload.
However, they are frequently disappointed by the lack of a sense of community. Low is highly critical of the sociocultural impacts of gating and challenges many claims about gated communities, including the beliefs that they reduce crime and replicate close-knit neighborhoods remembered from childhood.
A related title is Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder's Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Brookings, 1997). Recommended for undergraduate and large public libraries and for urban planning collections.-Janet Ingraham Dwyer, Worthington Libs., OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. - Library Journal
Sources: Barnes and Noble and Savage Minds
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Gillian TettSavage Minds views this book as anthropology. You decide.
Synopsis:
From award-winning "Financial Times" journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her newsbreaking warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, "Fool's Gold" tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown. Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the "Morgan Mafia," as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team's bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control.
The deeply reported and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the "shadow banking" world. The story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk.
But when the Morgan team's derivatives dream collided with the housing boom, and was perverted -- through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed -- by titans of banking that included Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch -- even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling -- catastrophe followed. Tett's access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story of how they engineered their bank's escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown.
A tale of blistering brilliance and willfully blind ambition, "Fool's Gold" is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was perpetrated.
Source for recommendation: Savage Minds
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Claude Lévi-StraussSynopsis:
"Every word, like a sacred object, has its place. No précis is possible. This extraordinary book must be read."—Edmund Carpenter, New York Times Book Review
"No outline is possible; I can only say that reading this book is a most exciting intellectual exercise in which dialectic, wit, and imagination combine to stimulate and provoke at every page."—Edmund Leach, Man
"Lévi-Strauss's books are tough: very scholarly, very dense, very rapid in argument. But once you have mastered him, human history can never be the same, nor indeed can one's view of contemporary society. And his latest book, The Savage Mind, is his most comprehensive and certainly his most profound. Everyone interested in the history of ideas must read it; everyone interested in human institutions should read it."—J. H. Plumb, Saturday Review
"A constantly stimulating, informative and suggestive intellectual challenge."—Geoffrey Gorer, The Observer, London
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Mary Catherine BatesonSynopsis:
Mary Catherine Bateson has been called "one of the most original and important thinkers of our time" (Deborah Tannen). Grove Press is pleased to reissue Bateson's deeply satisfying treatise on the improvisational lives of five extraordinary women.
Using their personal stories as her framework, Dr. Bateson delves into the creative potential of the complex lives we live today, where ambitions are constantly refocused on new goals and possibilities. With balanced sympathy and a candid approach to what makes these women inspiring, examples of the newly fluid movement of adaptation--their relationships with spouses, children, and friends, their ever-evolving work, and their gender--Bateson shows us that life itself is a creative process.
"Well-formulated and passionate ... Offers nothing less than a radical rethinking of the concept of achievement." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Fascinating ... A masterwork of rare breadth and particularity." -- The Boston Globe
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Jared DiamondSynopsis:
A renowned scientist examines the less than two percent of human genes that distinguish us from chimpanzees and that link human behaviors--such as genocide, drug addiction, and the extermination of other species--to our animal predecessors.
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Charles C. MannSynopsis:
A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.
Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness.
But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.
In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions. Among them:
• In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.
• Certain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets.
• The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.
• Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as “man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.”
• Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it–a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.
• Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively “landscaped” by human beings.
Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.
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Terence McKennaSynopsis:
An exploration of humans' symbiotic relationships with plants and chemicals presents information on prehistoric partnership societies, the roles of spices and spirits in the rise of dominator societies; and the politics of tobacco, tea, coffee, opium, and alcohol.
Why, as a species, are humans so fascinated by altered states of consciousness? Can altered states reveal something to us about our origins and our place in nature? In Food of the Gods, ethnobotanist Terence McKenna’s research on man’s ancient relationship with chemicals opens a doorway to the divine, and perhaps a solution for saving our troubled world. McKenna provides a revisionist look at the historical role of drugs in the East and the West, from ancient spice, sugar, and rum trades to marijuana, cocaine, synthetics, and even television—illustrating the human desire for the “food of the gods” and the powerful potential to replace abuse of illegal drugs with a shamanic understanding, insistence on community, reverence for nature, and increased self-awareness.
Praise for Food of the Gods:
“Deserves to be the modern classic on mind-altering drugs and hallucinogens.”—The Washington Post
“Terence McKenna is the most important—and most entertaining—visionary scholar in America.”—Tom Robbins
“The culture’s foremost spokesperson for the psychedelic experience . . . Those who know and enjoy Joseph Campbell’s work will almost certainly appreciate McKenna.”—L.A. Weekly
“An eloquent proposal for recovering something vital—a sense of the sacred, the transcendent, the Absolute—before it’s too late.”—Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Meaning & Medicine, Recovering the Soul, and Space, Time & Machine
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Edward T. HallSynopsis:
From a renowned American anthropologist comes a proud celebration of human capacities.
For too long, people have taken their own ways of life for granted, ignoring the vast, international cultural community that srrounds them.
Humankind must now embark on the difficult journey beyond culture, to the discovery of a lost self a sense of perspective. By holding up a mirror, Hall permits us to see the awesome grip of unconscious culture.
With concrete examples ranging from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the mating habits of the bowerbird of New Guinea, Hall shows us ourselves. Beyond Culture is a book about self-discovery; it is a voyage we all must embark on if mankind is to survive.
"Fascinating and emotionally challenging... The book's graceful, non-technical style and the many illuminating, real-life illustrations make it a delight to read." —Library Journal
"Hall's book helps us to rethink our values... We come away from it exhilerated." —Ashley Montagu
"In this penetrating analysis of the culturally determined yet 'unconscious' attitudes that mold our thought, feeling, communication and behavior...Hall makes explicit taken-for-granted linguistic patterns, body rhythms, personality dynamics, educational goals...Many of Hall's ideas are original and incisive...[and] should reward careful readers with new ways of thinking about themselves and others." —Publishers Weekly
"A fascintaing book which stands beside The Hidden Dimension and The Silent Language to prove Hall one of the most original anthropologists of our era." —Paul Bohannan
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Beyond Culture (other topics)Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (other topics)
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (other topics)
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (other topics)
Composing a Life (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Edward T. Hall (other topics)Terence McKenna (other topics)
Charles C. Mann (other topics)
Jared Diamond (other topics)
Mary Catherine Bateson (other topics)
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