Indigenous Huli people dancing in Mount Hagen, New Guinea (© Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Jared Diamond is no modest thinker. His 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel was intended to explain why some societies became powerful and developed in the course of history and why others did not. His follow-up in 2005, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, was meant to analyse the causes of civilisational collapse and to stop the world on its headlong path to destruction. His latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies, is a little more limited in its goals, but it is still intended to mark a decisive turning point in one of the longest running discussions in human history and to bring some very longstanding debates about the nature of civilisation and of humanity itself to a close.
Ever since the ancient Hebrews contrasted the habits of the farmer Abel and his pastoralist brother Cain, humans have been fascinated by the cultural and social differences among human groups. They have been intrigued by the way that different cultures produce different ideas about God, politics and family life; and the more settled and literate portion of the human race has always been fascinated by the nomads, jungle bands and other “savages” who live beyond the walls. The ancient Chinese carefully studied the barbarians to their north; Julius Caesar made a close study of the Gallic and Teutonic tribes of his day. Edward Said might have called these studies examples of Borealism, as they were shaped by the desire to control the behaviour of these northerly tribes rather than by a pure thirst for abstract knowledge, but while there certainly were military and political motives behind these studies, there was also a deeply human fascination with the possible insights to be gained from contrasting the conditions of “civilised” and “uncivilised” peoples.
As European explorers circled the globe in the early modern era, the variety of cultures and primitive people around the world seemed to offer clues to the origins of human society and what it meant to be human. Humans were recognisably similar everywhere, but existed in a dazzling, kaleidoscopic variety of cultures. This led to a number of perplexing questions: why were some peoples “civilised” and others not? Why were such very different social, political and religious ideas so entrenched around the world? Why were European ships docking in Osaka rather than Japanese ships visiting Amsterdam? Why did some peoples have more cargo than others?
These questions have two dimensions. One involves the relationship between great civilisations. Why was the Ottoman Empire in decline while the European states were rising? The other involves the same question that perplexed the ancients: what, if anything, can be learned about the basics of human nature from the comparison of the civilised with the uncivilised?
These remote and “primitive” others seem to have been, from early days, a mirror. By comparing the similarities and dissimilarities between themselves and others, the civilised could refine their ideas of human nature, satirise the defects of their own culture, and develop political theories to account for the rise of such features of civilisation as the state, organised religion and written law.
One of the earliest beliefs humanity has about its historical situation is that in the beginning “we” were all like “them”: the living conditions of the savages of today reflect to some degree the ways our ancestors once lived. From Hebrew and Greek times, the condition of the “savage” has been seen as a kind of time machine. The Hebrews studied the desert Arab tribes around them and reflected on their own distant, nomadic past; the Greeks studied the uncivilised tribes in their neighbourhood and formed theories about the nature of civilisation and their own prehistory.
Accordingly, over the millennia, there has been a marked tendency to historicise the differences between “civilised” and “savage” existence. Our understanding of human nature and of the rise of civilisation is grounded in the belief that the “savage” peoples around us reflect the authentic, primitive life of our species. The study of history becomes in part an effort to explain why we no longer live naturally, like them.
The comparison of these societies has been a minor and sometimes major literary genre and occupation from ancient times; the study of the primitive is the intellectual equivalent of pastoral poetry. Moments when the civilised and uncivilised (or differently civilised) worlds impinged on one another tended to bring this form of writing to the fore. The European discovery of the Americas and the long encounter with native American tribes stimulated centuries of reflection on the differences and similarities between “them” and “us.” In the 19th century it was the imperial project in Africa and the spread of industrialism to remote global regions that triggered another bout of this kind of reflection. In the 20th century, as civilisation extended its grip into all but a handful of places around the world, another series of jarring encounters took place—perhaps nowhere more so than in New Guinea, where tribal peoples whose material level of development appeared to differ little from those of the Stone Age, were suddenly pressed into the war effort as the Allies built landing strips and other facilities.
From Gauguin’s paintings of Tahiti to Margaret Mead’s anthropological studies like the landmark Coming of Age in Samoa, modern observers have gone to “uncivilised” regions of the earth in quest of the insights and experiences that the ancient world also sought in the realm of the savage. And just as political and military motives intensified the curiosity of the ancient Romans and Chinese about their “barbarian” neighbours, so in the 20th century anthropologists were often funded by governments interested in the military and political opportunities and dangers that groups like the Hmong in Indochina, or the various tribes in Central Asia, offered during the cold war.
Presumably the uncivilised have been at least as interested in the civilised all this time, but the absence of written records means that for the most part the story of the contacts and relationships between the two groups is remembered from the book- writing and record-keeping point of view.
The mirror presented by the savage world, then, has been used, and continues to be used today, to ground two kinds of theorising: theories about human nature that use observations of the primitive as raw material out of which ideas about the true nature of our species can be constructed, and theories of historical development that use descriptions of primitive peoples as a starting point in their analysis of how human societies change and develop over time.
Diamond believes that this long process has come to an inflection point. We stand on the cusp between two historical eras. Up until now the primitive has always been contemporary. The savage and the civilised have existed side by side. This was true in our parents’ generation, but it will not be true for our successors. The industrial and information revolutions have so enhanced the reach and the capability of civilisation that its tendrils have reached into the most remote valleys and forests of the world. It has become ubiquitous.
It has also become irresistible.
In past times, many people who lived outside the orbit of civilisation were content to do so. Contact with it might change their trading patterns; the Plains Indians were happy to acquire horses and rifles from European visitors, but they wanted these material goods in order to enhance their own lives rather than find a way into another world.
With a very small handful of exceptions, this is no longer true. The residents of remote New Guinea villages and the descendants of headhunters dress in the cast-off clothing of the west, look to earn their sustenance from multinational corporations rather than the forest floor, and increasingly have turned from the worship of the forest spirits and other deities of their ancestral traditions to the worship of the Christian God.
While a few scattered bands of people around the world continue to elude contact with the diligent anthropologists and surveyors of our global civilisation, we are living through the time when one of the most salient features of the human condition comes to an end. Soon, the only people on earth will be people caught up one way or another in the toils of a worldwide network of production, consumption, politics and information. “Primitive savagery” no longer walks the earth; at long last Abel has buried Cain. “Savages” of a kind we shall still have, but they are post-civilisational, not pre; the jungles they roam are made of asphalt and the barbarism they exhibit is constructed. They do not represent a living tradition that is older than and independent of civilisation; they are “neo-savages” rather than “ur-savages.”
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Diamond spent much of his career living among the tribal peoples of New Guinea studying bird life before his two relatively recent books catapulted him to international stardom. As someone whose professional career began when the first contact between New Guinea highlanders and the rest of humanity in the 1930s was still a living memory, he has talked with people who grew up in a world that was untouched by modern civilisation and spent months and years among people for whom it was still only a part of their lives, and often not a very important one. He is one of the last to know the Vanishing Other first hand, and so in The World Until Yesterday he has undertaken a kind of last look at the primitive, offering a coda to thousands of years of human reflection on the differences between them and us.
Intellectually speaking, Diamond is a descendant of George Eliot’s Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch. Like Casaubon, Diamond is on a quest to unravel the “key to all mythologies,” the grand explanation of human cultures that can organise their variety into a single comprehensive scheme. His book Guns, Germs and Steel sought to explain human history in terms primarily of the influences of geography. Conceived as an answer to the question asked of him by an inhabitant of New Guinea —“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”—Guns, Germs and Steel says, essentially, that the Europeans were luckier than other people in their geographical location. They enjoyed a wider variety of animals and plants that were suitable for domestication, and they were well positioned to benefit by trade and cultural exchange with other societies in Eurasia. Geography, for Diamond, isn’t just about maps; the chaps come into it as well.
Like most grand simplifications, Diamond’s key to all mythologies has its critics, often rivals who have their own universal key to propose. Some claim that culture, most recently in the form of “social capital,” is the key. The recent book by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail, dismisses Diamond’s geographical theory and proposes its own, rival, all-encompassing explanation for why the Europeans had more cargo than the New Guineans (“institutions”). The social capital, institutional and geographical theories have been bitterly criticised by those who argue that imperialism and the deliberate destruction of rival societies explains why the Europeans had such an unfair share of the world’s cargo.
Having explored why (some) societies rise, Diamond then turned his attention to why others fail. In Collapse he set out to analyse the causes that lead societies to fall apart. It was essentially a boilerplate Malthusian approach with an intriguing twist: overpopulation didn’t cause famines and die-offs on its own, but societies that grew past the carrying capacity of their homeland triggered deadly environmental crises which devastated the food supply or other features of the environment. This, Diamond argued, was what ultimately led to collapse.
With the problems of economic and social history more or less solved and humanity given due warning of the impending Malthusian disaster, in The World Until Yesterday Diamond shifts from the epic (Guns, Germs and Steel) and tragic (Collapse) into the pastoral. He turns his gaze to those without cargo, to the “traditional societies” who, from a material aspect, still live at the level of development that paleontologists identify as the Stone Age.
The wilderness pastoral is a recurring theme in the modern imagination. Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Romantics could trace the lineaments of unfallen man in the noble savage. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about “primitive communism” and saw “savages” as living in an edenic, prelapsarian world in which the ugliness of class oppression and struggle had not yet intruded. From Rousseau through 19th century western novels like those of James Fenimore Cooper and Karl May, on down to James Cameron’s film Avatar today, the inhabitants of the wilderness are seen to have achieved a complex understanding of natural forces that we “civilised” people lack. They live in a spontaneous and beautiful harmony with nature; we pave over paradise to put up our parking lots.
Diamond rejects this naïve, Romantic claptrap. Having spent a great deal of time with tribal peoples in New Guinea, he takes a more realistic view. And as he draws on literature about tribal groups in other parts of the world, he reads them through the filter of his own experience, alerting him to a reality that is more complicated and sometimes more shocking than James Cameron is ready to accept. In The World Until Yesterday, traditional societies don’t come off that well. They have their spontaneity and dignity, but they also fight brutally, murder one another, commit infanticide, strangle their elderly parents and their lives often look more nasty, brutish and short than exemplary.
They do, however, eat well. Diamond backs the increasingly fashionable concept of a “Paleolithic diet,” a return to the eating habits humanity presumably had before the rise of agriculture brought masses of cereal, sugar and dairy onto our plates. This natural and healthy diet, Diamond tells us, could protect modern man from degenerative diseases and cancer, keep us vigorous into old age, and end the contemporary epidemic of obesity once and for all. Today’s traditional peoples, for all their limits, are thin as long as they stick to the wise ways of the elders. Once they begin to eat the white man’s food, they get fat.
The World Until Yesterday is unlikely to have the impact of Diamond’s last two bestsellers. Those books made for compelling reading and, though some experts found his generalisations unconvincing, Diamond’s ideas about the influence of geography on economic development made a significant impact on the public mind—during the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney even cited Guns, Germs and Steel, before Diamond claimed that Romney had misunderstood his work. Diamond’s latest offering is unlikely to make such an impression, though it may find champions among younger readers for whom this will serve as their first introduction to anthropological literature.
From a storytelling perspective, nuance is much less exciting than adventure and, compared to Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond’s latest is cautious and hesitant. It is a credit to his sincerity that he insists on presenting the people of New Guinea in complicated ways. But readers who come to Diamond for his confident, sweeping generalisations about virtually everything under the sun are going to be disappointed. He is hampered by knowing his subject too well. The book isn’t—and there is no nice way to say this—a compelling read. In the first place it is very hard to say anything particularly fresh or interesting about a subject that humanity has so thoroughly discussed for so long and, despite a wealth of anecdotes and observations, Diamond doesn’t bring much in the way of fresh insight to the discussion. In the second place the structure he’s chosen for the book leaves the reader groping for some kind of narrative or intellectual continuity on a long and winding road. Each chapter presents a mix of Diamond’s personal observations and information drawn from the anthropological literature about a variety of topics. His intention is to illuminate aspects of the gap between them and us and to help us either glory in the achievements of our civilisation or, as the case may be, indulge our nostalgia for the lost textures and complexities of the pre-lapsarian world. It is admirable that Diamond doesn’t conscript all these small comparisons as evidence to prove some grand generalisation about the nature of mankind, but it makes for a flat and disjointed narrative. There is no sense of momentum or drive in these pages; we ramble the winding trails of a New Guinea forest while our guide talks on and on. The stories, entertaining as some of them are, don’t add up into anything in particular; the pudding has no theme.
Some sections work better than others. Diamond’s accounts of war among the New Guinea highland tribes are genuinely gripping. Ranging from night-time raids to groups of tribespeople confronting each other in massed array to genocidal slaughters, Diamond presents war as an ordinary but horrifying part of life in the highlands. Trapped by feuds and complex political rivalries, even within the narrow geography of their land (cut off from the rest of the world by steep mountains), the highlanders cannot leave the narrow territory of their particular band without risk—and every meeting with a stranger entails a chance of death. This is far from idyllic; Diamond portrays the highlanders as trapped in cycles of war, calculation, shifting alliance and retaliation as complex and inescapable as those Europe faced in 1914.
There are other chapters which work reasonably well. Despite some troubling allusions to infanticide, parts of the chapter on primitive child rearing almost take us back to Rousseau’s noble savage. Defending or at least palliating such practices as the use of cradleboards, Diamond makes the case that we have much to learn from the New Guineans when it comes to child rearing techniques. Perhaps we do, though Diamond shies uncomfortably away from what he seems to have found a disconcerting amount of public sex play among the rising generations of New Guineans.
Acknowledging that there is a tremendous variation in practice between very strict and very indulgent child rearing techniques among primitive peoples, Diamond finds on the whole that among many of the tribal peoples’ young children may feel happier and more secure than our own. They are close at all times to their parents and companions, nurse on demand rather than by schedule and are never left alone to cry. Diamond doesn’t romanticise the child rearing of these societies; children aren’t weaned until late less because of indulgent maternal affection than because the tribes don’t have access to baby foods and vitamins. Without the nutrition of a mother’s milk, toddlers might not survive. His point here and elsewhere is a modest and unassuming one: the noble savages in the jungle aren’t necessarily wiser and more in touch with themselves than we are—but in the variety of human behavioural patterns found on this planet, we should look for best practices wherever we find them.
Concern for the preservation of cultural diversity is never far from Diamond’s mind. Of the world’s 7,000 odd languages, he informs us, half are spoken by less than a few thousand people and most languages in existence today will either be extinct or on their way out by the end of the century. This concern to preserve the uncivilised and to appreciate their cultural diversity as something precious is very modern; historically, the world’s “developed” people trembled in fear of the Vandals, the Huns and the Mongols roaming the fringes of empire and sometimes invading the heartland. Today, we are encouraged to protect “savage” cultures from dissolution and decay. The savage now belongs on a UNESCO reserve, and we mourn his passing rather than fear his rage.
Other chapters—like the one on religion—are less satisfactory. A generalist trying to cover a great many complex subjects runs risks. Diamond, whose topics range from the evolution of electric eels to the eldercare practices of Kalahari nomads, does not always manage the risks well. The line between dilettante and polymath is sometimes a thin one, and there are too many occasions when Diamond seems to wander across the frontier.
But the book’s lack of success is not primarily due to the occasional lapses when Diamond’s intellectual ambition outruns his (considerable) knowledge. The problem is partly structural: the book is so long that the lack of a narrative or intellectual arc leaves the reader feeling lost and becalmed. Diamond’s insights and aperçus never quite gel into a vision that justifies the effort expended.
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There is a deeper problem as well; like many other observers of the primitives among us, Diamond misses the degree to which their experience differs from that of our ancestors. Diamond in many ways understands and empathises with the tragic plight of the uncivilised cultures of New Guinea and elsewhere. Some of the most effective and gripping moments in the book come when he shows us the horror, grief and fear that accompany the moment of contact. Before meeting the outsiders, the primitive peoples lived as adults in a rich and challenging world. Their ideas, their social organisation and their knowledge base were suited to the world in which they lived. But with contact, much of what they know loses its value. Their medicine is not as good as the outsider medicine. Their methods of food gathering and utilisation of the land aren’t as effective. The goods they make cannot be traded for the goods they want. Their children, irresistibly attracted by the shiny and glittering objects of the new people, move inevitably away from the tribal patterns of life—yet almost never do they find a satisfying or sustainable relationship with the outside world. They work marginal jobs for marginal wages; they acquire the offscourings and the dingiest trappings of the new world. They fall prey to substance addiction; they live in a no-man’s-land between worlds.
This state of limitation and inferiority is unique to modern tribes. The extended New Guinea Stone Age is quite different from the global Stone Age that ended thousands of years ago. The earlier tribes might not have had more in the way of material goods, and might have faced many of the same limits and dangers that today’s New Guineans face, but there was a crucial difference. Those earlier tribes weren’t cut off from the mainstream, such as it was, of human knowledge, trade and adventure. Their knowledge and technology was at the cutting edge of human progress, even if the cutting was still done with a flint axe. They shared in the common adventure of the human race, and their tribal culture was continually stimulated and challenged by new ideas, new techniques and tools and new goods that came in from elsewhere.
More, while most individuals would not have travelled widely in the early days of the species, humanity was a globetrotter from earliest times. As Diamond notes, even before the Neolithic Revolution, Homo sapiens had become the most widely distributed mammal species on our planet; only Antarctica escaped the encampments of our ancestors. Those early tribes inhabited a vast landscape; they moved across it, driven either by fear or overcrowding, or pulled by the hope of something better. From the savannahs of Africa to the forests of Borneo, the caves of France, and the pampas of Argentina, the people of the Stone Age were explorers and pioneers.
The tribes Diamond encounters in New Guinea and describes in other places live very differently. They have wandered into cultural and geographical cul-de-sacs. They have neither shared in the general cultural rise of humanity nor continued to roam and discover, altering their habits as they encountered new habitats. As Diamond describes the embedded enmities and the deep anxiety about territory, as he recounts stories of genocide and vicious turf battles, he is not necessarily bringing us closer to a sense of how our ancestors really behaved. During the Great Expansion of the actual Stone Age, people seem to have responded to conflict more by moving than by fighting. Weaker groups were pushed into less hospitable territories, but it would have been rather unusual for large numbers of tribes to be trapped like rats in a Malthusian, zero sum game to control a limited ground.
The physical and cultural isolation of modern tribes doesn’t just change their relations with their neighbours. Supporting a group of people on the same tract of land for a long time requires a much more inward looking and conservative attitude than would likely have characterised our Stone Age forbears. When a group has occupied a finite range of territory for countless generations (perhaps for tens of thousands of years), the inherited wisdom of the group is almost infinitely superior to the creative intuitions of any one member. The culture must necessarily become one aimed at discouraging individual initiative, privileging the wisdom of the elders, curbing the experimentalism of youth.
What we see, then, when we look at contemporary “primitive” peoples, is not primitive at all. We are looking at cultures that have been highly refined through thousands of years of adapting to very specific and unusual circumstances. While their level of material and technological development has much in common with those of our remote mutual ancestors 10 and 20 thousand years ago, their cultural situation of isolation and confinement is something that few actual Stone Age cultures would have known.
When observers like Diamond gaze at New Guinea tribespeople, modernity is not gazing on the antique. Two forms of modernity confront one another in mutual incomprehension, both standing at an immense cultural distance from their common Stone Age roots. While it makes sense to look at tribal cultures as part of the diversity of human experience which might suggest alternatives to us or shed new and interesting light on our own cultures and folkways, we must understand the depth of the deprivation that has so profoundly shaped and so largely disadvantaged the “primitives” whom we encounter. To participate in the flow of information and cultural and intellectual change across an ever-widening sphere is the natural condition of human beings. To be outward looking and constantly in search of the new is to be closer to the Stone Age in spirit than to be part of a timid and conservative community. The material condition of the last surviving tribal peoples may be closer to humanity’s ancestral level than that of modern Homo emptor, but in many ways the busy, globalised, cargo-making civilisation we inhabit today is closer to our expanding, experimental and acquisitive Stone Age roots.
