Jared Diamond

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 12 years ago

Picked up the most marvellous book, it’s by Jared Diamond & it’s about traditional societies (which, he points out, survive in partial form in even the most harried industrialized landscape and were universal to us until 11,000 years ago: a blip). He says how some things ‘modernity’ does better and some things, tradition. Like a bolt of cloth falling from a high shelf it struck me when he pointed out that all of psychology is based on a very narrow sample: mostly, undergraduate American psychology students, who were the ones most available to undergo tests and to fill out questionnaires. He cites the acronym WEIRD: Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.

The name of this book is The World Until Yesterday. How people picked up their babies and carried them upright with lots of body contact. Babies learned the world at eye level. How your chances of being killed by falling out of a tree or by having a tree fall on you were rather high. When I was a child in Jakarta we heard about a tribal man to the north, coming home from the village meeting through the familiar jungle who was eaten, whole, by a large snake. His body was cut out of its belly entire after the animal was captured.