Why am I reading this book?
Amazingly, this coincided with a meeting with an old friend from Primary school (shout out to Priya!) Priya has just finished her anthropology degree at UCL. It was so amazing to meet her - it struck us how weird life is, in that we drifted apart for our growing-up-years, and yet managed to grow up to enjoy such similar things! She's one of the most interesting, exciting and positive people I know. Her degree, anthropology, is basically all about the study of different cultures. She's learnt about some incredibly diverse and interesting stuff. I was inspired by our chats to try and see what I could learn.
Chloe, meanwhile has been learning as much as she can about the areas of geography that interest her (she's applying for a geography degree). She's a human geographer, and these topics often intersect with anthropology.
This book, 'The World Until Yesterday' brought together my newfound interest in both of these things. It's written in a really easy-to-read style, not too high-brow, but still presenting complex ideas. As an avid traveller, Diamond intersperses the book with lots of his own travel anecdotes that exemplify his points. This makes the book a real exciting read, as we journey with him across the world, and primarily to New Guinea.
Where can I read more about it?
You can read Chloe's in depth analysis and break down of the book here.
What's it about?
Diamond's main goal is to discuss how traditional people approach human problems like health, diet, conflicts, language and religion. He wants to see what we can learn from their traditional approach. He doesn't seek to glamourise tribal lifestyles, and shows the pros as well as the cons. He also notes how these societies can offer an interesting glimpse into our own social history.
What did I think?
If you, like me, are convinced that Western civilisation is not all it's cracked up to be, I am sure you will be fascinated by the things we can learn from traditional civilisations, and perhaps implement into our own lives.
In terms of the negative parts of traditional societies, the book also made me more grateful for all the good things that our society allows us to do. All the things we take for granted every day, like our ability to go to school and university, learn new things whenever we want to on the internet, lead individual, private lives, are exemplified as areas that Westerners have progressed in leaps and bounds.
What were the best bits?
The most interesting sections of the book, for me, were in the second half. Here, Diamond discusses 'Young & Old' and 'Religion, Language & Health'.
Young & Old
In this section, Diamond compares the way societies bring up their children, and deal with their elderly. Although many practices of traditional societies may be distasteful or shocking to our sensibilities (e.g. parents having sex in front of their children leading to sex-play between children), there are many interesting ideas I might think about implementing when and if I am lucky enough to have kids. I particularly noted how modern children are presented with ready made toys, whereas traditional children are forced to be more creative and make their own playthings. Whilst a Westerner would be given a toy plane, a New Guinean child would have to collect materials and work out how to make their own aeroplane. This process leads to greater creativity and resourcefulness in later life, two traits that I would like to develop in myself. 
Treatment of the elderly in traditional societies was an even more mixed bag. Whilst some societies were shocked at our ability to leave elderly parents in care-homes when they become too old or sick to look after themselves, others would leave sickly relatives alone to die when the band had to up-sticks. However, this was a rarity, rather than a norm, and traditionally most societies do really value their elderly people as valuable sources of knowledge. Status will often increase with age.
Religion, Language & Health
In the section on Religion, Diamond gives his opinion on the evolution of religion. Whilst an interesting read, I did agree with Chloe that he presents a picture that is appealing to atheists, rather than theists.
Diamond writes some very interesting things about language, a topic that I had little interest in until now. He presents a convincing argument for being at least bilingual. If for the only reason that it appears to reduce the onset of Alzheimer's it's something we all should consider. Keeping a diversity of languages is something that I now believe to be very important If we lose our languages, we also, over time, lose our diverse cultures.
The most interesting section for me was definitely Diamond's section on health.
He focuses primarily on the problems of hypertension and diabetes, beginning with an explanation of the evolutionary processes at work here. I was amazed to realise that diabetes, which can be such a dangerous condition, is actually caused primarily by a 'thrifty genotype' which, ancestrally, would have been of great benefit.
Many tribal people would have faced periods of grave starvation, followed by periods of extreme abundance. The logical response was to gorge all day on food when it was available, with the aim of putting on as much weight as possible to sustain oneself through the starvation periods. Some people were born with a genetic mutation that caused the body to release insulin even when a comparatively low level of glucose was consumed. That meant that even when there wasn't that much glucose in their food, their bodies would still respond to it in such a way that they stored it as fat. When the days of starvation followed the gorge, these people would be the ones statistically more likely to live, as they had managed to store the most energy throughout the period of plenty. When the other people, with less thrifty genes, eventually died of starvation, that left a gene pool with a much higher number of 'thrifty genotypes' to be passed on to offspring, and thus, a higher chance of mass survival of the tribe during the next starvation period. So far, so good. However, in two tribes that Diamond mentions, this has led to massively widespread diabetes. What characterises these tribes is that they had two very bad periods of starvation back-to-back, leading to almost all the non-thrifty genotypes dying out. And then, very swiftly afterwards, the tribes were Westernised leading to a dramatic increase in food abundance and processing. Their reaction was much the same as it would have been had there been a natural influx of food, however, this time there was no starvation period to follow and many of their bodies could not cope with such extended periods and large volumes of glucose consumption, leading to the onset of diabetes.
This was just one aspect of the whole health section I found really interesting, and Diamond does go on to explore other areas of traditional health and how we can use their ideas to improve our own health - he does have practical tips, not just interesting histories.
Overall?
A top read - very informative, but an adventure too.
Enjoy today!
- rosinaviolets x
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