The World Until Yesterday : : What can we Learn From Traditional Societies?

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Interesting, but.... submitted by sdunav on June 17, 2013, 10:29am ...if you've had introductory anthropology, there's not a lot that will be eye-opening for most readers.

Diamond covers a lot - too much, really, in my opinion. Each section - warfare and violence, justice, parenting and the elderly, danger and risk assessment, religion, language, and health - could easily have been a single book. Diamond has interesting insights into most of these areas, drawing on his fieldwork in New Guinea, but he is not the most gifted nonfiction writer out there, and several (loooong) sections are rather pedantic, plodding, or repetitive.

It is still worth reading, even if you skim the sections you're not really interested in, and his critiques of both WEIRD (Western, education, industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies and different native cultures are cogent and perceptive.

Small societies submitted by Jen Chapin-Smith on August 6, 2013, 8:48pm The author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" brings another book about human cultural development, this time about societies with small numbers of people (as opposed to large nations, such as the United States). Diamond examines various religious beliefs, multilingualism, conflict and conflict resolution and other issues that face societies both large and small. I particularly found interesting the ideas about ways smaller societies resolve disputes in order to end or prevent violence, and what lessons this can bring to our own society.
When Diamond writes about hunter-gatherer groups, Diamond treats the group as internally homogenous, a problem with many anthropological texts. Diamond also provides pictures of individuals without including the person's name, but simply identifying them as a representative of a group. This both denies an individual's own identity and implies that all members of this person's ethnic group look the same or are so similar as to be interchangeable.
It is also always a problem to assume that hunter-gatherer groups in the 20th and 21st century are just like hunter-gatherer groups of thousands of years ago. Diamond does look at many different hunter-gatherer groups, which is better than making suppositions based on just one group.