[This book review was published in the Spring 2014 issue of The Journal of Social,

Political and Economic Studies, pp. 88-95.]

Book Review

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
Jared Diamond
Penguin Books, 2012

For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors lived the way todays few still-
existing primitive societies live. (Jared Diamond prefers to call them traditional
societies.) The intellectual significance is considerable: the traditional societies
have amounted, he says, to thousands of natural experiments in how to construct a
human society. It is no surprise that they are fertile ground for scientific study;
shaped on the anvil of long experience, they cant be replicated in a laboratory.
In The World Until Yesterday, Diamond examines 39 such cultures, ranging
across the world to include several each from New Guinea and Australia, Africa,
and North and South America. A great many aspects of those cultures are touched
upon, but Diamond focuses primarily on selected features, to some of which he
devotes considerable attention in extended and thoughtful essays. Among them:
the origins and functions of religion; languages, their multiplicity but on-going
extinction; the value of multilingualism; a comparison of diseases in the traditional
societies with those prevalent in the United States; the ways disputes are handled;
how children are reared; and how the elderly are treated. There are many things
about those societies he does not discuss, which leaves readers eager to go farther.
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This reviewer wondered why an observer such as Diamond would limit
himself to selected facets, and so it is revealing when he mentions in the endnotes
that field observers are discouraged from going out on scientific fishing trips
and recording everything that they notice; they are expected to produce books and
articles on some specific subject. Whether this is a justified prejudice on the part
of the social science disciplines is hard to say, but it is one that comes at a certain
cost to the general reader.
The same endnote shows us how much social science is itself a human
activity, subject to the vicissitudes of ideology and intellectual convention: At a
given time there are also certain interpretations and phenomena that tend to be
Jared Diamond is a cultural phenomenon in his own right. Hes a splendid
example of what people are capable of. Bits and pieces of his biography come to
light as the book progresses. They show that he was born in 1937, studied in
Cambridge, England, and at Harvard; did his Ph.D. thesis on electricity generation
by electric eels (a subject important to evolutionary theory); became an
evolutionary biologist; has pursued a career as an author and university
geographer with a geography professorship at the University of California in Los
Angeles (UCLA); has travelled to New Guinea countless times over a 49 year
period since 1964 to do field work among primitive peoples there, along with
much bird-watching; has lived in the United States, Germany, Scotland, Indonesia
and Peru; and knows several languages that include English, German, Spanish,
Tok Piksin and Russian. The book reviewed here is his fifth; he was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel.
It is possible to read The World Until Yesterday for its intriguing (though
often repugnant) details about the cultures Diamond examines. We find, for
example, that until about 1957 the Kaulong people of the island of New Britain
practiced the ritualized strangling of widows. Women had grown up observing it
as the custom, with the result that a widow followed the custom when she
became widowed herself, strongly urged her brothers (or else her son if she had no
brothers) to fulfill their solemn obligation to strangle her and sat cooperatively
as they did strangle her. Diamond tells of endocannibalism, which is the eating

preferred, and others that are considered unpalatable. Diamond cites as an
example that there are still strong views that traditional peoples arent warlike, or
that if they are warlike its an artifact of European contact. The evidence
Diamond gives throughout the book shows otherwise.
Social science as we have known it for well over the past century has often
been pretentious, vacuous and silly; but that is hopefully the chaff that will fall by
the wayside, leaving the great body of meaningful work that has in fact been done.
Diamonds book is part of the latter. The amount of creditable work done in both
the social and physical sciences quite literally boggles the mind. An example
that many will find amusing comes in Diamonds discussion of the salt
consumption in various cultures: He refers to Brazils Yanomamo Indians, whose
staple food is low-sodium bananas, and who excrete on the average only 50
milligrams of salt daily: about 1/200 of the salt excretion of the typical American.
This tells us that somebody has actually made it his business to distill the
respective urines for their salt content. When we think about it, thats quite
remarkable. Its a minute example, but one that shows how far the web of
investigation extends.

of dead relatives. There are rituals calling for painful sacrifices, not the least of
which is subincising (the splitting of the penis lengthwise). He writes of the
long list of head-hunting peoples that went to war to capture and kill enemies for
their heads, and of cannibalistic peoples who ate captured or dead enemies.
There has also been capture of enemies to use them as slaves. A belief in
sorcery has sometimes led people to blame anything bad that happens on an
enemy sorcerer, who must be identified and killed. There has been, of course,
much belief in spirits and ghosts. Diamond tells of one New Guinean explaining
that his own people believed that when a person died, his skin changed to white
and he went over the boundary to the place of the dead. A felicitous outcome
was that when whites first arrived, the reaction was Lets not kill them they are
our own relatives [who] have turned white and come back.
Such tidbits, however, though titillating, do not make up the core of
Diamonds book, which is more appropriately read as a serious (though easily
readable) work of cross-cultural field work. He starts by discussing the
methodology, telling the combination of four approaches scholars take towards
trying to make sense of differences among human societies. They are: (1) to
send trained social or biological scientists to visit or live among a traditional
people. (2) to interview living non-literate people about their orally transmitted
histories. (3) to try to view traditional societies as they were before they were
visited by scientists by using the accounts of explorers, traders, government
patrol officers, and missionary linguists. (4) to examine the societies distant past
by archaeological excavation. Certain additional methods are brought into play,
such as using radiocarbon dating to determine the age of past objects, and
regression analysis to tease out which factors have primary effects on such a
thing as language diversity. Diamond doesnt inquire into the origins of a given
people, but if he did he would find DNA comparisons illuminating. Another
methodological point is that physics Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle carries over
to investigations of primitive cultures; the very act of interacting with people in
those cultures to study them, Diamond says, inevitably has large effects on
previously untouched peoples. As we reflect on all this, we see that there is
nothing pretentious, vacuous or silly about it. It is straight-forward fact-centered
social science.
One of the topics Diamond explores at length is the origin and functions of
religion. The chapter dealing with this contains an extended definitional essay
seeking to discover what is and what is not included in religion. It reminds this
reviewer of his own grappling with the meaning of socialism,
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a word that has
encompassed so many schools of thought endorsing varying models of society and
of economic organization that defining it is like trying to say what is and what is
not included in a river when it is fed by many tributaries, streams, rivulets and
springs. Diamond reports, for example, long-standing debates among scholars of
religion about whether Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism should be counted
as religions. If we think that a belief in supernatural agents is the essence of
religion, its worth keeping in mind that a number of such beliefs are not
commonly thought of as religious; along these lines, Diamond mentions belief
in fairies, ghosts, leprechauns, and aliens in UFOs.
Much of his chapter discusses seven functions religions serve. An original
function was explanation Origin myths, like those of tribal people and of the
book of Genesis, are widespread to explain the existence of the universe, people,
and language diversity. A second is in defusing our anxiety over problems and
dangers Our craving for relief from feeling helpless. Traditional peoples in
particular experience much they cant control, leading them to resort to prayer,
rituals, omens, magic, taboos, superstitions, and shamans. To relieve their worry
over the dangers of hunting in Africas Kalahari Desert, !Kung men consult oracle
disks made of antelope leather to prophesy what to expect; when the disks are
thrown on the ground, a diviner reads them (like tea leaves) to see whether the
hunt will go well. A similar function of religion has been to provide comfort,
hope, and meaning when life is hard. Diamond observes that most religions
provide comfort by in effect denying deaths reality. It is a comfort even to
believe that those who did you evil will have a miserable afterlife. The other
four functions Diamond discusses are standardized organization, preaching
political obedience, regulating behavior by means of formal moral codes, and
justifying wars.
Wide swings of cultural diversity come to light in Diamonds essay on child-
rearing. He points out that over 98% of First World babies survive infancy and
childhood, while the proportion is as low as 50% in traditional societies. It
doesnt help the percentage among primitive peoples for the Ache Indians in
Paraguay to kill children, mainly girls, to accompany a dead adult into the grave.
No doubt a larger percentage of premature deaths is caused by the fact that many
hunter-gatherer societies give children total autonomy, allowing them to do
dangerous things. This reviewer recalls visiting the Grand Canyon in the United

2
See Chapter 28 of Dwight D. Murpheys Socialist Thought (Washington, D.C.:
University Press of America, 1983). The book is available on the authors web
site: www.dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info
States and finding Navajo babies playing within feet of a 1,000-foot drop-off while
their mothers sold trinkets spread out on a blanket nearby. (By way of contrast,
Diamond tells of the extraordinary lengths parents in tropical rainforests go to
protect their small children from such dangers as scorpions, spiders, jaguars,
snakes and even stinging plants.) Some of the deaths come from infanticide: in
many traditional societies, infanticide is acceptable under certain circumstances,
such as when an infant is born deformed or weak or too soon after the preceding
child was born. Among the !Kung, it is the mothers responsibility to examine
the baby carefully for birth defects. If it is deformed, it is the mothers duty to
smother it. Because many societies value boys over girls, females born into
them will sometimes die through passive neglect, or (in exceptional cases) even
[by] being intentionally killed by strangling, exposure, or burying alive.
In this essay, Diamond compares the roles taken by fathers, how parents
in different cultures respond to their childrens crying, whether corporal
punishment is used, childrens making of their own toys as distinct from the
enjoyment of manufactured toys in developed societies, what obedience is
expected, sexual privacy, and differing methods of childbirth. As to all of these
things, the book conveys much thats informative.
Another essay has to do with the treatment of the elderly. Diamond writes
disparagingly about how in the United States so many older people go into
retirement homes and are seldom visited by loved ones. One Fiji Islander thought
such a thing outrageous. On the other hand, some traditional societies, faced with
the exigencies of their ways of life that often involve moving from place to place
and suffering recurrent famines, starve or abandon or actively kill them. He says
of the Lapps of northern Scandinavia, the San of the Kalahari Desert, the Omaha
and Kutenai Indians of North America, and the Ache Indians of tropical South
America that they intentionally abandon an old or sick person when the rest of
the group shifts camp. He reports that old Chukchi people who submitted to
voluntary death were assured that they would receive one of the best dwelling
places in the next world. Further, sick and old people in the Banks Islands
begged their friends to end their suffering by burying them alive. It would seem
that by reporting all this Diamond is painting a dire picture of those peoples.
Despite it all, however, the overriding tone of the book is one of objectivity, mixed
with empathy and respect.
Diamond tells us a lot about languages. The world, he says, has about 7,000
of them. One thousand of these are spoken exclusively in New Guinea; even the
Pygmies in Central Africa have at least 15 ethnolinguistic groups. Africa and
India each have over 1,000. Nigeria has a remarkable 527 and Cameroon 286.
The small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu (area less than 5,000 square miles)
[has] 110 languages. Lots of them have between only 60 and 200 speakers.
Most languages are unwritten, and it was a mere 4- to 5,000 years ago that
writing began, starting in the Near East.
He is especially fascinated by how many languages go out of existence.
Sometimes this is the result of language steamrollers where a dominant incoming
group swamps out the indigenous culture. This happened to native languages in
the Americas, and Diamond points, among other instances, to the British
conquest of Australia [that replaced] Aboriginal Australian languages and the
Russian expansion over the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean replacing native
Siberian languages. When the Indo-European language family began its spread
into western Europe some 9,000 years ago, it eliminated all the original languages
of Europe except for the Basque language in the Pyrenees.
For a variety of reasons, most prominent of which is almost certainly the
expanding globalization with its breaking down of localism, languages are now
vanishing more rapidly than at any previous time in human history. If current
trends continue, 95%... will be extinct or moribund by the year 2100. Since each
is the vehicle for a unique way of thinking and talking, a unique literature, and a
unique view of the world, much is being lost because there are so few linguists
studying them. Diamond believes this deserves as much attention as the now-
rapidly occurring extinctions of plants and animals.
We could go on with details about The World Until Yesterdays handing of
its several other topics, but its appropriate to leave those for readers to discover
for themselves. Its obvious from all weve said that we highly recommend the
book. We will end this review simply by mentioning a couple of additional items
that have caught our eye but that havent fit into the earlier flow.
For a reason well explain soon, it may interest American readers in
particular to know that Diamond mentions the fear that people often have of
someone who speaks an unrecognized language. The instant distinction between
friends and strangers still operates today: just see how you (my American readers)
react the next time youre in Uzbekistan, and you finally to your relief hear
someone behind you speaking English with an American accent. This has a
bearing on the accusation that is sometimes levelled against white Americans for
supposed racism when they act fearfully if they hear young black men behind
them. This accusation was surprisingly rebutted in part by black-activist Jesse
Jacksons own candid admission that he felt relieved one time when he found that
footsteps behind him were those of whites rather than of his fellow blacks. Now,
Diamonds Uzbekistan example puts the matter in a broader, more universal,
context that transcends black/white relationships in the United States.
Diamond is a man of his time, and no renegade, so it can be expected that he
sometimes toes the line of ideological correctness (though it doesnt come up
often). An example of conventionality comes when he repeats the now-common
criticism, often bitterly voiced, of earlier Americans for trying to assimilate Indian
children into white society by putting them into English-speaking boarding
schools. Nevertheless, Diamond takes issue with an anti-European myth when he
sees it. One of these is that people were traditionally peaceful until those evil
Europeans arrived and messed things up. He says that the mass of
archaeological evidence and oral accounts of war before European contact makes
[this] far-fetched. The effects of European contact are mixed, but overall the
long-term effect has almost always been to suppress tribal warfare.
The dishonesty of a great deal of thinking is a major fact in todays world.
Diamond doesnt cast it in so broad a light, but he tells us something that we
ourselves may find indicative of ideological warping: Archaeologists excavating
fortifications associated with ancient wars have often overlooked, ignored, or
explained them [signs of warfare] away, e.g., by dismissing defensive ditches and
palisades surrounding a village as mere enclosures or symbols of exclusion.
This is why an author who tells things straight is much to be valued.

Dwight D. Murphey