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The Seventh Wonder of the modern world is a human child, any child. I used to wonder about childhood and the evolution of our species. It seemed to me unparsimonious to keep expending all that energy on such a long period of vulnerability and defenselessness, with nothing to show for it, in biological terms, beyond the feckless, irresponsible... See more

Lewis Thomas • Seven Wonders by Lewis Thomas

The Stranger-King or Dumézil among the Fijians by Marshall Sahlins

gwern.net

Making fire is so “unnatural” and technically difficult that some foraging populations have actually lost the ability to make fire. These include the Andaman Islanders (off the coast of Malaysia), Sirionó (Amazonia), Northern Aché, and perhaps Tasmanians. Now, to be clear, these populations couldn’t have survived without fire; they retained fire

Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success

Back in the 1960s, the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres suggested that precisely the opposite was the case. What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they’re actually more imaginative

David Graeber • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Amerindian Nootka,

Alan Watts • The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or innately egalitarian.

David Graeber • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Plato said those who tell the stories rule society and he was right.

W. Brian Arthur • Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

Melanesian society is organized tribally, into what anthropologists call segmentary lineages, groups of people who trace their descent to a common ancestor. Numbering anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand kinsmen, these tribes are locally known as wantoks, a pidgin corruption of the English words “one talk,” or people who speak the same... See more

Francis Fukuyama • The Origins of Political Order

This is one area in which early missionary or travellers’ accounts of the Americas pose a genuine conceptual challenge to most readers today. Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’ observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien,