Sublime

Observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer bands support this idea. Most bands are highly egalitarian, and when a hunter comes back to camp carrying a fat deer, everybody gets a share. The same is true of chimpanzees.

When Chief Oren Lyons of the Iroquois Onondaga Nation was invited to address students at the University of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, he highlighted this risk. ‘What you call resources we call our relatives,’ he explained. ‘If you can think in terms of relationships, you are going to treat them better, aren’t you? … Get back to the re

Following in the footsteps of Mauss, we might also suggest a fourth possibility. Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?

Biology, anthropology and archaeology all point in the same direction: humans may be nice to their friends, we’re cold-blooded when it comes to outsiders.

perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument.

Lorsque les anciens ont découvert que chaque population avait sa propre vision de la vie, ils n’ont pas été tétanisés. Cela leur a au contraire permis d’améliorer leur compréhension de l’humanité et d’avoir les conversations les plus enrichissantes que des hommes aient jamais engagées sur la meilleure façon de mener son existence.

This is a key to understanding our history and psychology. Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle.

On the one hand, as the late composer Stephen Sondheim once wrote, “The history of the world, my sweet—is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.” Clans, families, tribes, and nation-states collide, and one side is annihilated or enslaved or colonized or dispossessed to enrich the other. One