The ability to disseminate is a virtue so that great thinkers or scientists, whatever the field, end up approaching scenarios that at first seem very distant because of the technical or the abstract. Authors like Eduard Punset u Oliver sacks are two extraordinary examples in whose bibliography we find that synthetic reader taste, that close, metaphorical, analogical explanation.
Jared Diamond es another one of those great communicators that end up reaching many readers with anthropological concerns from the most basic to the most sophisticated. And its magic resides in the full conviction of each other.
Nothing is more anthropological in essence than the study of Evolution. Nothing that can encompass everything in terms of evolutionary changes in the first instance and resulting in sociological, religious or political phenomena than the approach to that constant movement of human civilization that is shaping every space from the most individual to the collective.
As human beings adapt to their habitat and as they make that environment a pre-eminent place for their species, everything else develops in a community that has already made the planet that global village comparable to a valley occupied by the former. humanoids interacting on Earth.
It may sound pretentious, but Jared Diamond really knows how to narrate this process so varied and extended in time with profuse and synthetic detail (worth the paradox). And of course, such a source of knowledge is widely used by experts and restless. So, if you want to get closer to a very complete author of scientific literature. You are in the right place.
Top 3 recommended books by Jared Diamond
Guns, germs and steel
The world for a current human being, on that side of the world labeled as "Western" (perhaps in a maddening ethnocentric gesture that seeks to extend a geographical part of the planet to everything that adapts to its idiosyncrasy), is a set of characteristics known and presumed for the whole world.
Our patterns are what they are and from them we see the world. Perhaps that is why, to get out of a focus that stretches back many centuries, Jared Diamond takes us back to thousands of years before our way of life was even a remote utopian dream, or dystopian, depending on how you look at it. And we find the human being stripped of the supposed comfortable refuge of the current lifestyle.
Perhaps beginning to discover those homo sapiens sapiens that were finally evolving towards fully upright characteristics is disturbing.
Even more so when we discovered how some societies were oriented towards the most basic exploitation of the first agricultural and livestock resources while others used the most atavistic force to become the first warriors from activities such as hunting.
Was evolution marked by force or by nascent intelligence towards control of resources? The destiny traced to this day arose from a balance of power between what Mother Earth offered and what man came to understand in his relationship with his fellow human beings.
Collapse. Why some societies endure and others disappear
The old myth of the Mayans or the Incas leaving their most emblematic territories in which time later their constructions are discovered.
Lack of resources or extinction due to some endemic evil? It is just one example of the causes that have led to the prosperity of some civilizations and the extinction of others. The black plague or the Spanish flu attacked with force when the different European communities were already beginning to interact.
But those phases were overcome thanks to some type of natural vaccination that prevented the catastrophe, a specific defensive evolution. Today the climatic, ecological and biological challenges are still there, and perhaps we ourselves will facilitate the pandemic.
Readings on the past are always interesting to consider possible current drifts. Jared Diamond leads us from one civilization to another, with the conjectures and certainties about his final fate.
The world until yesterday
Yesterday perhaps we were not so different. The essence of our civilization is characterized by drives, emotions, by rationalization and the senses. The differences are established in what surrounds us, almost always an artificial environment currently on which we structure our world more subjective than ever.
From these premises, Jared Diamond talks about our current situation. Seeing ourselves as essentially identical with what we were can free us from that armed conception of the accessory rather than the fundamental.
The author's studies on different civilizations that still live far from that globalized world today serve the cause of an awareness that ranges from the spiritual to the sociological.
The pleasant way in which this author is able to address the deepest ideas about the anthropological end up splashing earthly aspects such as education, old age, spaces in which it is always important to recover that notion of the essential to end up recovering lost horizons that they refocus us on happiness and our balanced coexistence with the world stripped of so much superfluous aspect.
