In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization

Rating:
Summary: A great criticism of civilization
Review: Despite some passages where Diamond spends a little too much time defining what anthropology should be, this book is truly wonderful and one of its kind. An absolute must-read.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant anthropology and philosophy
Review: I love this book, and refer to it constantly, both in my life and in my books. It has the best first sentence of any book I've ever read: "Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home." And the book takes off from there. It is an extraordinary exploration of the indigenous peoples with whom Diamond worked, and explores the differences between, for example, indigenous and civilized moralities. Here is what he wrote about morality in a civilized world: 'Our moral syntax has no predicate. Hence we speak of doing good, good for its own sake, or evil. We convert each to a pure substantive, beyond experience, abstract. That is what [anthropologist] Paul Radin meant when he observed that the subject (or object) to which love, remorse, sorrow, may be directed is regarded as secondary in our civilization. All have the rank of virtues as such: they are manifestations of God's if not of Man's way. But among primitives . . . the converse holds. Morality is behavior, values are not detached, not substantives; the good, the true, the beautiful or rather, the ideas of these things, do not exist. Therefore, one does not fall in love, one loves another; and that is an intricately learned experience, as hate, in a certain sense, also is.'

The whole book is that good. Fabulous. Fabulous.

Rating:
Summary: Wild Kingdom
Review: This book is a collection of stories from a lifetime of professional travel. As a young man just after World War I, Cotlow was very enamored with travel. He got himself a job as a supercargo, monitoring the handling and loading of merchant ships, and traveled around the world. As a supercargo, he made a point of visiting ports and taking numerous slides of famous destinations. After four years of such a life, he settled down again back home, working as an insurance salesman. However, he was asked to give lectures about his travels, and soon found himself traveling about the country with his slides and stories of exotic lands. He also attended similar lectures and met with anthropologists and explorers. He writes "Their stories of primitive tribes, wild animals, tropical forests, and the ways of living far from civilization fascinated me." This fascination set him off on lifelong tour of wild peoples of the world. He wanted to meet and film these people so that he could show them to the folks back home who attended his lectures. Attending his lectures must have been sort of like watching Wild Kingdom, except he was featuring people, not animals. Cotlow has included a selection of his photographs to illustrate this book. Most are reproduced in black-and-white, but there are also a few in color. The book includes an index, but no references or suggestions for further reading.

This book was written in 1966, at the end of Cotlow's career, so the stories are an amalgamation of reminiscences of all his trips over the years. Similar to a slide show, it is organized by region, with separate sections for Africa, South America, New Guinea, and the Arctic, and stories from different trips to the same region are combined to give a more complete description of the area that includes a diachronic perspective. Much of Cotlow's travel in Africa went through Congo and Central Africa, where he met the Watusi, the Masai, and the Mangbetu, among others. In South America, he lived and traveled with the Jivaros of northern Ecuador. In New Guinea, he spent time on the coast as well as in the central highlands, and met the Forei and Kukukuku, among others. He also traveled with the Inuit in the Arctic. In each place he went, he introduced himself to the local tribal chiefs, bringing trade goods as tribute. Through interpreters, he questioned the tribe members about their daily activities, their customs, mating rituals, and diet, and takes great pains to describe their attire and appearance for readers. Whenever possible, he went along on a hunting expedition with the tribe. He also cajoled or paid the tribes to perform special dances or rituals for his movie cameras. In addition to meeting the native tribes, he also met a wide variety of Western researchers and colonists living in the area, such as Jean de Medina, founder of the Okapi research station in Congo.

I'm not very fond of books written by people who travel solely to have something new to write about. This book is an extreme example of such travel, where the author even gets the people he meets to stage events just so he can get material, and he frequently displays a colonial attitude of treating the tribal people as animals in a zoo rather than as real people. Nevertheless, parts of the book are still quite interesting today. In his descriptions of the Watusi in Africa, he provides fascinating glimpses into the source of the violence between the Hutus and Tutsi in Rwanda today. In his travels, there was hardly a Westerner living in the wild regions that he did not meet, and researchers interested in these people can find fascinating anecdotes about them in Cotlow's stories. In one memorable chapter about a 1955 trip to New Guinea, Cotlow encounters Kuru, before it had a name. He describes visiting the Forei, who were afflicted with a "strange laughing disease," that went on to rob victims of their coordination, and was always eventually fatal. He notes that this disease had first been noticed by patrols in 1951, but that it had been with the tribe for a long time before that. At the time of Cotlow's visit, the connection of the disease to cannibalism had not yet been discovered. Gems like these make this book a treasure trove of anecdotal history of tribal regions of the mid-Twentieth Century.