AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: The Origins of Human Society (History of the World) by Peter Bogucki ISBN: 1-57718-112-3 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $37.95

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Comprehensive, up-to-date overview
Comment: Coming to this book as a non-expert, I feared it might be a rather dry overview. But as a scholar fresh from the academic fray, Bogucki provides the general reader with a real sense of the excitement of current arguments and debates, offering what seemed to be very fair and conscientious summaries of other scholars' perspectives on key interpretive issues, such as the origins of inequality and the transition to agriculture etc.

At the same time, he is frank about his own conceptual framework, which assumes that societies can best be understood in terms of the individual agents that constitute them, who are conceived as essentially self-interested. This methodological individualism contrasts with holistic approaches that grant more importance to larger social structures in understanding individual behavior and that therefore tend to see human nature as more variable and plastic over time. Because of his assumptions, Bogucki often seems to me to project back into prehistory very modern sounding individualistic motives. Pleistocene band society represents the constraining force of communism on risk-taking individualism. The post-ice-age "flexible foragers" become distant cousins of Eastern Europeans freed from communist constraints and able at last to exercise consumer freedom and possessive individualism. I felt at times that he was losing a sense of the historical distance between the prehistoric peoples and ourselves and regretted not getting a sense of their otherness especially as expressed in their cultural expression.

Rating: 3
Summary: overview of prehistoric archeology
Comment: I have been hoping to find a book that would integrate archeological, genetic, linguistic and ethnographic evidence into a concise yet comprehensive overview of the history of our species. I thought perhaps I had found such a book here, but was wrong. This volume provides a good overview of the archeology of our genus, covering global developments over the past 2 million years. However, it does not integrate genetic or linguistic data well, though both speak to the topics the book attempts to address. While appreciating the author's apparent authority on European archeology, I was dismayed by the treatment of other topics. The question of the origins of our species, despite some opinions otherwise, has been settled in favor of a single origin about 150,000 years ago in Africa, but here the issue is discussed as an open question. Further, treatment of hunter-gatherers, such as views on the sexual division of labor, at times seems awkward in light of other work cited in the book (e.g. Kelly 1995). Such issues lead me to wonder if the author has accepted too much data uncritically; also, the rich archeological data base would be better integrated with the theoretical perspectives of evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology. Less critically, the book nicely summarizes archeological and ethnographic evidence bearing on types of human societies, such as chiefdoms. These types of societies, generally discussed in a sequence of increasing sociocultural complexity, are seen as signposts along processes of sociocultural change. It it these latter aspects that provide the book with its main advantages.

Similar Books:

Title: A History of Archaeological Thought by Bruce G. Trigger ISBN: 0521338182 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1990 List Price(USD): $30.00