PhilPaine.com

I strong­ly rec­om­mend this book to any­one who is begin­ning to look at the Neolith­ic peri­od in Eng­land, or to any­one who is intrigued by Stone­henge, Ave­bury, or the mar­velous Orkney sites. Cas­tle­don does a fine job of pulling togeth­er the cur­rent evi­dence and weav­ing it into a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of life in the U.K. in 3000 BC. Much of this involves inter­pre­ta­tion, guess­es, and imag­i­na­tive recon­struc­tion, but the author usu­ally makes it clear when he is doing this, and care­fully dis­tin­guishes between what the archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence can prove or not prove, and when analo­gies from anthro­pol­ogy are appro­pri­ate. Occa­sion­ally the text drifts into fash­ion­able pat­ter about the psy­chol­ogy of spaces and the rela­tion of mind to land­scape, but not enough to be annoy­ing. There is only one embar­rass­ing pas­sage, where he talks about the “emer­gence” in the fourth mil­le­nium BC, of “lit­er­ally self-con­scious peo­ple, peo­ple like us, self-con­tained and self-aware”. The notion that human beings in some peri­od or cul­ture were not self-con­scious or self-aware, and sud­denly became so because of some sud­den trans­for­ma­tion, is, as far as I can tell, non­sense. Yet it con­stantly pops up in his­tor­i­cal and anthro­po­log­i­cal writ­ing, based on the flim­si­est rea­son­ing. One might as well claim that peo­ple became “self-aware” in 1950, because then they began to make indi­vid­ual pur­chases with cred­it cards. But this is only one blem­ish in an oth­er­wise excel­lent and use­ful work. The book abounds in well-cho­sen maps, illus­tra­tions and pho­tographs, the mate­r­ial is pre­sented in an order­ly fash­ion, and the prose style is pleasant.

15469. [2] (Philip Pull­man) The Gold­en Com­pass [His Dark Mate­ri­als, Book 1]
15470. (Philip Pull­man) The Sub­tle Knife [His Dark Mate­ri­als, Book 2]
15471. (Philip Pull­man) The Amber Spy­glass [His Dark Mate­ri­als, Book 3]
15472. (Christo­pher Boehm) Seg­men­tary “War­fare” and the Man­age­ment of Con­flict:
. . . . . Com­par­i­son of East African Chim­panzees and Patri­lin­eal-Patrilo­cal Humans [arti­cle]
15473. (Jacob M. Rab­bie) The Effects of Intra­group Coop­er­a­tion and Inter­group Com­pe­ti­tion
. . . . . on In-group Cohe­sion and Out-group Hos­til­i­ty [arti­cle] Read more »

Rotat­ing cred­it asso­ci­a­tions are pro­foundly impor­tant insti­tu­tions. They illus­trate the abil­ity of peo­ple to orga­nize them­selves demo­c­ra­t­i­cally on a grass-roots lev­el, and show that this impulse is cross-cul­tur­al. This is the clear­est and most detailed descrip­tion of how rotat­ing cred­it asso­ci­a­tions work. The author’s best knowl­edge is of Indone­sia, but he draws on well-researched com­par­isons with oth­er regions, espe­cially Africa. The analy­sis of struc­ture, motives, and effects is very sharp. Basic read­ing in this area.