The power to embrace and integrate entire continents

Jarod Diamond's latest book (the world until yesterday) I have not read but I have read reviews and it was trashed by almost everyone. Chris Knight, UK anthropologist and all round troublemaker is someone who I like to read. From Knight's review of Diamond's book this is I think a wonderful passage:

Excellent when he sticks to science, Diamond is less convincing when he turns to politics. Here is an example: “Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic… ” As I read these lines, I had the funny feeling they were directly aimed at me! It would be interesting to research the extent to which anthropologists’ political beliefs correlate with those of the people they study. My closest professional colleagues study African hunter-gatherers; all of us have witnessed and participated in emphatically egalitarian social, economic and gender relationships. As a result, we have all become “anarchist” in the sense Diamond intends. We have had an excellent education - by people who make anarchy work. I should add that anyone familiar with hunter-gatherer systems of extended kinship would be surprised at Diamond’s description of them as “small-scale”: unlike truncated Western notions of kinship and family life, these extraordinary systems have the power to embrace and integrate entire continents.

Gramsci on 'the crisis'

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."  Antonio Gramsci

You know, what a great quote, I really feel great about quoting it, it makes me feel so, you know, cynically chic with a twist of visionary sparkle, shaken not stirred, the James Bond of the underclass. But those morbid symptoms are not morbid, they are the hopefully monsters preparing the way, exploring the world, learning the possibilities of unplanned freedoms. They are the vernacular and I distrust the imperial of both the 'old' and the 'new'.

High civilizations are bound for the North Pole

"Man, as an animal, is indeed, a tropical animal. But man, as distinguished from animals, is not at his best in the tropics or very near them. His fight upward in civilization has coincided in part at least with his march northward over the earth into a cooler, clearer, more bracing air." - Vilhjalmur Stefansson (The northward course of empire, 1922).

The book is an elaborate crack-pot argument celebrating the unappreciated richness of the Arctic rather than a geopolitical survey of empires, their temperatures and the inevitable polar thrust of society you would perhaps expect. It opens with the above graph and it's hard to not to smile.