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Title: Man's Rise to Civilization: The Cultural Ascent of the Indians of North America by Peter Farb ISBN: 0-525-15270-9 Publisher: E P Dutton Pub. Date: March, 1978 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A wonderful book
Comment: I hope this book will be re-edited, the prose is wonderful -I couldn't put it down- and without falling into the 'Noble Savage' trap, Farb shows how wonderful life might have been in most Amerindian cultures before Columbus. This book re-educates.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Recapitulation of the I-E Domestication of the Horse
Comment: The late Peter Farb's book made a great impression when I read it over twenty years ago and I frequently refer to its insights in my lectures on Environmental history.
Native Americans, like the Scythians, Sarmatians, Magyars, Mongols, Turks, etc., developed a common nomadic culture on the Plains once they had stolen the horse from the Spanish invaders. Like the cultures that proceeded theirs by some three millennia, they had a common tool-kit and life-style, while maintaining different languages and social structures.
Mr. Farb would have been horrified by the thoughtless change of Sioux for Comanche in the filming of the book, 'Dances With Wolves,' for the Sioux were descendants of the Woodland, settled peoples of the East, while the Comanche got the horse earlier, but were Uto-Aztecan nomads of the desert. A particular culture was a mixture and synthesis of all historical ingredients: Comanche lived in small groups that rarely coalesced into large military formations; the Sioux and Blackfeet lived in small goups when hunting, but were confederated into powerful military and economic organizations. In short they are as different as the Lithuanians are from the Romans.
That same film also created unnecessary misunderstandings that Farb's book tried to dispell: he displayed the common human origins of Indian and Western behaviors. The name 'Dances with Wolves' is not at all strange when you remember Mozart's first name Wolfgang.
The natives who traded Manhattan usufruct rights for glass beads were acting in the best traditions of human capitalism: glass beads were unknown to the New World and were visually far superior to found diamonds or rubies. The native trader going inland would get a very good return on each bead and the inland trader going further into the forest could justify giving that return because he would get an even greater return on his investment; thus, there was a very important rationality behind the American Natives' agreement to Dutch terms. They were only completely in the clutches of the Dutch when a glass bead factory was built in New Amsterdam!
Farb shows all enculturated individuals to be human and worthy of both admiration and scorn. It is a great lesson to learn toward the end of a millennium fraught with misunderstanding and the lack of formulation of basic principles for the evaluation of the Self and the Other.
Rating: 5
Summary: Extraordinary!
Comment: Peter Farb's book should be brought back into print: unfortunately, he's dead and so there's nobody to promote the book so probably no publisher will be interested. However, you'll find much of his work resurrected in Daniel Quinn's book "Ishmael" and Thom Hartmann's book "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," both brilliant works available here on amazon.com. All are highly recommended...
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Title: Dancing With Mosquitoes by Theo Grutter ISBN: 053312977X Publisher: Vantage Press Pub. Date: 15 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Beyond Civilization : Humanity's Next Great Adventure by Daniel Quinn ISBN: 0609805363 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 07 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment by John M. Gowdy ISBN: 155963555X Publisher: Island Press Pub. Date: January, 1998 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing by Robert Wolff, Thom Hartmann ISBN: 0892818662 Publisher: Inner Traditions Intl Ltd Pub. Date: 15 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight : Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation by THOM HARTMANN, NEALE DONALD WALSCH, Joseph Chilton Pearce ISBN: 0609805290 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 10 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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