Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature - Softcover

Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 074320249X ISBN 13: 9780743202497

Verlag: Free Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Erudite, wide-ranging, a work of dazzling scholarship written with extraordinary flair, Civilizations redefines the subject that has fascinated historians from Thucydides to Gibbon to Spengler to Fernand Braudel: the nature of civilization.
To the author, Oxford historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a society's relationship to climate, geography, and ecology are paramount in determining its degree of success. "Unlike previous attempts to write the comparative history of civilizations," he writes, "it is arranged environment by environment, rather than period by period or society by society." Thus, for example, tundra civilizations of Ice Age Europe are linked with those of the Inuit of the Pacific Northwest, the Mississippi Mound Builders with the deforesters of eleventh-century Europe.
Civilizations brilliantly connects the world of ecologist, geologist, and geographer with the panorama of cultural history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a professorial fellow of Queen Mary, University of London, and a member of the modern history faculty at Oxford University. He is the author of numerous books, including Millenium: A History of the Last Thousand Years and Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature.

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Introduction: The Itch to Civilize

Civilizations and Civilization

Hubert: C'est un cas bien particulier qui m'amène. Morcol: Je ne connais que des cas particuliers, Monsieur.

-- R. Queneau, Le Vol d'Icare (1968), p. 14

"Phew!" muttered Bob under his breath, and I wrinkled my nose, too. The smell that assailed us defied description. But then the thought occurred to me that some of our own civilized odors are not too delicate either. What about the smells that hover over some of our industrial cities -- the smogs, factory stenches, unburned gas exhausts from a million noisy autos, garbage smells drifting out of back alleys? I smiled. Probably an Aleut would wrinkle up his nose at them. I guess it all depends on what you're used to.

-- Ted Bank II, Birthplace of the Winds

(New York, 1956), p. 73

"Has it ever struck you," he said, "that civilization's damned dangerous?"

-- Agatha Christie, "The Shadow on the Glass,"

The Mysterious Mr. Quin

The Civilizing Ingredient

In a dim, grim square in downtown Providence, a few blocks from where I was writing these lines, workmen were installing an ice rink between embarrassingly empty office blocks. The city fathers hoped, I suppose, to freeze-frame a splash of life, color, poise, and charm. When they finished it, the ice rink inspired fun but stayed cold. Meanwhile, other optimists were laying down vivid lawns in Lapland.

Neither effort, some readers may think, says or does much for civilization. For even the world's best ice-dancing is tawdry: glitz and lutz to Muzak. Lawns are platforms for the mentally numb rites of suburban England in summer: small talk and silly games. What wilderness wants to be coated with this bourgeois shellac?

Yet we should applaud the heroism of the ice rink in the concrete jungle, and the lawn in the ice. They represent the terrible paradox of construction and destruction at the start of the civilized tradition: the urge to warp unyielding environments in improbable ways; the itch and risk to improve on nature. The results of civilization are equivocal: sometimes the environment is gloriously transformed; sometimes it is mocked or wrecked. Usually, the effect is between these extremes, along the range of achievements reviewed by Sophocles in a passage which appears at the head of this book: wearing the earth, cleaving the waves, controlling beasts, creating towns with "feelings," and building refuge from weather.

Like most terms calculated to evoke approval, such as "democracy," "equality," "freedom," and "peace," the word "civilization" has been much abused. Of course it denotes a type of society. The difficulties begin to arise when we ask, "What type?" or demand a description or characterization, or inquire into awkward distinctions -- between, say, "civilization" and "culture," or "civilized" and "uncivilized." In the course of many unsatisfactory traditional attempts to capture a term for it, the civilizing ingredient -- the magic which transmutes a mere society into a civilization -- has been seen as a process, a system, a state of being, a psychic or genetic disposition, or a mechanism of social change. "Civilization" has meant so many different things to different people that it will be hard to retrieve it from abuse and restore useful meaning to it. It may be helpful to set out the ways in which the term is usually understood and the way in which I propose to use it.

Loosely used, "a civilization" means an area, group, or period distinguished, in the mind of the person using the term, by striking continuities in ways of life and thought and feeling. So we can speak of "Western civilization" or the civilizations of China or Islam, or of "Jewish civilization" or "classical civilization" or "the civilization of the Renaissance," and readers or listeners will know roughly what we mean. This usage is justified by convenience and legitimated by wide acceptance; but it is imprecise and insubstantial, riven with subjective judgments. The words "society" and "culture" would serve the same purpose equally well. The perceived continuities will vary from observer to observer; some observers will deny them altogether, or perceive others which cut across the proposed categories.

One way of getting round this problem is to insist that there are particular continuities which distinguish civilizations, such as a common religion or ideology or sense of belonging to a "world order"; or a common writing system or mutually intelligible languages; or shared peculiarities of technology, agronomy, or food; or consistency of taste in art; or some combination of such features. All such criteria, however, are arbitrary -- as I hope we shall see -- and there seems no good reason why some societies should qualify as civilizations because of them, whereas other features of culture, such as dance or prophetic techniques or sleeping habits or sexual practices, are not necessarily admitted as civilizing.

At a further level, the word "civilization" denotes a process of collective self-differentiation from a world characterized, implicitly or explicitly, as "barbaric" or "savage" or "primitive." By extension, societies judged to have achieved such self-differentiation are called "civilized." This usage is obviously unsatisfactory -- because barbarism, savagery, and primitivism are also nebulous terms, partisan and value-charged -- but it is easy to understand how it arose: it began in eighteenth-century Europe, where politesse and manners, sensibility and taste, rationality and refinement were values espoused by an elite anxious to repudiate the "baser," "coarser," "grosser" nature of men. Progress was identified with the renunciation of nature. Reversion to the wild was derogation. Men might be the sucklings of wolves, but their destiny was to build Rome. Savages might be "noble" and set examples of heroic valor and moral superiority; but once rescued from the wild, they were expected to renounce it forever. The so-called Wild Child of Aveyron was a boy abandoned in infancy in the high forests of the Tarn, who survived by his own wits for years until he was captured in 1798 and subjected to an experiment in civilization, which his custodians were never able to complete to their satisfaction. Perhaps the most poignant moments in his pathetic life, described by his tutor, were of reminiscence of his solitude:

At the end of his dinner, even when he is no longer thirsty, he is always seen with the air of an epicure who holds his glass for some exquisite liquor, to fill his glass with pure water, take it by sips and swallow it drop by drop. But what adds much interest to this scene is the place where it occurs. It is near the window, with his eyes turned towards the country, that our drinker stands, as if in this moment of happiness this child of nature tries to unite the only two good things which have survived the loss of his liberty -- a drink of limpid water and the sight of sun and country.

When the experiment failed, he was abandoned again: this time into the care of a kindly old woman in a modest neighborhood of Paris, where the scientific world recalled him with the bitterness of disappointment.

Finally, "civilization" is commonly used to denote a supposed stage or phase which the histories of societies commonly go through or which they achieve at their climax. I find this usage repugnant a fortiori, because it implies a pattern of development, whereas I disbelieve in patterns and am skeptical about development. Societies change all the time but in different ways. They do not develop, evolve, or progress, though in some measurable respects they may get better or worse, according to different...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Free Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 074320249X
• ISBN 13: 9780743202497
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 560
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; AA Utrecht; 3584; Niederlande