The Habitats of History

[bibliogramma]

Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Scholars of history have conceived of a great many schemes for dividing human societies and civilisations into groups, ranging from such basic identifiers as time and place - where they are/were in the world, the time in which they flourished – to linguistic and ethnic groupings to social characteristics such as kinship customs or political organisations. In Civilizations, Felipe Fernández-Armesto has chosen instead to organise this overview of many of the world’s cultures, past and present, according to the nature of the physical environment in which they developed. In the process, broad themes about how humans adapt, modify, or adapt to specific kinds of environments emerge and allow us to look at the history of humans on this planet in new and thought-provoking ways.

The result of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's work is a series of startling and illuminating juxtapositions - the maritime civilizations of the Venetians and the Polynesians; the mountain cultures of Tibet and Papua New Guinea; the lifestyles of the English and the Iroquois. Societies that flourished in the Arctic, the Rain Forest and the Desert are re-evaluated alongside those of the ancient river-valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, where civilization is conventionally supposed to have started. In this book the search for civilization leads not to Imperial Rome, Enlightenment Paris and Renaissance Florence but rather to the Sahara of the Dawada people, the Aleut Islands of the icy northern Pacific, and the Indian Ocean where the Oran Laut 'boat people'. (source)

Readers of Jared diamond’s work will find some similarities between the approaches of the two authors, although Fernández-Armesto focuses more on the physical geography of environments while Diamond is looking more at ecologies and resources set. Both scholars, however, make us think about our species’ past in terms of its interaction with the world around it, rather than as an isolated force moving though the world, and in today’s world, where our interactions with the world may very well put an end to the future of our species, that’s an important paradigm shift.

Fernández-Armesto is more than an environmental historian, though – he is also a raconteur, and his discussions of each of the civilisations included in this volume contain fascinating bits of information about the people, places and times, small exemplars of the cultures he explores that make even those societies most separated in time and space from the modern developed nations his readers most likely inhabit seem vivid and immediate.

From my point of view, Fernández-Armesto’s argument becomes problematic when he goes beyond categorising civilisations by their physical environments and seems to place greater value on those civilisations that have more completely altered their environments to meet the needs and preferences of humans:

Civilization makes its own habitat. It is civilized in direct proportion to its distance, its difference from the unmodified natural environment.

The degree of civilisation thus becomes a measure of how much of a mark humanity has made on the environment. At the same time, the author is clearly aware that the transformation of environments can lead to catastrophes, resulting in a tension between his admiration for the most transformative of civilisations and the unavoidable realisation that without sustainability, transformation is ultimately a dead end.