We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But
by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human
cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering
speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and
place to place. And the way we live - our manners, morals, habits,
experiences, relationships, technology, values - seems to be
changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be
dislocating, baffling, sometimes terrifying. Why is this? In A Foot
in the River, best-selling historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto sifts
through the evidence and offers some radical answers to these very
big questions about the human species and its history - and
speculates on what these answers might mean for our future.
Combining insights from a huge range of disciplines, including
history, biology, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, sociology,
ethology, zoology, primatology, psychology, linguistics, the
cognitive sciences, and even business studies, he argues that
culture is exempt from evolution. Ultimately, no environmental
conditions, no genetic legacy, no predictable patterns, no
scientific laws determine our behaviour. We can consequently make
and remake our world in the freedom of unconstrained imaginations.
A revolutionary book which challenges scientistic assumptions about
culture and how and why cultural change happens, A Foot in the
River comes to conclusions which readers may well find by turns
both daunting and also potentially hugely liberating.
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