Framed in this way, the question of how ‘culture areas’ formed is necessarily a political one. It raises the possibility that decisions such as whether or not to adopt agriculture weren’t just calculations of caloric advantage or matters of random cultural taste, but also reflected questions about values, about what humans really are (and consider themselves to be), and how they should properly relate to one another. Just the kinds of issues, in fact, which our own post-Enlightenment intellectual tradition tends to express through terms like freedom, responsibility, authority, equality,
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