Status Updates From The Other Side of Eden

Making my goodreads return

Shout out anthro for making me read this

Fucking hell this is good.

An irony of Levi-Strauss’s achievement is that it yields much more insight into his own culture, so centered on binary logic and attempts to create rational order, than into those of the tribes he examined.

The term “land claim” is itself an anomaly, implying that the onus should be on the original occupants to claim their homes, resources, and territories from the colonists. This is a reversal of common sense; the burden of proof should lie with the newcomers.

The stereotype of caveman or hunter-gatherer male chauvinism is easy enough to explain. Those “primitive” people are supposed to be our earliest ancestors – the original versions of ourselves...But as a mythic notion, the caveman is a projection of the modern onto the ancient. The grunting misogynist is a crude and idealized version of modern man. If we were but our natural and real selves, thus it would be.

Faith in progress is itself a kind of religion.