90
DECEMBER 2012
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HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
WHENYOU’RETALKING
to JaredDiamond, whowrote a book called
Guns, Germs and Steel,
it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re in
the midst of something elemental and important, even if you are
having a tremendous amount of fun in the process.
Published in 1997,
Guns
a ributes the evolutionofmodern society
to the three titular factors. Aworldwide bestseller, it also became a
standard work in interdisciplinary studies in colleges and inspired
a PBS series of the same name. Diamond’s new book,
The World
Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?
,
draws on decades of field research into tribal cultures in an a empt
to understand why we make love and war, and how we raise our
children and look a er our elders—heavy stuff, in other words,
but handled with a light, sometimes funny touch that shrinks the
distance between us and our roots, and makes the profound ques-
tions confronting our civilization go down easier.
Born in Boston in 1937, Diamond got his start studying birds and
teasing apart aspects of their behavior. While accruing
significant expertise (and a fewdegrees) in physiology, bio-
physics, ornithology, geography, environmental history and
anthropology at institutions like Harvard and Cambridge,
he developed remarkable insights into other kinds of ani-
mals. His 1992 book,
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution
and Future of the Human Animal,
examined how the fate
of
Homo sapiens
could be so radically different fromthat of
the creature with which we share 96 percent of our genes.
His
Guns
follow-up,
Collapse,
took amultidisciplinary look
at why some societies flourish and others fail.
Hemispheres
caught up with Diamond, fresh off a foray
into the Sumatran jungle, to talk about the ways of our
fellow featherless bipeds.
THE
HEMI
Q&A:
JAREDDIAMOND
NATIVE CURIOSITY
From top, Jared Diamond
crossing a bridge built
by tribespeople in New
Guinea’s Star Mountains,
in 1993; standing in the
shadow of Borneo’s Mount
Kinabalu, the highest
mountain between the
Himalayas and New
Guinea, in 2000
