The Dartmouth Observer |
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Commentary on politics, history, culture, and literature by two Dartmouth graduates and their buddies
WHO WE ARE Chien Wen Kung graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004 and majored in History and English. He is currently a civil servant in Singapore. Someday, he hopes to pursue a PhD in History. John Stevenson graduated from Dartmouth College in 2005 with a BA in Government and War and Peace Studies. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He hopes to pursue a career in teaching and research. Kwame A. Holmes did not graduate from Dartmouth. However, after graduating from Florida A+M University in 2003, he began a doctorate in history at the University of Illinois--Urbana Champaign. Having moved to Chicago to write a dissertation on Black-Gay-Urban life in Washington D.C., he attached himself to the leg of John Stevenson and is thrilled to sporadically blog on the Dartmouth Observer. Feel free to email him comments, criticisms, spelling/grammar suggestions. BLOGS/WEBSITES WE READ The American Scene Arts & Letters Daily Agenda Gap Stephen Bainbridge Jack Balkin Becker and Posner Belgravia Dispatch Black Prof The Corner Demosthenes Daniel Drezner Five Rupees Free Dartmouth Galley Slaves Instapundit Mickey Kaus The Little Green Blog Left2Right Joe Malchow Josh Marshall OxBlog Bradford Plumer Political Theory Daily Info Andrew Samwick Right Reason Andrew Seal Andrew Sullivan Supreme Court Blog Tapped Tech Central Station UChicago Law Faculty Blog Volokh Conspiracy Washington Monthly Winds of Change Matthew Yglesias ARCHIVES BOOKS WE'RE READING CW's Books John's Books STUFF Site Feed    |
Monday, May 03, 2004
Jared Diamond Fellow 04s will recall being assigned Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel in the summer of 2000 as reading for the Freshman Lecture later that year. I tried hard, but ultimately couldn't bear reading a purported history that was completely devoid of human personalities (save Montezuma, Cortez, Charles V, and the tribesman Yali). Well, now's your chance to dust off that copy of GGS and pose the questions you've always wanted to ask about the book to the man himself. Prof. Diamond will be giving a lecture in 105 Dartmouth Hall this Wednesday at 4 pm on "Religious elites and the evolution of human culture." The official writeup of the event goes something like this: "Differences among human societies spring largely from geographical factors shaping technology, economic and social life, and forms of cultural expression. This lecture will focus on religion as a cause and consequence of human social development." That doesn't quite make sense to me. If Prof. Diamond is going to argue that religion, which is very much an anthropocentric phenomenon, stimulates human social development, then how still stands his thesis about geography as the cause of differentiation among human societies (a thesis, by the way, that I don't really believe in)? |