Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive HarmonyAuthor and scholar Robert Edgerton challenges the notion that primitive societies were happy and healthy before they were corrupted and oppressed by colonialism. He surveys a range of ethnographic writings, and shows that many of these so-called innocent societies were cruel, confused, and misled. |
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Page 3 - The point of all these pieces is that we are indeed living in a state of "consciousness out of context"; that the true context of our consciousness was the upperpaleolithic (our "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" as the jargon has it); that in this environment there was a harmony of our evolved attributes as a species, including our intelligence, our imagination, our violence, (and hence our violent imagination), our reason and our passions — a harmony that has been lost...