Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-24hb2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T12:51:43.101Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - The tempest: anthropology and human development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Peter Gow
Affiliation:
Professor of Social Anthropology University of St Andrews
Alan Fogel
Affiliation:
University of Utah
Barbara J. King
Affiliation:
College of William and Mary, Virginia
Stuart G. Shanker
Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
Get access

Summary

Humans make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

The truth of this statement is obvious to anyone who reflects on their own childhood, for we do not select for ourselves where we were born nor who our parents are. We come into a world already given to us, and we have to find our place within it. Our developmental possibilities are constrained by the world as we find it. Equally, however, our developmental possibilities, as they take shape, create new worlds for others, new circumstances that will already exist, given and transmitted from the past, for other people. If the world is given to us, then important aspects of it become, as we develop, what we in turn give to others. Anthropologists who have spent time studying people whose experience of the world is markedly different from their own necessarily understand these gifts in a particular way. I want to explain how I understand these gifts through a story about my time living among the Piro people of the Bajo Urubamba River in Peruvian Amazonia, and what they have taught me.

I want to explain how I understand these gifts in the form of a story because this is what Piro people insistently taught me to do.

Type
Chapter
Information
Human Development in the Twenty-First Century
Visionary Ideas from Systems Scientists
, pp. 91 - 103
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×