人类学视野下的全球史

This course will take on the broad sweep of human history from an anthropological perspective, highlighting the great social and cultural diversity of human experience. Standard accounts of global history depict human society evolving from stage to stage in unilinear fashion: egalitarian hunter-gatherers gave way to hierarchical agricultural societies before the rise of cities and, later, the establishment of states. New archaeological and anthropological discoveries are gradually challenging such picture: the trajectory of human history, it turns out, has been much more diverse and unpredictable than previously imagined. The course will delve into anthropological phenomena that showcase this diversity, such as seasonal variation among hunter-gatherers, ‘play agriculture’ in Amazonia, egalitarian cities in Ukraine, pirate networks in the Indian Ocean, urban revolutions in Mesoamerica, and stranger-kings across the Pacific. It will place these topics within contemporary anthropological and archaeological theory. Additionally, it will dig deep into extended case studies that allow a better grasp of key theoretical debates in anthropology. These will include agriculture in prehistoric Australia, the neolithic site of Gobekli Tepe, and the history of the Chinese cities of Taosi and Shimao, among others. The leitmotif running through each topic of the course is the capacity of collective intentionality in shaping human history. The course will view historical phenomena as windows into the social flexibility of the human past as well as accounts that throw insights into the possibilities of the future.