The Origins of Human Society

Coming to this book as a non-expert, I feared it might be a rather dry overview. But as a scholar fresh from the academic fray, Bogucki provides the general reader with a real sense of the excitement of current arguments and debates, offering what seemed to be very fair and conscientious summaries of other scholars' perspectives on key interpretive issues, such as the origins of inequality and the transition to agriculture etc. At the same time, he is frank about his own conceptual framework, which assumes that societies can best be understood in terms of the individual agents that constitute them, who are conceived as essentially self-interested. This methodological individualism contrasts with holistic approaches that grant more importance to larger social structures in understanding individual behavior and that therefore tend to see human nature as more variable and plastic over time. Because of his assumptions, Bogucki often seems to me to project back into prehistory very modern sounding individualistic motives. Pleistocene band society represents the constraining force of communism on risk-taking individualism. The post-ice-age "flexible foragers" become distant cousins of Eastern Europeans freed from communist constraints and able at last to exercise consumer freedom and possessive individualism. I felt at times that he was losing a sense of the historical distance between the prehistoric peoples and ourselves and regretted not getting a sense of their otherness especially as expressed in their cultural expression.