is a tricky term, one that means many things to many people. For some, it
denotes great buildings, canals, codes of law; for others, it offers a contrast
between one group and another, with the advantage always going to the more
"civilized" bunch against the "barbaric,"
"savage," or "primitive."
All such distinctions, writes
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, are arbitrary and laden with subjective value; they
speak to unscientific notions of progress, to hidden agendas. What matters, he
continues, is the extent to which a culture has developed means to separate
itself from nature: "Civilization makes its own habitat. It is civilized
in direct proportion to its distance, its difference from the unmodified
A culture such as the ancient Han Chinese, the medieval highland Maya, or the
Renaissance Venetian, then, is highly civilized inasmuch as its members dammed
and diverted rivers, drained lakes, stripped forests, and built monumental
structures to celebrate their achievements; people content or resigned to
"live off the product and inhabit the spaces nature gives them" are
markedly less so by virtue of that accommodation.
No culture, Fernández-Armesto writes, is inherently exempt from becoming
civilized; nor, he adds, does "civilized" equate to "good."
In exploring history as a branch of historical ecology, he sometimes abandons
his thesis, intriguing and provocative as it is, to engage in a wide-ranging
survey of the world past reminiscent of (but much better-written than) Toynbee
and Durant, touching on the ancient Greeks here, the herding peoples of the
African savanna and Central Asia there, the Moundbuilders of prehistoric North
America and the hunting peoples of the Arctic there. Unlike many standard
textbooks, his narrative manages to offer something new wherever he turns.
Allusive and learned, his book repays close reading - and should inspire plenty
of argument along the way.