Understanding Cultural Diversity: A Review on Diamond's Perspective

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When talking about history, most historians limit their research to certain events or points in time. That one event or era is typically large enough for experts to focus their efforts on researching their importance to history. Tasking himself with 13,000 years of history, Diamond examines why different cultures followed different courses in history. Through inspiration, Jared Diamond is determined to answer his friend, Yali, the question “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (pg.14) Yali’s question plays a critical role in Jared Diamond’s novel aiming to focus on the wide-ranging discussions of the history of human evolution and diversity through …show more content…

The title of his novel Guns, Germs, and Steel is a reference to the components that allowed Eurasian societies to become powerhouses of the world. Diamond develops an argument about human inequality based on a determinist logic of the physical environment, including the climate, to be a determinant of human society which does not sit well with readers. Diamond overstates the role of geography in his novel making it his main focus. With this focus, he argues that race, religion, and culture did not determine causes for why Eurasia conquered the world but set Eurasia as a “natural” receiver and because of geography they ended up taking over the world. Diamond lacks to mention other reasons as to why the Eurasia civilization succeeded. He fails to acknowledge reasons such as slavery and genocide. Diamond in a way sets himself up to be labelled as a racist. He discusses the different diseases in Eurasia and why they had stronger immune systems which he relates it to geographical environments but fails to note that a reason for their heightened immunity is because of waste disposal. Being confined to small areas, they were then close to their waste, it allowed then over time to develop immunity to deadly diseases. Whereas the North-South axes had some distance from their waste areas. Another criticism is that he brings forth a lot of different scientific responses to his thesis. Doing this can lead to shortfalls of

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