Eurocentrism
World History to 1500
2/17/14
Jared Diamond’s Eurocentric Approach
Jared Diamond is a historian who does lots of research on birds around the world. His research on birds intrigued many people. Diamond also did research on people and their cultures. He was very interested in how different cultures lived. A man named Yali was the one who motivated Jared Diamond to become even more interested and involved in people and their culture. Yali asked Diamond a simple question that forced him to try and search for the answer, as he did not know what it was. The question Diamond received was controversial to him and because of this question he wrote the book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is a book about human societies. Because of this controversial question, Jared Diamond tells us that “some readers may feel I am going to the opposite extreme from conventional histories, by devoting too little space to western Eurasia at the expense of other parts of the world,”1 but Diamond sees the modern world as an onion, layers of history that must be peeled in order to learn more about the historical facts of the world. The question Jared Diamond got from Yali was this, “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?”2 This question himself did not make him dispute the Eurocentric explanations of this but made him question it. Eurocentrism is focusing on Europe and Europeans and their culture, history, and economics. It can be defined by Jared Diamond as This was because at that point in time Diamond was focusing on Europe. Diamond decided to write about non-Eurocentric history of inequality. Traditionally, the world was looked at in a Eurocentric approach, but a geographer, Jared Diamond has searched to find that this approach is unconvincing. He agrees that the west has a risen position of power in the world. Diamond analyzes this non-Eurocentric approach based on agriculture and
2/17/14
Jared Diamond’s Eurocentric Approach
Jared Diamond is a historian who does lots of research on birds around the world. His research on birds intrigued many people. Diamond also did research on people and their cultures. He was very interested in how different cultures lived. A man named Yali was the one who motivated Jared Diamond to become even more interested and involved in people and their culture. Yali asked Diamond a simple question that forced him to try and search for the answer, as he did not know what it was. The question Diamond received was controversial to him and because of this question he wrote the book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is a book about human societies. Because of this controversial question, Jared Diamond tells us that “some readers may feel I am going to the opposite extreme from conventional histories, by devoting too little space to western Eurasia at the expense of other parts of the world,”1 but Diamond sees the modern world as an onion, layers of history that must be peeled in order to learn more about the historical facts of the world. The question Jared Diamond got from Yali was this, “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?”2 This question himself did not make him dispute the Eurocentric explanations of this but made him question it. Eurocentrism is focusing on Europe and Europeans and their culture, history, and economics. It can be defined by Jared Diamond as This was because at that point in time Diamond was focusing on Europe. Diamond decided to write about non-Eurocentric history of inequality. Traditionally, the world was looked at in a Eurocentric approach, but a geographer, Jared Diamond has searched to find that this approach is unconvincing. He agrees that the west has a risen position of power in the world. Diamond analyzes this non-Eurocentric approach based on agriculture and