Excellent account in Munz 1977, 139 – 41, beginning with “the conception of
Ferdinand Tönnies that the development of human groups in history goes from com-
munity (Gemeinschaft) to society (Gesellschaft), with the clear indication that a com-
munity is something valuable and meaningful in which there is a common life and a
sense of belonging and that a society is a mere conglomerate of individuals in which
there is not only a division of labour but also a division of value, opinions, and of
leisure time activities” (140). Munz gives a wide range of examples, curiously not men-
tioning Marxism explicitly. For the power of such Marxist-informed views in British
cultural materialism, see Felperin 1990, 167 – 69; for an eloquent expression of the fan-
tasy that “there was a time when things were both more beautiful and less fragmented,”
and for a protest against succumbing to it, see B. Williams 1993, 166 – 67.
Dupont 1999 is extreme, but representative.
Lévi-Strauss’s various contributions are lucidly discussed and criticized by Gell
(1992, chap. 3); he remarks that Lévi-Strauss’s “interest in the sociology of time is
focused primarily, and perhaps with a degree of envious nostalgia, on the ways in
which societies can annul time and its effects” (24). N. Thomas observes, more broadly,
that anthropology’s distinctive object of study “was and is essentially a social or cul-
tural system or structure out of time” (1996, 120).
Fabian 1983. This was a very common conception in the ancient world: R. F.
Thomas 1982b, 55; Cobet 2002, 405; Campbell 2003, 189; Nisbet and Rudd 2004, 271.
One brief example: when Lucretius speaks of contemporary people without Iron Age
technology, he uses the same language of rumor and report (ut fama est,5.17) that he
just before uses of mythical events in deep time (fertur,5.14). For a compelling presen-
tation of the geographically remote also embodying the future,see Murphy 2004, 183 –
88, on Seneca’s picture of the Chauci in his evocation of cataclysm (QNat.3.27 – 28).
Horace ’s sixteenth Epode,with its fantasy of an escape to the Blessed Isles, is the
finest example: see Watson 2003 for copious comparative material, and, in general,
Bichler 1995; Evans 2003, for Roman utopias.
9.The Economist,16 April 2005, 71.
Mann 2005, 289, 304. Mann’s book synthesizes recent research that dispels the
view of a “natural” Edenic existence in the Americas before 1492, and that asserts that
the inhabitants of America were then, and have continued to be, fully part of history.
Cf. Worsley 1997, 41 – 50, on the Aborigines of northern Australia.
“The switch from hunting and gathering to farming may have been... even
more gradual than was previously thought” (The Economist,7 August 2004, 65 – 66).
For a severe questioning of the “revolution” model, see Gamble 1986.
Diamond 1997, 86, 113.
Hughes 1994, 29 – 30.
N. Davis 1996, 71; cf. Heinberg 1989, 166 – 70.
M. L. West 1997, 312 – 19. Most (1997) attempts to contest the Near Eastern
notes to pages 109 – 111
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