Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire
- ISBN-10
- 1107717329
- ISBN-13
- 9781107717329
- Category
- Social Science
- Pages
- 390
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2009-09-28
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Authors
- Patricia A. McAnany, Norman Yoffee
Description
Questioning Collapse challenges those scholars and popular writers who advance the thesis that societies - past and present - collapse because of behavior that destroyed their environments or because of overpopulation. In a series of highly accessible and closely argued essays, a team of internationally recognized scholars bring history and context to bear in their radically different analyses of iconic events, such as the deforestation of Easter Island, the cessation of the Norse colony in Greenland, the faltering of nineteenth-century China, the migration of ancestral peoples away from Chaco Canyon in the American southwest, the crisis and resilience of Lowland Maya kingship, and other societies that purportedly 'collapsed'. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that resilience in the face of societal crises, rather than collapse, is the leitmotif of the human story from the earliest civilizations to the present. Scrutinizing the notion that Euro-American colonial triumphs were an accident of geography, Questioning Collapse also critically examines the complex historical relationship between race and political labels of societal 'success' and 'failure'.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2009-09-28
- 392 pages
- Paperback
- Cambridge University Press
Similar books
-
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
By Jared Diamond'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This ...
-
After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies
By Glenn M. Schwartz, John J. NicholsThis is the first book-length work to examine the question of how and why early complex urban societies have reappeared after periods of decentralization and collapse.
-
Understanding Collapse
By Guy D. MiddletonIn this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more ...
-
The Collapse of Complex Societies
By Joseph TainterTwenty-four examples of societal collapse help develop a new theory to account for their breakdown. Detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Cacoan collapses clarify the processes of disintegration.
-
How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times
By Pablo Servigne, Raphael StevensIn this important book, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens confront these issues head-on.
-
Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics
By Peter SingerIn a reassessment of the meaning of life and death, a noted philosopher offers a new definition for life that contrasts a world dependent on biological maintenance with one controlled by state-of-the-art medical technology
-
Collapse (Sneak Peek First Seven Chapters)
By Richard StephensonHoward Beck proved them wrong. The final criticism about the White House A.I. was the only one that had any merit. The President's critics in the Democratic Party despised Howard Beck for buying the Presidency. They felt that Beck was ...
-
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
By Robert D. PutnamRobinson and Godbey, Time for Life, 126—129. Time diary data are generally more reliable than survey recall questions, and they show less work time and more leisure time. 5. Schor, The Overworked American; Robinson and Godbey, ...
-
State Collapse and Reconstruction in the Periphery: Political Economy, Ethnicity and Development in Yugoslavia, Serbia and Kosovo
By Jens Stilhoff SörensenIn the 1990s, Yugoslavia, which had once been a role model for development, became a symbol for state collapse, external intervention and post-conflict reconstruction.
-
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
By Eric H. ClineIn this major new account of the causes of this "First Dark Ages," Eric Cline tells the gripping story of how the end was brought about by multiple interconnected failures, ranging from invasion and revolt to earthquakes, drought, and the ...