V Gordon Childe Quotes

If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place. As long ago as 1936, the prehistorian V. Gordon Childe wrote a book called Man Makes Himself. Apart from the sexist language, this is the spirit we wish to invoke. We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

En la historia humana, los vestidos, herramientas, armas y tradiciones, toman el lugar de las pieles, garras, colmillos e instintos, para la búsqueda de alimento y abrigo. Las costumbres y prohibiciones, condensando siglos de experiencia acumulada y transmitida por la tradición social, ocupan el lugar de los instintos heredados, facilitando la supervivencia de nuestra especie.

Guardando y preservando las llamas, el hombre hizo acopio de conocimientos. Los fuegos sagrados que nunca se apagaban, como el fuego de Vesta en Roma, fueron mantenidos como ritos por muchos pueblos antiguos y por los modernos salvajes. Es de presumir que se trata de supervivencias y reminiscencias de la época en la cual el hombre todavía no aprendía a producir el fuego a voluntad.