there is much to be learned within this book and much to think about. Be warned, it reads like a textbook, which I’m sure it is destined to be. The author has never met a term that he hasn’t stopped to define—even relatively common ones such as “thing”. If you are fine with that, I think you will enjoy Where are we Heading? but for most readers, I will give it 3 stars.

Fascinating take on human social evolution that postulates that the main driver is human interdependence on things. The more things the we use, the more things we need. I have ruminated on this topic before when thinking about cars and how cars lead to roads and then to urban sprawl. Archaeologist Ian Hodder goes much more into details on this idea and where it could be taking us. I have been reading this book in bite-sized pieces because it is written more like a textbook. I concur with other reviewers that I would like to hear a lecture series or take a course on the topic.

Thanks to NetGalley, Yale University Press and the author Ian Hodder for the an advanced review copy.

Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things by Ian Hodder was in an interesting and thought-provoking read.
This book was filled with generous amounts of information intertwined with the author’s theory of entanglement (how humans depend on things in our environment and they depend on us). The description of the book is spot-on.
The book is broken down into chapters, such as The Idea of Progress, Path Dependence and Two Forms of Directionality, and Why the Question Matters. There are drawings throughout the book to help demonstrate author’s points. I felt the book had a textbook feel to it. I would love to hear this as an audiobook or in an episode of TED talks.
Some examples of things you will see or read in the book: The average US household today has three hundred thousand things (wealth=power), focus on increases in material stuff and human-thing dependence, global warming (how we deal with such problems by inventing more things), why have we moved in the direction we have, social evolutionary theories of progress, the rate of evolution toward greater complexity is forever accelerating, complexity theories (how the entanglement theory asks how human-thing dependencies might pull complexity in a general direction), and so much more. These examples are but a small portion of the book and I don’t think my brief description does the book justice.
Some of the questions/thoughts that ran through my mind as I read the book were: What happens if we go backwards by choice, ex. homesteading movement, minimalist lifestyle movement? What about people who shun technology or modern advances? How would a plague or destruction of most of the world affect the entanglement theory? Are we our own worst enemy? Are we destined to continue this path of entanglement?
Overall, I would recommend the book, especially for those looking to learn or read something thought-provoking.

*I received an ARC courtesy of Netgalley and the publisher. Thank you for allowing me to read and review the book!

#WhereAreWeHeading? #NetGalley #Reading #Books #Entanglement #Science #ThoughtProvoking

Humans have an obvious impact on the things they create. In Where are we Heading?, the author postulates that the things created also impact humans—and not always in a positive way.

The author uses the creation of the spinning wheel and its subsequent industrial machine replacement to illustrate the impact of things on humanity. The spinning wheel allowed the poor to create not only clothes for their families but also items to sell to fund other basic necessities. Once industrial machines appeared, individuals couldn’t compete with their speed or consistent quality. This forced many people to move to cities and deplorable working conditions. Eventually, labor unions and environmental laws forced the factories to move to more business friendly, and poorer, countries overseas. The book also looks at more modern creations like gasoline and electric cars.

There is much to be learned within this book and definitely much to think about. Be warned, it reads like a textbook, which I’m sure it is destined to be. The author has never met a term that he hasn’t stopped to define—even relatively common ones such as “thing”. If you are fine with that, I think you will enjoy Where are we Heading? but for most readers, I will give it 3 stars.

Thanks to the publisher, Yale University Press, and NetGalley for an advanced copy.

This book was promoted as being an exploration of the “entanglement” between humans and things: ie. an exploration of the mutual dependency of humans and their stuff by an archaeologist, Ian Hodder. He cited the following in the prologue and first chapter that he would use as examples: wheel, fire, wheat, cotton, opium, dams and Christmas tree lights. Intriguing, huh?

Hodder is a professor of anthropology as well as an archaeologist. The book reads like a series of lectures to college students rather than as a book to extol his theory. I imagine that sitting in his class would be quite interesting as well as enlightening. I would imagine that his purpose in many of the lengthy side bars of the book would be to cause his students to explore, mentally, other options rather than just to accept the ideas of the professor.

This would probably be a good book to “read” as an audio version – especially if Holder were the reader. It made me want to sit in his classes.

As written literature, well, I’d have to suggest that next time he should engage a ghost writer. The subject matter was excellent but it was hard to keep on track with his many sidebars.

Over the years, evolutionary theories have taken the shape and structure of two dominant strains. The first theory has its advocates emphasizing society’s progression towards an advances industrial systems. The proponents of this theory view societies are moving towards a tangible end or a determined goal. The competing theory, pioneered by Charles Darwin postulates that complicated systems get selected over their simpler counterparts, on account of the former accommodating better adaptations to the environment.

Radically departing from the accepted wisdom, constituting the bedrock of the two hitherto acknowledged theories of evolution, Ian Hodder an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at Stanford University, introduces a new flavour, colour, content and context to the theory of evolution. Postulating a novel and compelling philosophy of human evolution that has at its crux and core the notion of “entanglement,” Hodder dwells on the exponentially increasing mutual dependency between humans and things. Choosing a few examples such as the invention of the wheel, growth of the cultivation of cotton etc. Hodder demonstrates how this mutual entanglement has weaved webs of dependency that both bestows benefits as well as brings bewilderment.

By using the entanglement approach, Hodder encourages the readers to be as ‘inclusive’ as possible and to comprehend the ‘artificiality’ of any boundaries that we may wont to be drawing, especially between humans and things. Explaining the inextricable interconnection between things themselves and their employ, Hodder turns to the wheel – an invention that influenced the contours of human evolution in more ways than one – to espouse his theory of entanglement. A wheel may be subject to a fundamentally simplistic definition, ‘a thin circular object with a hole in the middle’. However, resorting to such a simplistic definition lands us in hot water. What about those wheels that do not have a hole in the middle and are not exactly circular? Also viewing the wheel in isolation would not serve any utilitarian end. Since a wheel cannot function without an axle, which in turn needs a frame or a vehicle to keep it in place, this cascading linkage exhibits the tenuous boundary between the wheel and the wagon. As Hodder says, “’wheelness’ is distributed, displaced. Deferred and dispersed. Thingness is a dispersal and a making of connections.” This entanglement between humans and things is illustrated by Hodder with the help of the following four acronyms:

• HH – Human dependent on Human;
• HT – Human dependent on Thing;
• TH – Thing dependent on Human; and
• TT – Thing dependent on Thing

Hodder argues that “human dependence on things (HT) leads to thing dependence on other things (TT) and things dependence on humans (TH), producing greater human dependence on things (HT).”
This unique iteration leads to what Hodder terms as an ‘expanding outer core of conditions and consequences.’ For example, the outer cone in the case of cotton spinning involves, ‘people, material things, institutions and ideas, including sugar, tobacco, trains, clocks, the telegraph, wool, flax, guns, spices, iron, pollutants, ships, tribute, clothing, unions, slaves, children, Native Americans, trading companies, entrepreneurs, retailers, debt, machines, wage labour, the movement into towns and the emergence of a proletariat, industrial capitalism, enclosure, the nation-state, governments, colonialism, and much more.’
This dependency between human beings and things forming an inevitable lock step may also involve a double bind. This mutual reciprocity and dependency which has the capability to both further as well as fell the prospects of humanity finds its full impact in the story of opium. As Hodder strives to explain, “the web of positive dependence and negative dependency around opium has brought addiction, wars, imprisonment, crime and terrorism”. While the Sumerians cultivated poppy seeds as early as in the seventh century BC its main purpose was a cure for various ailments. The Greeks also employed opium as a sleeping potion and a cure. From purposes as variegated as serving as an anesthetic for surgery and being mixed with wine/alcohol to produce laudanum, opium has traversed a meandering path from pure to pernicious!

Hodder also highlights in perfect detail, the contradictions and conflicts that stem from the mutual dependency between Humans and things. For example, the dependence on cotton set in motion a virtual and virulent chain of contrasts: “slavery and free labour, states and markets, colonialism and free trade, industrialization and de-industrialization, plantation and factory, colonizers and colonized.”

The famous German philosopher, Immanuel Kant even more famously remarked, “and we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something.” “Where We Are Heading” spurs us to never examine or evaluate a thing in isolation for doing so would expose us to dependencies the unraveling of which may shock as well as awe us!

An intriguing and thought provoking book about the complex interlinking relationships between people and things, and about how the constantly developing and improving technology is impacting on our evolution. Clear and concise, without too much technical jargon, this was a quick and interesting read. I particularly liked how the author chose several everyday examples to illustrate his ideas.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own

Is Human Evolution Directional? by Ian Hodder is the study of man and his relationship with what he creates. Hodder is an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at Stanford University. His most recent books are Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement.

This is a book not about the biological evolution of man, although some of that is included in why we have small teeth and weak jaws, but of man as a species. Comparisons are made between man and other animals such as beaver dams and manmade dams. This is not only discussed in purpose but also in reaction and the effects of the completed project. Most of the discussion concerns man and his dependence on things and things that are dependant on man. As Hodder digs deeper, he shows that there is an entanglement between man and things.  The connection of Christmas tree lights in America and car production in China is one example used in the book.

There are also interesting discussions of wheat and cotton, and they have evolved from in production and the effects of technology.    Other items are less organic like the QWERTY keyboard design.  Its design was created so that the arms would not jam when typing letters that are physically too close to each other.  There are more efficient designs and not many people still use manual typewriters, but QWERTY stayed because it became the standard -- taught in high schools, taught in secretarial schools, standardized all makes and models of typewriters.  It may not be the best design but it would be nearly impossible to change it today.  

Hodder makes a compelling case for the entanglement of man and things.  I can see this in everyday America. We make cars for transportation.  We design cities to be car friendly.  We widen roads to allow more cars.  We raise speed limits so vehicles can move more quickly.  However, in the process, we find ourselves dependant on cars.  Suburbs, urban sprawl, housing communities isolated from businesses are byproducts. If we don't have a car, we become stuck.  Many areas do not have sidewalks, public transportation, or bike lanes.  We created a system that system that ties our success to the success of the flow of automobiles. That flow also creates environmental concerns.  Our solutions are not effective. We build hybrid and electric cars to ease our dependence on fossil fuels, but many areas electricity is produced by burning coal.  So an electric vehicle is essentially a coal-burning vehicle.  This simple analogy runs far deeper when we include petroleum production, automobile production (which includes steel, plastics, and rare earth elements), changing the landscape/environment by building new roads, and removing the habitat for other animal life. Although it may seem to most that we control our destiny as a species by building, manufacturing, and changing the environment, we have become dependant on the things we make, and they may guide our future more directly than we thought possible.  The deeper we go the more we see our future entangled with and directed by the things we make.

Here is a book that tackles some of our biggest questions about sustainability, environmental pressures and our place within the global ecosystem in a dispassionate, scholarly yet accessible way.

Hodder attacks these questions through archaeological discoveries and interpretations and carefully builds an argument which is at one level depressing and alarming , but on another one which offers clarity on how environmental disaster can be averted.

Rather than dismantle other theories, Hodder calmly assesses then and takes the best elements of them to build his own argument. And some of the solutions he offers are also drawn from archaeology and precious cultures.

A compelling and quick read that never loses the layperson but offers insights into the nature of the human condition and where, arguably, we lost our balance and harmony with the planet.