Judge Not.(Review)

Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature, by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (Free Press, 545 pp., $35)

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Civilizations is one of those grand, all- encompassing histories that many non-historians find appealing. It makes some very alluring promises. "My purpose," Fernandez-Armesto explains, "is to change the way we think about civilization: to present it as a relationship between one species and the rest of nature, an environment refashioned to suit human uses." It takes an especially thoughtful inquiry to transform how we view civilization, to make us rethink not only what we know but how we know.

At first glance, the book looks fresh and bold and, above all, ambitious: a brand new way of viewing human history and culture. Instead of approaching civilizations as detached from nature, Fernandez-Armesto, a member of the modern-history faculty at Oxford, views them as an outgrowth of their natural surroundings. He therefore organizes his book not according to chronology but by environment: highland civilization, tundra civilization, seaboard civilization, Atlantic civilization, etc.

"We cannot get out of the ecosystem in which we are linked, the 'chain of being' which binds us to all the other biota," he writes. "Our species belongs in the great animal continuum. The environments we fashion for ourselves are gouged or cobbled out of what nature has given us." He traces the histories of how various civilizations built themselves out of their natural environs-from the vanished Mongol cities of the Eurasian steppe and the Venetians defying their "water margins" to the Samoyeds who inhabit the "waste land" of northern Scandinavia. All of this is very colorful and, at times, astute. The author's brief discussion of Las Vegas-"The new skyline is dominated by an electrified rip-off of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, a pimple itching at the civilized tradition"-is both funny and clever. His thoughtful, lengthier investigation of island life, particularly his assertion that Hawaii and Easter Island benefited culturally from their relative isolation, is likewise illuminating.

But the book fails-completely-to fulfill its promise that it will change how we think about civilization. Fernandez-Armesto contends that civilization is "a kind of relationship between human society and the natural world." Question: What else could it possibly be? To civilize is to impose order on disorder, to contain (a la Hobbes) the flux and uncertainty of natural life by way of centralized government, economic organization, written language, and so on. This fundamental impulse has been described, analyzed, and debated for thousands of years-which means there's nothing very original about the author's contention that societies are civilized to the extent that they have distanced themselves from their natural surroundings. He has simply attempted to tell the same old story from a not very different angle-one that offers little insight and ends up looking more like a gimmick than like an important new perspective.

But it's worse than a gimmick: It's actually a tool to support the author's ...