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Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches

Marvin Harris · 1975 · 192 pages

Recommended by 1 person on the record.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

Derek Sivers liked it
Mind-blowing anthropology. Great argument that the reasons that religions worship cows or hate pigs, that tribes wage wars, or Europe's 200 years of witch hunts, are all very practical economic reasons usually unknown to the participants or washed out of history. But they're revealed here in zoomed-out hindsight. My notes here can't describe it. You have to read the whole book. Riveting.

on sive.rs · 19 Feb 2016

Find it on Open Library →  ·  This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.