To save as a PDF, click "Print" and select "Save as PDF" or "Print to PDF" from the Destination dropdown. On a mobile device, click the "Share" button, then choose "Print" and "Save as PDF".
Available From UC Press
The Human Scaffold
Humanity has precipitated a planetary crisis of resource consumption—a crisis of stuff. So ingrained is our stuff-centric view that we can barely imagine a way out beyond substituting a new portmanteau of material things for the one we have today.
In The Human Scaffold, anthropologist Josh Berson offers a new theory of adaptation to environmental change. Drawing on niche construction, evolutionary game theory, and the enactive view of cognition, Berson considers cases in the archaeology of adaptation in which technology in the conventional sense was virtually absent. Far from representing anomalies, these cases exemplify an enduring feature of human behavior that has implications for our own fate.
The time has come to ask what the environmental crisis demands of us not as consumers but as biological beings. The Human Scaffold offers a starting point.
Josh Berson has held appointments at two Max Planck Institutes—Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and the History of Science—and at the Berggruen Institute, where he was inaugural USC Berggruen Fellow in the Transformations of the Human. He is the author of The Meat Question: Animals, Humans, and the Deep History of Food and Computable Bodies: Instrumented Life and the Human Somatic Niche.
"The Human Scaffold turns you inside out. It shifts the way we see our bodies, how they sense and think, and how climate and landscape may biochemically adapt our inner selves. A book that makes you aware about the behavior of the skins we thought we were inhabiting. It touches your insides in all possible degrees. A hot date with your senses."—Cooking Sections, founders of CLIMAVORE and authors of Salmon: A Red Herring
"Who else but Josh Berson could take readers on a journey that begins with forty thousand years of goings-on in Tasmania, veers into a consideration of Korean breath-hold divers, and touches on the fine points of topology? This deceptively small book brims with Berson's trademark elegance of mind and generosity of spirit, asking us to reconsider ideas of evolution, sustainability, and the anthropocene. Moving across scales of time and space, cautioning against our technological biases, Berson's breadth of vision and enquiry is, at the same time, astonishingly parsimonious. This is anthropology for the twenty-first century."—Elizabeth J. Chin, Editor-in-Chief, American Anthropologist, and author of My Life with Things