Big Pictures in Shallow Frames

This chapter engages with Barry Buzan’s Making Global Society and its deep-historical perspective on the evolution of societal orders. It argues that Buzan’s big-picture approach is undermined by his deployment onto deep history of disciplines calibrated for shallow times, and makes the case for an ‘anthropological historical’ approach adapted to the species-wide evolutionary framework implied in his all-encompassing historical narrative. To do so, the chapter begins with a recalibration of Buzan’s portrayal of hunter-gatherer society in the Palaeolithic Age, to bring forth major phenomena that he misses or underestimates, including those that palaeoanthropologists identify as the markers of a first human ‘modernity’. This alternative perspective on pre-agrarian society is then used to propose an alternative to Buzan’s conceptualisation of the institutions that structure human society in deep time, based on an evolutionary logic of differentiation experienced in different planetary conditions. The conclusion suggests that, when approached from an anthropological-historical perspective that takes the hunter-gatherer era and its distinctive societal order seriously, ‘global society’ can be conceptualised anew as a more primordial form of human association that predates the ‘inter-national’ and could/should accordingly be envisaged independently of it.