ABSTRACT
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was an enormously successful book. It won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1998, and has been translated into 36 languages. The American anthropologist Michael Wilcox argues that many people would find Guns, Germs, and Steel ridiculous. His reasoning is that Diamond ignores the perspectives of people he claims were completely eradicated, such as Native Americans, even though they continue to exist today, albeit in a different way. The core of Wilcox's discussion of the limitations of Guns, Germs, and Steel is perspective: Diamond assumes that native culture collapsed, and is now an artifact of the past, but this denies the existence of still-living Native Americans. Wilcox argues that Diamond's "terminal narratives"- the idea that native communities reached an "end" when colonization occurred- are not just questionable in their accuracy, but incredibly damaging to the psyche of the remaining native communities.
