BROADCASTS.com

Some time ago, the legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and Homo sapiens Charles Foster spent a few weeks in the woods trying to live like a badger, a deer, a swift, an otter, and a fox, hoping to understand animal consciousness. That book, Being a Beast, now finds its unlikely sequel in Being a Human, in which Foster attempts the perhaps more difficult task of reconstructing the human consciousness of millennia ago. He settles on three pivotal turns in our history: the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, and, far more recently, the Enlightenment. How does one escape the constraints of modern thought\u2014of written language, digital technology, creature comfort\u2014in pursuit of the origins of modern consciousness? Foster joins the podcast to report on his quest in the woods of northern England, and beyond.

Go beyond the episode:

• Charles Foster\u2019s Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness, and Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide
• For another complicating view on humanity\u2019s adventures in and out of agriculture, check out David Graeber and David Wengrow\u2019s The Dawn of Everything
• Thinking in words has its perks: read Emily Fox Gordon on \u201cHow I Learned to Talk\u201d
• If our current era is an extension of the Enlightenment, as Foster argues, we might need to cling to our ideals of humanism a bit more in the struggle against social media, per James McWilliams in \u201cSaving the Self in the Age of the Selfie\u201d

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.

Subscribe: iTunes \u2022 Feedburner \u2022 Stitcher \u2022 Google Play \u2022 Acast

Have suggestions for projects you\u2019d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.