http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/book-reviews/the-world-until-yesterday-what-can-we-learn-from-traditional-societies/422223.article

Now maybe “The Appendix” is great, and SM is certainly great, but if anthropologists really want to get our message to a wider audience, then insights like these need to be presented more forcefully (and perhaps more succinctly) in more popular places. Please consider taking things like this on the road; this essay really brings out the best in anthropology.

an important distinction between the anthropological project, understanding from inside-out, and the naturalist project, understanding from outside-in

I agree that the review is excellent, but isn’t that a false dichotomy? Humans are natural creatures, and Collingwood was wrong; we can only ever understand human beings by what they do, say, and leave behind (ie, from the outside-in, as it were), because we don’t have privileged access to other minds (and it is even arguable whether we have privileged access to our own minds). When humans try to understand one another, they are using precisely the same kind of reasoning as any naturalist. To believe otherwise is to believe that humans are supernatural.

Diamond should certainly have looked at the interesting things that people in New Guinea believe rather than merely what they do, and his failure to do this is clearly the Achilles’ heel of the book. It is also probable that he failed to discuss these things because he is a naturalist used to concrete ‘scientific’ facts. It may even have been due to an a priori belief in the determination of culture by ecology or selection. But Diamond overlooking these things is a personal failing. It isn’t evidence that beliefs are not amenable to naturalistic analysis or that naturalism and social anthropology are in some way incompatible.