Being distracted by reddit from Studying for tomorrow's exam, on post-ww2 French thought. I took the module because it was vaguely historyish but that was a mistake, French thought is the bane of my life. That being said it has its interesting bits, one of the key texts I'm looking at is Claude Lévi-Strauss' Race et Histoire, and whilst a lot of it is wafflish anthropological mumbo-jumbo (written in French and as such even worse), the book itself is primarily concerned with how the west views/viewed race, and attacks the bad history of people who view foreign, less advanced cultures as being on the same false evolutionary scale as western ones but at an earlier "stage" and therefore primitive or backwards. Lévi-Strauss argues that there are no child peoples in the world, all are adult, and the fact that ones without writing or fancy architecture or impressive tools didn't "keep a journal" of their childhood/adolescence as societies doesn't mean they don't have histories or haven't progressed.

If I read correctly, he argues that cultures can be split into two groups: those which are actively progressive and innovative and cumulate experience/achievements to develop upwards, and those which might be just as active and occasionally innovative but without the same synthesising spark of the first group to bring together advancements, instead just going forward without the jump upwards of cultures in group 1. My understanding of the whole thing is fairly rudimentary so if anyone knows more about all this or finds it interesting do give thoughts, it's been interesting reading regardless.