The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity : Graeber, David: Amazon.com.au: Books
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Paperback – 31 May 2022
by David Graeber (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars 420 ratings
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'Pacey and potentially revolutionary' Sunday Times
'Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read' The Guardian
'This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast' Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.
Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities than we tend to assume.
The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision and faith in the power of direct action.
'Fascinating, thought-provoking, groundbreaking. A book that will generate debate for years to come' Rutger Bregman
'Graeber and Wengrow have effectively overturned everything I ever thought about the history of the world. The most profound and exciting book I've read in thirty years' Robin D. G. Kelley
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608 pages
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Review
A boldly ambitious work ... entertaining and thought-provoking ... an impressively large undertaking that succeeds in making us reconsider not just the remote past but also the too-close-to-see present, as well as the common thread that is our shifting and elusive nature. -- Andrew Anthony ― Observer
What a gift ... Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we're used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring. -- William Deresiewicz ― The Atlantic
Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read ... As we seek new, sustainable ways to organise our world, we need to understand the full range of ways our ancestors thought and lived. And we must certainly question conventional versions of our history which we have accepted, unexamined, for far too long. -- David Priestland ― The Guardian
Pacey and potentially revolutionary ... This is more than an argument about the past, it is about the human condition in the present. -- Bryan Appleyard ― Sunday Times
A fascinating, radical, and playful entry into a seemingly exhaustively well-trodden genre, the grand evolutionary history of humanity. It seeks nothing less than to completely upend the terms on which the Standard Narrative rests ... erudite, compelling, generative, and frequently remarkably funny ... once you start thinking like Graeber and Wengrow, it's difficult to stop. -- Emily M. Kern ― Boston Review
A spectacular, flashy and ground-breaking retelling of human history, blazing with iconoclastic rebuttals to conventional wisdom. Full of fresh thinking, it's a pleasure to read and offers a bracing challenge on every page. -- Simon Sebag Montefiore ― BBC History
A timely, intriguing, original and provocative take on the most recent thirty thousand years of human history ... consistently thought-provoking ... In forcing us to re-examine some of the cosy assumptions about our deep past, Graeber and Wengrow remind us very clearly of the perils of holding ourselves captive to a deterministic vision of human history as we try to shape our future. -- James Suzman ― Literary Review
An engrossing series of insights ... They re-inject humanity into our distant forebears, suggesting that our prevailing story about human history - that not much innovation occurred in human societies until the invention of agriculture - is utterly wrong. -- Anthony Doerr ― Observer
Fascinating, thought-provoking, groundbreaking. A book that will generate debate for years to come. -- Rutger Bregman
The Dawn of Everything is also the radical revision of everything, liberating us from the familiar stories about humanity's past that are too often deployed to impose limitations on how we imagine humanity's future. Instead they tell us that what human beings are most of all is creative, from the beginning, so that there is no one way we were or should or could be. Another of the powerful currents running through this book is a reclaiming of Indigenous perspectives as a colossal influence on European thought, a valuable contribution to decolonizing global histories. -- Rebecca Solnit
Synthesizing much recent scholarship, The Dawn of Everything briskly overthrows old and obsolete assumptions about the past, renews our intellectual and spiritual resources, and reveals, miraculously, the future as open-ended. It is the most bracing book I have read in recent years. -- Pankaj Mishra
This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. There is not a single chapter that does not (playfully) disrupt well seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A fascinating inquiry, which leads us to rethink the nature of human capacities, as well as the proudest moments of our own history, and our interactions with and indebtedness to the cultures and forgotten intellectuals of indigenous societies. Challenging and illuminating. -- Noam Chomsky
Graeber and Wengrow have effectively overturned everything I ever thought about the history of the world ... The authors don't just debunk the myths, they give a thrilling intellectual history of how they came about, why they persist, and what it all means for the just future we hope to create. The most profound and exciting book I've read in thirty years. -- Robin D.G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, UCLA, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Scholarly, irreverent, radical and genuinely ground-breaking - my kind of non-fiction. -- Emma Dabiri
A fascinating, intellectually challenging big book about big ideas.― Kirkus
A work of dizzying ambition, one that seeks to rescue stateless societies from the condescension with which they're usually treated ... Our forebears crafted their societies intentionally and intelligently: This is the fundamental, electrifying insight of The Dawn of Everything. It's a book that refuses to dismiss long-ago peoples as corks floating on the waves of prehistory. Instead, it treats them as reflective political thinkers from whom we might learn something. -- Daniel Immerwahr ― The Nation
Not content with different answers to the great questions of human history, Graeber and Wengrow insist on revolutionizing the very questions we ask. The result: a dazzling, original, and convincing account of the rich, playful, reflective, and experimental symposia that 'pre-modern' indigenous life represents; and a challenging re-writing of the intellectual history of anthropology and archaeology. The Dawn of Everything deserves to become the port of embarkation for virtually all subsequent work on these massive themes. Those who do embark will have, in the two Davids, incomparable navigators. -- James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University, author of Seeing Like a State
Graeber and Wengrow debug cliches about humanity's deep history to open up our thinking about what's possible in the future. There is no more vital or timely project. -- Jaron Lanier
About the Author
David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts helped to make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on 2 September 2020.
David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of three books, including What Makes Civilization?. Wengrow conducts archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle East.
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Product details
Publisher : Penguin Press; 1st edition (31 May 2022)
Language : English
Paperback : 608 pages
ISBN-10 : 0141991062
ISBN-13 : 978-0141991061
Dimensions : 12.9 x 2.5 x 19.8 cm
Best Sellers Rank: 4,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
3 in Prehistory
9 in Prehistoric Archaeology
20 in Ethnology
Customer Reviews:
4.4 out of 5 stars 420 ratings
David Graeber
David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; born 12 February 1961) is a London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, perhaps best known for his 2011 volume Debt: The First 5000 Years. He is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
As an assistant professor and associate professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007 he specialised in theories of value and social theory. The university's decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy, and a petition with more than 4,500 signatures. He went on to become, from 2007–13, Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
His activism includes protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan, "We are the 99 percent".
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by David Graeber Edited by czar [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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An Archaeologist
5.0 out of 5 stars An expert opinion: This book is rigorous and importantReviewed in the United States on 17 November 2021
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First off, let me say something about myself by way of establishing why anybody shopping on Amazon should care what I think about this book. I am an archaeologist and a published author on several of the issues that Graeber and Wengrow address. My work (with colleagues and collaborators) is cited in this book’s extensive (and comprehensive) bibliography. So: allowing that this is the reviews section of Amazon and not American Antiquity where reviews come with their own bibliography, I can speak to how well this book holds up to being read by a subject matter expert.
And it’s thrilling. It’s empirically rigorous despite the breezy (often funny, sometimes scorching) tone. And I hope it shatters the existing view of prehistory in the popular imagination, because Graeber and Wengrow are categorically right that said view is factually wrong, politically disastrous, and astonishingly boring.
The way I see it, this book is tackling two necessarily interrelated projects at the same time. First, it marshals mountains of evidence from all over the world and all periods of time to make the argument that from the very beginning—ca. 300,000 years ago—human beings have lived together in an astonishing variety of arrangements and that none of those arrangements has any single point of origin, or single scalar or economic correlate: tiny hunter-gatherer bands can be fastidiously democratic or violently authoritarian; industrial cities have existed at the heart of empires and in the total absence of sovereign government altogether. These societies have been peaceful and violent; patriarchal and matriarchal; slaveholding and abolitionist. Many societies have deliberately and self-consciously moved between different forms of social and political organization at different times of year, or deliberately reoriented themselves toward another way of living in the space of a generation or two. In other words, the human career has been marked by an extraordinary variety of political and social possibilities that most modern people not only don’t KNOW about, but do not IMAGINE to be possible.
And so the second project Graeber and Wengrow take on with this book is to reconstruct how we came to be so intellectually shackled as to think that many of the ways people have organized themselves are not only unusual or hard to achieve or whatever—but actually not even possible at all (they implicitly invoke Ostrom’s Law: “what’s possible in practice must be possible in theory,” and illustrate how prevailing theories of human’s history run afoul of it). They trace the history of thought that elevated a completely unscientific set of Enlightenment origin myths (Hobbes’s bit about life before the state being “nasty, brutish, and short,” and Rousseau’s about the idyllic pre-agricultural “state of nature”) to the scientific canon. And they counter by saying, in essence, that both of these ideas are testable scientific hypotheses, and they are both demonstrably and catastrophically wrong.
What that should make clear is that any claim that this book is romantic—or, as an earlier Amazon reviewer said, “woke revisionism” (that person went on to invoke Ye Olde “days of kings and serfs,” and the “way our ancestors actually lived,” which is an interesting way of establishing authority by demonstrating total lack of subject knowledge. But I digress—has not actually read the book. This book abounds with examples of all sorts of human unpleasantness, along with all sorts of social wonders. That is, in fact, the point: Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate that ancient and non-western societies obey no evolutionary taxonomy, no linear moral or organizational trajectory. Rather they demonstrate that people have always made choices about how to live together, that some of those choices have had better or more durable consequences than others, and that by telling ourselves a simplistic and teleological myth about the relationship between political organization and economic organization or social scale, we have dramatically limited our ability to imagine better ways of doing things.
To my enormous frustration, reviews of this book in major outlets (notably the NYT) have rhetorically asked "how can we know whether all of the facts presented in this book are true?” but never actually bothered to ask anyone qualified to answer that question.
(They have instead played up a silly and minor flap about a single claim early in the book, which is easily resolved if you understand the difference between reading an entire document and reading its abstract. It isn’t my turf, but Wengrow’s comments on the matter thoroughly convinced me. Emily Kern has a whole section on this in her excellent review of TDoE for Boston Review.)
So let me do so: In all the areas directly touched by my expertise, this book gets it right. So much so that most of the material they survey is in no way “revolutionary”: these are things that have been fixtures of archaeology courses for decades, and they are not controversial. That Poverty Point was a vast, monumental building project carried out by hunter-gatherers who did not permanently live on-site is not something new: it is the reason Poverty Point is a world heritage site (and if you don’t have much patience, the world expert on Poverty Point, T.R. Kidder, has a great YouTube video where the whole argument is laid out with cartoons). That Tlaxcallan in 16th Century Mexico was a republic is not new, or revisionist, or “woke”: Cortez literally calls it a republic in his letter to the king of Spain, and more recent archaeological and ethnohistoric research published in major journals has borne this observation out.
What is novel and revolutionary about this book is not the evidence it presents, but rather the coherent argument it makes about the diversity of social and political life across the sweep of the human story.
Synthesis is a process of simplification, and so any synthetic work necessarily simplifies and condenses the source material in the service of a larger argument. Graeber and Wengrow of course do that here, and there is no reason to fault them for it. Where they address the things I have published on, they demonstrate far better respect for and command of the published literature than other big syntheses published by non-anthropologists (which makes sense; they actually know this literature because they’ve spent decades immersed in it). They cite everything I would have hoped for a big synthetic treatment to cite, and then some. Their reading of the literature in fast-moving subfields is extremely current. Glancing through the acknowledgements, it is clear that they enlisted the very experts I would have pointed them to as guides to some of the case studies that emerge as particularly important in their book, like Teotihuacan in Central Mexico.
So while they may simplify and sometimes offer interpretations that are a little bit out of the mainstream, they do not misrepresent and their interpretations are still well-constrained by the evidence. Which brings me to another important point:
“Speculative.” When archaeology challenges a particular cherished origin story (like this one, my favorite: “women like to shop because they instinctively want to gather berries, since back in cave man days…”), the inevitable rejoinder is that archaeology is speculative, so people can go on believing whatever they want about the past. Again, a lot of major media reviews have lobbed The S Word, without referring to a single archaeologist for comment. This is crap. Archaeology is not speculative. Archaeological interpretations are constrained by evidence, and the more evidence one has the fewer and fewer viable interpretations of that evidence there are. That multiple hypothesis can remain viable despite evidence at hand does not render a science speculative: it makes it a science, one whose precision at describing reality improves with time. And so anybody who comes out and says “this is all really speculative, so I’m going to stick with Hobbes” has no concept of how science works, or of just how much archaeologists know about the ancient world. This book is imaginative—a high compliment—but not speculative. There is a difference.
In sum: This is a really, really good book. You should read it.
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Eta Carinae
5.0 out of 5 stars Evidence-based rewriting of human historyReviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 October 2021
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Origin myths the world over have a basic psychological effect: regardless of their scientific validity, they have the sly power of justifying existing states of affairs, while simultaneously contouring a perception of what the world might look like in the future. Modern capitalist society has built itself upon two variants of one such myth. As one story goes, life as primitive hunter-gatherers was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ until the invention of the state allowed us to flourish. The other story says that in their childlike state of nature, humans were happy and free, and that it was only with the advent of civilisation that ‘they all ran headlong to their chains’. These are two variants of the same myth because they both posit an unilinear historical trajectory, one that begins from simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and ends with increasing social complexity and hierarchy. They also nurture a similar fatalistic perspective on the future: whether we go with Hobbes (the first) or Rousseau (the second), we are left with the idea that the most we can do to change our current predicament is, at best, a bit of modest political tinkering. Hierarchy and inequality are the inevitable price to pay for having truly come of age. Both versions of the myth picture the human past as a primordial soup of small bands of hunter-gatherers, lacking in vision and critical thought, and where nothing much happened until we embarked on the process that, with the advent of agriculture and the birth of cities, culminated in the modern Enlightenment.
What makes Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything an instant classic is its comprehensive scientific demolition of this myth – what they call ‘the Myth of the Stupid Savage’. Not a shred of archaeological evidence tells us that the picture of the human past is remotely close to what the foundational myth suggests. Instead, what the available evidence shows is that the trajectory of human history has been a good deal more diverse and exciting and less boring than we tend to assume because, in an important sense, it has never been a trajectory. We never permanently lived in tiny hunter-gatherer bands. We also were never permanently egalitarian. If there is a defining trait of our prehistorical condition it is its bewildering capacity of shifting, almost constantly, across a diverse array of social systems of all kinds of political, economic, and religious nature. Graeber and Wengrow’s suggestion is that the only way to explain this kaleidoscopic variety of social forms is to assume that our ancestors were not actually that stupid, but were instead self-conscious political actors, capable of fashioning their own social arrangements depending on circumstances. More often than not, people would choose to switch seasonally between socio-political identities as to avoid the perils of lasting authoritarian power. And so, rather than asking ‘Why did inequality arise?’ the most interesting question to pose about human history becomes ‘Why did we get stuck with it?’ This is only one of many kindred claims advanced in this astounding new book.
The book draws much of its value from its eclectic approach. David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at UCL. He is well-known for his work on early cultural and political transformations in Africa and Eurasia. David Graeber, who died suddenly in September 2020, was a professor of anthropology at LSE, widely regarded as the most brilliant of his generation. Together, they explore a suite of recent archaeological findings that prove anomalous to the standard narrative (for instance, the existence of ancient large-scale egalitarian cities), but that, until now, had only been privy to a handful of experts who never quite unravelled the implications. Archaeological discoveries are therein appraised from anthropological eyes. The result is a sweeping tour into the past that hops from continent to continent and from one social sphere to another to tell stories that, depending on the reader’s familiarity with the archaeological record, might come as revelations.
We learn, for instance, that the uniformity in material culture across Eurasia in the Upper Palaeolithic meant that people lived in a large-scale imagined community spanning continents, putting to rest the idea that ‘primitives’ only spent their time in isolated bands. Counter-intuitively, the scale of single societies decreased over the course of human history as populations grew larger. From monumental sites such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or Hopewell in Ohio, we learn that people would seasonally come together from distant lands in what appear to have been large centres of cultural interactions for recreation and the exchange of knowledge. Journeying great distances while expecting to be welcomed into an extended community was a typical feature of our ancestors’ lives.
The book then pivots to agriculture. The received view has it that the birth of agriculture meant the more or less automatic emergence of stratified societies. Yet, this assumption runs into problems once we consider a phenomenon like ‘play farming’ across Amazonia, where acephalous societies like the Nambikwara, though familiar with techniques of plant domestication, consciously decided not to make agriculture the basis for their economy and to opt for a more relaxed approach that switched flexibly between foraging and cultivation. (Agriculture generally emerged in the absence of easier alternatives.) Further, we learn that some of the first agricultural societies of the Middle East formed themselves as egalitarian and peaceful responses to the predatory foragers of the surrounding hills. It was mostly women, here, that propelled the growth of agricultural science. We also learn that complex works of irrigation in some such places were executed communally without chiefs, and even where structures of hierarchy existed, these works were accomplished despite authority, not because of it. The gradual spread of agriculture across the globe was far less unilinear than anyone had previously guessed.
In what’s perhaps the best chapter of the book, the authors move on to examine cities. Nowadays, large-scale egalitarian cities, the mere idea of it, smacks of utopianism; but Graeber and Wengrow argue that it shouldn’t when we start thinking of cities as the coalescence, in a single physical space, of already existing extended imagined communities with their own egalitarian ethos and norms – first happening seasonally, then more stationarily, as conscious experiments in urban form. Sites like Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia and many others offer incontrovertible evidence of the past existence of such cities, where no sign of authoritarian rule can be found. (Generally, when these are found, they stand out in the form of palaces, temples, fortification, etc.) Other ancient cities like Cahokia in Mississippi or Shimao in China exhibit evidence of a temporal succession of different political orders, sometimes moving from authoritarian to egalitarian, which leaves the possibility of urban revolutions as a likely explanation for the change.
The final chapters focus on the ‘state’. Or better, on how misleading it is to define societies like the Inka or the Aztecs as ‘incipient states’ because these were far more diverse than what this straitjacket term would make us think. From the Olmec and the Chavin societies in Mesoamerica to the Shilluk of South Sudan, The Dawn of Everything offers a taste of the variety of authoritarian structures throughout history. By the end of the book, we encounter the archaeological gem that is Minoan Crete – a ‘beautiful irritant for archaeology’ – where all evidence points to the existence of an ancient system of female political rule, most likely a theocracy run by a college of priestesses.
There is much more. The leitmotif running through the chapters is that if we want to make sense of all these phenomena, we are obliged to put human collective intentionality back into the picture of human history, as a genuine explanatory variable. To assume, that is, that our ancestors were imaginative beings who were eminently capable of self-consciously creating their social arrangements. The authors by no means discount the importance of ecological determinants. Rather, they see their effort as moving the dial to a more sensible position within the agency–determinism continuum, which usually only takes one extreme. The key upshot is that this newfound view of our past equips us with an expanded sense of possibilities as to what we might do with ourselves in the future. Fatalistic sentiments about human nature melt away upon turning the pages.
Staying true to Ostrom’s law – ‘whatever works in practice must work in theory’ – Graeber and Wengrow set out a new framework for interpreting the social reality brought to light by empirical findings. Firstly, they urge us to abandon terms like ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ societies, let alone the ‘origin of the state’ or ‘origin of social complexity’. These terms already presuppose the kind of teleological thinking challenged in the book. The same goes for ‘modes of production’: whether a society relies on farming or fishing is a poor criterion for classification because it tells us almost nothing about its social dynamics. Secondly, they lay out some new descriptive categories of their own. They show, for instance, that social domination can be broken down into three elements – control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power – and that permutations of these elements yield consistent patterns throughout history. While the modern nation state embodies all three, most hierarchical societies of the past had only one or two, and this allowed for the people who lived under them degrees of freedom that are barely imaginable for us today.
Graeber and Wengrow reflect at length on this last point. More than a work on the history of inequality, The Dawn of Everything is a treatise on human freedom. In parsing the anthropological record, they identify three types of freedom – freedom to abandon one’s community (knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands), freedom to reshuffle the political system (often seasonally), and freedom to disobey authorities without consequences – that appear to have been simply assumed by our ancestors but are now largely lost (obviously, their conclusion is a far cry from Rousseau’s: there is nothing inevitable about this loss!). This analysis flips the question one should really be asking about the historical development of hierarchy: “The real puzzle is not when chiefs first appeared”, they suggest, “but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.”
So much of what makes this book fascinating is the alien nature of what we encounter within, at least to contemporary eyes. Potlaches, headhunting and skull portraits, stranger kings, revolutions, shamanic art, vision quests… The Dawn of Everything reads like a work of sci-fi, except that what turns out to be fictional is our received view of human history. The writing is often funny, sometimes hilarious. At the same time, because hardly a paragraph goes by without bequeathing insight, this is a book that needs to be patiently taken in. It sits in a different class to all the other volumes on world history we are accustomed to reading.
The Dawn of Everything intellectually dwarfs the likes of Pinker, Diamond, or Fukuyama (and Harari too). Whenever non-specialists try their hands at human history, they inevitably end up reproducing the same old myths we have grown up with. Consider Steven Pinker: for all his talk about scientific progress, his books might as well have been written at the times of Hobbes, in the 17th century, when none of the evidence unearthed recently was available. Graeber and Wengrow casually expose these popular authors’ startling incompetence at handling the anthropological record. Only a solid command of the latter – namely, of the full documented range of human possibilities – affords a credible interpretative lens over the distant past. For it supplies the researcher with a refined sense of the rhythms of human history.
One of the experiences of delving into this book, at least in my case, was a gradual recognition of being in the presence of an intellectual oddity, something difficult to situate within the current landscape of social theory. By embracing once again the ‘grand narrative’, the book makes a clean break with post-structuralist and post-humanist trends widespread in contemporary academia. We know that Graeber, at least, liked to think himself as a ‘pre-humanist’, actively expecting to see humanity realise its full potential. One can certainly see this work as a contribution in that direction. One can also see The Dawn of Everything as belonging to the tradition of the Enlightenment (except that one of the other major claims in the book is that Enlightenment thought developed largely in response to indigenous intellectuals’ critiques of European society of the time). As for how it squares with current archaeological and anthropological theory, the book is of such a real sweep that I don’t think it admits easy comparisons.
If comparisons must be made, they should be made with works of similar calibre in other fields, most credibly, I venture, with the works of Galileo or Darwin. Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what the first two did to astronomy and biology respectively. The book produces a similar decentring effect: in dethroning our self-appointed position at the pinnacle of social evolution, it deals a blow to the teleological thinking that so insidiously shape our understanding of history. With the exception that while works such as Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and On the Origin of Species hinted at the relative insignificance of humans in the face of the cosmos, The Dawn of Everything explores all the possibilities we have to act within it. And if Galileo and Darwin stirred turmoil of their own, this will do even more so for precisely this reason. Ultimately, a society that accepts the story presented here as its official origin story – a story that is taught in its schools, that seeps into its public consciousness – will have to be radically different than the society we are currently living in.
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Oscar
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating counter narrative of the origins of humans.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 October 2021
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Truly a fascinating book. Offers a wonderful counter narrative to the writers such as Diamond, Yuvel Noah, Pinker about the origins of mankind etc using evidence not often cited from those readers. Defiantly worth a read.
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Banana
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating rethink of human historyReviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 November 2021
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A lengthy, interesting and well-researched exploration of the overlooked dynamism and diversity of our social, economic and political solutions to survival. It spans the period of our distant prehistory to around 1000 years ago and touches, to varying degrees, on socio-cultural forms on every continent. The anthropological and archaeological gloss is revealing and underscores the sheer variability in forms of human cooperation, coercion and corruption. At it’s core though the book is not primarily about the almost irresolvable mysteries of our past and the age-old tensions between personal freedom, social justice and power. Rather the author’s seem more preoccupied with wanting to make the case for the historical and ethical legitimacy of a variety of anarchism, evidence of which appear to have arisen in the last 13,000 years. In this way, the book borders on polemic with political intent. This is a fascinating and sometimes compelling thesis, which begs the question of how we have lost some of this dynamism and diversity and gotten ‘stuck’ within a particular, globalising, homogenising power structure that not only entrenches extremely asymmetrical social relations, but also decouples our survival solutions from environmental patterns and parameters. I like this preceding thought-provoking aspect of the book, but I feel that the authors miss something really important along the way, namely the cosmological dimension. Their materialist, atheism (which is fine) seems to however diminish their imagination in regards the organising force of cosmological (and ideological) beliefs in our pre/history. People do the strangest and most amazing things in the name of supernatural and metaphysical beliefs. David Abram’s explanations of animism for instance, point to an organising force in our prehistory which helps to elucidate some of the impetus behind stateless acts of collaboration. I feel that the book seems to want to avoid this dimension and thereby misses an important source of the persistence of power forms. The Egyptian case is only amongst the most physically and hyperbolically manifest examples of despotic power generated via a social, economic and political commitment to the significance of the afterlife. Assuaging the gods for our survival is surely the most basic rationale for these charismatic, excessive displays which are eventually ritualised into state bureaucracy. I would still recommend this as an alternative to the more popular linear renditions of the evolution of power provided by S. Pinker, Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari.
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Jeremy
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely Mind BlowingReviewed in the United States on 10 November 2021
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This is my new favorite book. Just a paragraph herein started a half hour long discussion between me and my wife on the implications of the statements. It's thought provoking and well researched. It adds breadth and depth to a topic usually either treated as two-dimensional and bland.
This is exciting and amazing. If my history classes ever taught this, I would have paid attention. Much more than a series of thoughts, more a criticism of how we think in terms of history and our relationship to the people therein.
In short: I love this book.
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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber, David Wengrow
4.34 · Rating details · 1,984 ratings · 392 reviews
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.
The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. (less)
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Hardcover, 704 pages
Published November 9th 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published October 19th 2021)
Original TitleThe Dawn of Everything
ISBN0374157359 (ISBN13: 9780374157357)
Edition LanguageEnglish
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Do David Graeber or David Wengrow note that Peter Kropotkin wrote about man's early social organization in a series of essays begun in 1890 and brought out in book form as "Mutual Aid", in 1902? Kropotkin criticized the neo-Darwinians who exaggerated things he wrote to fit their favourite trope of "survival of the fittest". He showed that cooperation, not competition, was paramount to early humanity's survival.
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Mitch Not in this particular book, though aparently the last essay Graeber wrote was a forward to a new printing of Mutual Aid by PM Press. So if you are re…more
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Is this be a good introductory book? For someone not too well versed in the social sciences? If not, is there anything in particular you would have someone be aware of before going into this book? Any information or details are helpful!
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Margaret Lukens It's not easy to answer your question without knowing more about your question. Is this a good introductory book to what? If you are looking for a sys…more
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Kevin
Oct 31, 2021Kevin rated it it was amazing
Shelves: history-long, econ-inequality, environment-geography, critique-racism, 1-how-the-world-works, history-culture, history-racism, theory-gender, econ-violence, theory-indigenous
Graeber’s final (and most ambitious) gift to us is only the beginning…
Preamble:
--There’s a certain joy seeing status quo liberals frame Graeber’s social imagination as “dangerous”; suddenly, that inescapable Mark Fisher “Capitalist Realism” overcast disperses and the skies open with endless possibilities. What better time than now to revive social imagination as status quo faith propels us towards ecological collapse.
--There’s also a certain relief from the Western Left internet debates (ex. “anarchists vs. Marxists”); self-professed “anarchist” Graeber often transcends vulgar caricatures by reframing assumptions shared by both “sides”. We need more “anarchists” synthesizing statecraft and more “Marxists” studying the latest in anthropology/archeology beyond vulgar stages-of-development (like Marx would have).
--Lastly, this can only be the beginning: the culmination of a project between anthropologist/activist Graeber and archeologist Wengrow started as an investigation on the “origins of inequality”, but ended with the authors presenting a complete reframing that raises new questions and possibilities (lecture: https://youtu.be/EvUzdJSK4x8)
Highlights:
Myth #1: Prior to agriculture, humans lived in primitive egalitarian bands:
--This vulgar “stages of development” assumption can be traced to the Enlightenment and the shock of “an obscure and uninviting backwater full of religious fanatics” Europe’s sudden integration into the world economy.
--In typical “Great (Western) Man Theory” manner, modern liberals like smug muppet Steven Pinker (the Ayn Rand for Bill Gates) portray the Enlightenment in an isolationist manner of inventive European men. Even when these Enlightenment-era Europeans detail encounters with the rest of the world (American indigenous/Chinese/Indian/Persian etc.), this is either omitted or rendered as “mere projection of European fantasies”.
--This erases the dialogue behind the Enlightenment: missionary/travel literature became popular back in Europe for its critique of settlers/Europe and social imagination for alternatives. In particular, the “Indigenous critique” (ex. Kondiaronk) against European (ex. French) elite private property regime against mutual aide while the masses toiled + accumulation of oppressive power against individual freedoms/consensus-building (participatory democracy) caused Jesuit outrage and stimulated Enlightenment debates.
--A counter to this critique was based on Lockean property rights, where colonialists portrayed the indigenous as primitive i.e. not putting labour into the land, thus part of nature with no property claims. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was able to coopt the “Indigenous critique” and its reactionary backlash with the “stupid savage” myth (later abused in “Social Darwinism” and “scientific racism”; now known as “noble savage”) where primitive peoples were indeed egalitarian but this cannot be an alternative to the trap of private property’s progress. This myth and Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” myth (violent primitive anarchy constrained by the benevolent State), the two “sides” of the modern debate, both assume a “primitive” stage.
--Since “stages” and “primitive” still run deep in mainstream imagination (Yuval Noah Harari casually compares “foragers” with chimpanzees/bonobos), Graeber/Wengrow presents a dynamic human history of conscious social experimentation, esp. the prominent example of seasonal fluidity between mass collective mobilization (i.e. harvests/festivals... often egalitarian) and nomadic bands (often hierarchical).
Myth #2: Surplus from agriculture/technologies traps societies into inequality:
--This technocratic justification for stages is popular amongst mainstream luminaries like chronically-wrong Francis Fukuyama and an-atlas-is-my-bible Jared Diamond; Harari considers the framing of wheat domesticating humans.
--Graeber/Wengrow review Neolithic cultivation to contrast the biodiversity of Neolithic botanists (and egalitarianism from women’s roles becoming more visible) vs. the “bio-power” of agricultural food productionism/domestication rule over animals (crucial to our biodiversity crisis; Rob Wallace would love this!)… flexible/collective flood-retreat farming/“play farming”/“ecology of freedom” conscious choices and experimentation vs. Enclosures private property/full-time peasant toil/“ecological imperialism” environmental determinism…
--A finer distinction is considering the rigidity of the “grain states” concept by fellow anarchist James C. Scott.
--Yanis Varoufakis, you’re still my favorite writer, but I beg of you, please replace your constant recommendation of Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies with this book, and Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth with Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
Myth #3: Urbanization’s increasing complexity/scale requires hierarchical rule:
--Another technocratic justification for stages... Note: in systems theory, complex systems both in nature and in society do not require top-down organization.
--Graeber/Wengrow review early cities that lacked rulers and had various egalitarian schemes: Ukraine “mega-sites”, Uruk (Mesopotamia), Indus Valley, China’s “Late Neolithic”, Teotihuacan (Mesoamerica), etc. This reminds me of Michael Hudson (who collaborated with Graeber) on ancient Mesopotamian cities; a pity they didn’t co-author a book.
New framework, new questions:
--By debunking the myths underlying the “origins of inequality” question and revealing the dynamic social possibilities throughout human history, new questions surfaces: “how did we get stuck?” and can we escape?
...Harari: “There is no way out of the imagined order [...] when we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? leaves a similar feeling, quite frankly.
…First, a new framework is considered:
--3 principles of domination (note: not all 3 have to be present; indeed they can be contradicting forces):
1) control force: sovereignty
2) control knowledge: bureaucratic administration (interesting to note the esoteric component of this bureaucratic “knowledge”, which we can connect to today's financial instruments + intellectual property rights regime!)
3) charismatic politics: heroic competition
--3 basic freedoms:
1) leave: “expectations that make freedom of movement possible – the norms of hospitality and asylum, civility and shelter”
2) disobey
3) shape new social realities/switch between
--“How did we get stuck?”: a compelling first stab: The Roman Law roots of private property (right to use + enjoy products + *most crucially* right to damage/destroy) and its connection to slave law’s objectification (thus a “power” rather than a “right” involving mutual obligations negotiated with others)…
...Thus, the logic of war (arbitrary violence/interchangeable enemies) is inserted into the intimacy of domestic care (patriarchal household private property)... The effects on women and exiles regarding the basic freedoms
...The proliferation of “culture areas”: “the process by which neighbouring groups began defining themselves against each other and, typically, exaggerating their differences. Identity came to be seen as a value in itself, setting in motion processes of cultural schismogenesis.” (for my 2nd reading, I tried to key in on this as I'm lacking in cultural studies; I need to review more of Graeber unpacking “identity politics” in politics/culture: https://youtu.be/H6oOj7BzciA).
--We have a lot to work on and a lot to work with thanks to Graeber (RIP... here's Hudson and Steve Keen remembering Graeber: https://youtu.be/tYipFH1_Y4k )
Max Planck once remarked that new scientific truths don’t replace old ones by convincing established scientists that they were wrong; they do so because proponents of the older theory eventually die, and generations that follow find the new truths and theories to be familiar, obvious even. We are optimists. We like to think it will not take that long.
In fact, we have already taken a first step. We can see more clearly now what is going on when, for example, a study that is rigorous in every other respect begins from the unexamined assumption that there was some ‘original’ form of human society; that its nature was fundamentally good or evil; that a time before inequality and political awareness existed; that something happened to change all this; that ‘civilization’ and ‘complexity’ always come at the price of human freedoms; that participatory democracy is natural in small groups but cannot possibly scale up to anything like a city or a nation state.
We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths.
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BlackOxford
Nov 09, 2021BlackOxford rated it it was amazing
Shelves: american, sociology, favourites, history
Rekindling Historical Imagination
David Graeber and David Wengrow are super-heroes in the scholarship of human development, the equivalent, perhaps, of a Howard Zinn for world history. In The Dawn of Everything they expose the culturally biased pseudo-histories of the likes of Fukuyama, Diamond, and Pinker, not to mention the influential fictions of Hobbes and Rousseau on which they are based. These and many others are little more than literate rumour-mongers, closet racists, and tellers of tedious time-worn tales lacking evidence or logic. That David Graeber died almost immediately upon completion of this original and provocative work is a tragedy. There are so many more idols that need toppling; so many better historical questions to ask.
Here are just several highlights of the meticulously documented conclusions in The Dawn of Everything:
1. The 18th century European Enlightenment was in large part sparked by exposure to the indigenous tribes of the forests of Northeast North America.
2. The so-called European ‘cultural efflorescence ‘ of Homo Sapiens about 40,000 years ago is mythical and was in any case likely preceded by real events of equal significance in Africa that have little to do with an economic shift from hunting to farming.
3. So-called primitive peoples existing today on the fringes of modern states are not ‘windows to the past’ but sophisticated cosmopolitan societies which demonstrate imaginative solutions to perennial problems of human political organisation.
4. Our modern problems of economic, sexual, and political inequity arise not because of anything inherent in human nature but at the historical moment when personal wealth can be transformed into political power and coercive authority.
5. The formal freedoms provided in modern democracies are far more restrictive (and restricted) than the substantive freedoms afforded widely in pre-industrial, non-European societies.
6. Montesquieu’s The System of Laws (1748), a book highly influential in the constitutional deliberations of the Founders of the United States, was very likely the product of contact with the Osage people of the Great Plains.
7. Our traditions of social dominance and coercive authority are derived from Roman Law which conceived of the male head of the family as literally owning the lives of everyone in the household.
The list of interesting propositions contained in The Dawn of Everything could be easily trebled. They are purposely provocative, sometimes counter-intuitive, but always framed by outstanding scholarship. Above all, they are interesting. By challenging conventional wisdom, they demand consideration and attention to the logic behind the historical facts as conventionally reported.
So The Dawn of Everything is really not so much a human history as it is an historiographical critique of the sources, methods, presumptions, prejudices, and criteria of historical validity employed by the humans who have written human history. History is a political activity. And so are the anthropological and sociological studies upon which much of history has been based. This is the point. Whether or not any of the propositions presented by Graeber and Wengrow are ultimately verified is of secondary importance. They are serious hypotheses which have been crushed by lack of imagination.
The tales of human development we tell ourselves are riddled with the politics of the day and form the context of the politics of the future. Every once in a while someone comes along to shake the intellectual cages in which we have trapped ourselves to reveal just how much we have allowed ourselves to be lied to, misled, or deluded. We are beyond fortunate to have Graeber and Wengrow do that for today’s world. They will undoubtedly be castigated and derided but they cannot be ignored. (less)
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Trevor (I sometimes get notified of comments)
Dec 31, 2021Trevor (I sometimes get notified of comments) rated it it was amazing
Shelves: social-theory, history
This is something of a remarkable book. I’d learnt one of the authors had died, and having read two other of his books, and thought they were two of the best books I’ve read in quite a long time, I was very disappointed there would be no more. This couldn’t really have been too much ‘more’. It is stunningly good and has changed my understanding of early human societies.
Marx and Engels begin the Manifesto by saying, ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’. There is a footnote that then says that for most of human history, in fact, there wasn’t any class struggle, but rather what they refer to as primitive communism. This was a time when hunter/gatherer peoples (known at the time as savages) lived communally and shared everything they possessed. This vision didn’t allow for much variation between places – basically, everyone hunted, everyone gathered, everyone shared. The variety starts when a surplus exists.
The idea being that hunter-gatherers couldn’t really produce enough food to provide for more than the members of their own tribe – and sometimes not even that much food. So, if they captured someone in a war, it wasn’t much use ‘making them your slave’ since they would hardly have been able to feed more than themselves. Making them a slave would have effectively meant getting them to join your tribe. So, you either killed them or you killed and ate them. The first law of social organisation is basically determined by thermodynamics.
The thing is that the moment society gets over this thermodynamic threshold and people produce more than they need, you immediately get a small group of people hoarding that surplus for themselves and enslaving everyone else. You immediately get what Marx and Engels referred to as class society.
That isn’t the story that is told here. Rather, the authors make a compelling case for a much more complicated pre-history of humanity. They say that the variety of human societies in this longest phase of human history was much more diverse than we have ever given it credit for. They also point out that the shift to class society, in the Marxist sense, wasn’t as immediate or automatic as has generally been assumed – in fact, some groups moved between what Marx would have considered different social structures, more or less with the seasons. Many of the societies discussed at length here proved anything but identical or ‘simple’.
The start of the book discusses the difference between Hobbs and Rousseau. Essentially, these are alternative visions of pre-history. In one, everyone is selfish and nasty, and we only get to go on living because we hand over power to the state – which brings the war of all against each to an end. The other vision is of some naked guy strolling around the forest of Eden picking his nose and farting, and generally having a great time without a care in the world. Neither of these visions is particularly supported by any evidence. And it could be that neither was even intended to be taken literally, but take them literally we certainly have.
There is an interesting part in this where Native Americans are reported having extended debates with Europeans about the meaning of life, or more particularly, why European life looks complete repulsive to these ‘primitive savages’. Often these reported discussions have been assumed to have been invented by European writers putting words into the mouths of the savages as a means of critiquing their own society, without having to pay the price that that might have involved. As such, the ‘mouthpiece savage’ could say what the author wanted to say, but that he wouldn’t have gotten away with, while providing ‘plausible deniability’ as US presidents like to have when they execute a foreign leader, say.
The authors here make it clear that these works are probably much more fact than fantasy. That these debates seem to have occurred, to have been documented, and to have been pretty much what they claim to have been – Europeans being schooled in democracy, justice and the good life by these ‘damn savages’. It turns out that societies do like to gather a surplus, but while sometimes that surplus is in ‘stuff’, like in our societies, sometimes it is in ideas and understanding.
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Giulio Ongaro
Oct 20, 2021Giulio Ongaro rated it it was amazing
Origin myths the world over have a basic psychological effect: regardless of their scientific validity, they have the sly power of justifying existing states of affairs, while simultaneously contouring a perception of what the world might look like in the future. Modern capitalist society has built itself upon two variants of one such myth. As one story goes, life as primitive hunter-gatherers was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ until the invention of the state allowed us to flourish. The other story says that in their childlike state of nature, humans were happy and free, and that it was only with the advent of civilisation that ‘they all ran headlong to their chains’. These are two variants of the same myth because they both posit an unilinear historical trajectory, one that begins from simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and ends with increasing social complexity and hierarchy. They also nurture a similar fatalistic perspective on the future: whether we go with Hobbes (the first) or Rousseau (the second), we are left with the idea that the most we can do to change our current predicament is, at best, a bit of modest political tinkering. Hierarchy and inequality are the inevitable price to pay for having truly come of age. Both versions of the myth picture the human past as a primordial soup of small bands of hunter-gatherers, lacking in vision and critical thought, and where nothing much happened until we embarked on the process that, with the advent of agriculture and the birth of cities, culminated in the modern Enlightenment.
What makes Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything an instant classic is its comprehensive scientific demolition of this myth – what they call ‘the Myth of the Stupid Savage’. Not a shred of archaeological evidence tells us that the picture of the human past is remotely close to what the foundational myth suggests. Instead, what the available evidence shows is that the trajectory of human history has been a good deal more diverse and exciting and less boring than we tend to assume because, in an important sense, it has never been a trajectory. We never permanently lived in tiny hunter-gatherer bands. We also were never permanently egalitarian. If there is a defining trait of our prehistorical condition it is its bewildering capacity of shifting, almost constantly, across a diverse array of social systems of all kinds of political, economic, and religious nature. Graeber and Wengrow’s suggestion is that the only way to explain this kaleidoscopic variety of social forms is to assume that our ancestors were not actually that stupid, but were instead self-conscious political actors, capable of fashioning their own social arrangements depending on circumstances. More often than not, people would choose to switch seasonally between socio-political identities as to avoid the perils of lasting authoritarian power. And so, rather than asking ‘Why did inequality arise?’ the most interesting question to pose about human history becomes ‘Why did we get stuck with it?’ This is only one of many kindred claims advanced in this astounding new book.
The book draws much of its value from its eclectic approach. David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at UCL. He is well-known for his work on early cultural and political transformations in Africa and Eurasia. David Graeber, who died suddenly in September 2020, was a professor of anthropology at LSE, widely regarded as the most brilliant of his generation. Together, they explore a suite of recent archaeological findings that prove anomalous to the standard narrative (for instance, the existence of ancient large-scale egalitarian cities), but that, until now, had only been privy to a handful of experts who never quite unravelled the implications. Archaeological discoveries are therein appraised from anthropological eyes. The result is a sweeping tour into the past that hops from continent to continent and from one social sphere to another to tell stories that, depending on the reader’s familiarity with the archaeological record, might come as revelations.
We learn, for instance, that the uniformity in material culture across Eurasia in the Upper Palaeolithic meant that people lived in a large-scale imagined community spanning continents, putting to rest the idea that ‘primitives’ only spent their time in isolated bands. Counter-intuitively, the scale of single societies decreased over the course of human history as populations grew larger. From monumental sites such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or Hopewell in Ohio, we learn that people would seasonally come together from distant lands in what appear to have been large centres of cultural interactions for recreation and the exchange of knowledge. Journeying great distances while expecting to be welcomed into an extended community was a typical feature of our ancestors’ lives.
The book then pivots to agriculture. The received view has it that the birth of agriculture meant the more or less automatic emergence of stratified societies. Yet, this assumption runs into problems once we consider a phenomenon like ‘play farming’ across Amazonia, where acephalous societies like the Nambikwara, though familiar with techniques of plant domestication, consciously decided not to make agriculture the basis for their economy and to opt for a more relaxed approach that switched flexibly between foraging and cultivation. (Agriculture generally emerged in the absence of easier alternatives.) Further, we learn that some of the first agricultural societies of the Middle East formed themselves as egalitarian and peaceful responses to the predatory foragers of the surrounding hills. It was mostly women, here, that propelled the growth of agricultural science. We also learn that complex works of irrigation in some such places were executed communally without chiefs, and even where structures of hierarchy existed, these works were accomplished despite authority, not because of it. The gradual spread of agriculture across the globe was far less unilinear than anyone had previously guessed.
In what’s perhaps the best chapter of the book, the authors move on to examine cities. Nowadays, large-scale egalitarian cities, the mere idea of it, smacks of utopianism; but Graeber and Wengrow argue that it shouldn’t when we start thinking of cities as the coalescence, in a single physical space, of already existing extended imagined communities with their own egalitarian ethos and norms – first happening seasonally, then more stationarily, as conscious experiments in urban form. Sites like Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia and many others offer incontrovertible evidence of the past existence of such cities, where no sign of authoritarian rule can be found. (Generally, when these are found, they stand out in the form of palaces, temples, fortification, etc.) Other ancient cities like Cahokia in Mississippi or Shimao in China exhibit evidence of a temporal succession of different political orders, sometimes moving from authoritarian to egalitarian, which leaves the possibility of urban revolutions as a likely explanation for the change.
The final chapters focus on the ‘state’. Or better, on how misleading it is to define societies like the Inka or the Aztecs as ‘incipient states’ because these were far more diverse than what this straitjacket term would make us think. From the Olmec and the Chavin societies in Mesoamerica to the Shilluk of South Sudan, The Dawn of Everything offers a taste of the variety of authoritarian structures throughout history. By the end of the book, we encounter the archaeological gem that is Minoan Crete – a ‘beautiful irritant for archaeology’ – where all evidence points to the existence of an ancient system of female political rule, most likely a theocracy run by a college of priestesses.
There is much more. The leitmotif running through the chapters is that if we want to make sense of all these phenomena, we are obliged to put human collective intentionality back into the picture of human history, as a genuine explanatory variable. To assume, that is, that our ancestors were imaginative beings who were eminently capable of self-consciously creating their social arrangements. The authors by no means discount the importance of ecological determinants. Rather, they see their effort as moving the dial to a more sensible position within the agency–determinism continuum, which usually only takes one extreme. The key upshot is that this newfound view of our past equips us with an expanded sense of possibilities as to what we might do with ourselves in the future. Fatalistic sentiments about human nature melt away upon turning the pages.
Staying true to Ostrom’s law – ‘whatever works in practice must work in theory’ – Graeber and Wengrow set out a new framework for interpreting the social reality brought to light by empirical findings. Firstly, they urge us to abandon terms like ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ societies, let alone the ‘origin of the state’ or ‘origin of social complexity’. These terms already presuppose the kind of teleological thinking challenged in the book. The same goes for ‘modes of production’: whether a society relies on farming or fishing is a poor criterion for classification because it tells us almost nothing about its social dynamics. Secondly, they lay out some new descriptive categories of their own. They show, for instance, that social domination can be broken down into three elements – control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power – and that permutations of these elements yield consistent patterns throughout history. While the modern nation state embodies all three, most hierarchical societies of the past had only one or two, and this allowed for the people who lived under them degrees of freedom that are barely imaginable for us today.
Graeber and Wengrow reflect at length on this last point. More than a work on the history of inequality, The Dawn of Everything is a treatise on human freedom. In parsing the anthropological record, they identify three types of freedom – freedom to abandon one’s community (knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands), freedom to reshuffle the political system (often seasonally), and freedom to disobey authorities without consequences – that appear to have been simply assumed by our ancestors but are now largely lost (obviously, their conclusion is a far cry from Rousseau’s: there is nothing inevitable about this loss!). This analysis flips the question one should really be asking about the historical development of hierarchy: “The real puzzle is not when chiefs first appeared”, they suggest, “but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.”
So much of what makes this book fascinating is the alien nature of what we encounter within, at least to contemporary eyes. Potlaches, headhunting and skull portraits, stranger kings, revolutions, shamanic art, vision quests… The Dawn of Everything reads like a work of sci-fi, except that what turns out to be fictional is our received view of human history. The writing is often funny, sometimes hilarious. At the same time, because hardly a paragraph goes by without bequeathing insight, this is a book that needs to be patiently taken in. It sits in a different class to all the other volumes on world history we are accustomed to reading.
The Dawn of Everything intellectually dwarfs the likes of Pinker, Diamond, or Fukuyama (and Harari too). Whenever non-specialists try their hands at human history, they inevitably end up reproducing the same old myths we have grown up with. Consider Steven Pinker: for all his talk about scientific progress, his books might as well have been written at the times of Hobbes, in the 17th century, when none of the evidence unearthed recently was available. Graeber and Wengrow casually expose these popular authors’ startling incompetence at handling the anthropological record. Only a solid command of the latter – namely, of the full documented range of human possibilities – affords a credible interpretative lens over the distant past. For it supplies the researcher with a refined sense of the rhythms of human history.
One of the experiences of delving into this book, at least in my case, was a gradual recognition of being in the presence of an intellectual oddity, something difficult to situate within the current landscape of social theory. By embracing once again the ‘grand narrative’, the book makes a clean break with post-structuralist and post-humanist trends widespread in contemporary academia. We know that Graeber, at least, liked to think himself as a ‘pre-humanist’, actively expecting to see humanity realise its full potential. One can certainly see this work as a contribution in that direction. One can also see The Dawn of Everything as belonging to the tradition of the Enlightenment (except that one of the other major claims in the book is that Enlightenment thought developed largely in response to indigenous intellectuals’ critiques of European society of the time). As for how it squares with current archaeological and anthropological theory, the book is of such a real sweep that I don’t think it admits easy comparisons.
If comparisons must be made, they should be made with works of similar calibre in other fields, most credibly, I venture, with the works of Galileo or Darwin. Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what the first two did to astronomy and biology respectively. The book produces a similar decentring effect: in dethroning our self-appointed position at the pinnacle of social evolution, it deals a blow to the teleological thinking that so insidiously shape our understanding of history. With the exception that while works such as Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and On the Origin of Species hinted at the relative insignificance of humans in the face of the cosmos, The Dawn of Everything explores all the possibilities we have to act within it. And if Galileo and Darwin stirred turmoil of their own, this will do even more so for precisely this reason. Ultimately, a society that accepts the story presented here as its official origin story – a story that is taught in its schools, that seeps into its public consciousness – will have to be radically different than the society we are currently living in. (less)
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David Wineberg
Oct 24, 2021David Wineberg rated it it was amazing
For 350 years, it has been common knowledge that Man went from bands of hunter-gatherers, to pastoralists, to farming, to industry. In parallel, Man lived in families, in tribes, in villages and then in cities, as technology improved. Technology, the third parallel, took us from the stone age through the bronze age and the iron age to the industrial revolution. All neat, tidy and clearly separable. David Graeber and David Wengrow claim there is no evidence for this. In The Dawn of Everything, they show proof of an unbelievable variety of living styles, governance and intellectual activity all over the world and throughout time. It was never a straight line progression. It was never the result of technology. And possibly most stunning, the larger the population was did not also mean more restrictions, more crime, more laws, or more inequality. This is an important book.
The concepts the authors describe are so different that many don’t even have names. For example: “What do you call a city without top-down governance?" There simply are no words for this and numerous other concepts. They found far more variety right here in our own history than scientists have dreamed for alien civilizations in the galaxy. It is astonishing what we have tried, and succeeded with.
The misinformation all began in the mid 1700s, when a man named Turgot, a 23 year old seminary student, wrote to the author of Letters of a Peruvian Woman. He corrected her vision, insisting that the freedom demonstrated by native Peruvians (savages) was not a positive thing, but a reflection of their poverty. Only when technology permits people to live together in large urban settings does the poverty alleviate.
Turgot kept at this idea, eventually lecturing on it. With friends like Adam Smith, his ideas got repeated so often and so widely they became the standard truth. All societies started as hunter gatherers and progressed through specific, required stages to live in urban environments, thanks to farming and technology. It couldn’t work any other way.
Ah, but it can. And it did. One of the unsung positives that came of the Spanish and French invasions of the Americas, was the priesthood that accompanied it. These Catholics wrote everything down, learning the language of every tribe they encountered, absorbing all the structures and nuances of how they lived among themselves as well as with other tribes, and how they governed. Apparently no one has ever compiled all this ethnographic data before The Dawn of Everything. It shows stunning sophistication, different approaches to everything, and seemingly no two societies alike. We have a huge amount to learn from what has been tried, completely unrestricted by Turgot’s supposedly inescapable progression of society and hierarchy. Sadly, we have gone the opposite way, locking in Turgot’s dull theory, while dismissing everything to do with native societies as too primitive to learn from. You could drive trucks through the gaps in the literature.
A common theme among the tribes was equality. For many, there was no hierarchy, no police, no authority. Anyone could refuse to do the bidding of the chief, whose home was always open to all, who took in widows and orphans, and who often had to defend his position by giving the better speeches. Everyone was free to come and go and speak their mind.
Of the numerous whites who were captured and adopted, many found “the virtues of freedom in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of the constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth. Others noted Indians’ reluctance to ever let anyone fall into a condition of poverty, hunger or destitution.” They were honor-bound to take in travelers who came upon their villages and camps. The authors say that “Insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom.” This is a concept totally alien to the world today.
It is well known that many white abductees chose to remain, and many others, having returned to civilization, abandoned it and made their way back to live out their lives in the tribe. The reverse was never true; there are no cases of Indians wanting to return to live among whites in their cities.
Although the book has numerous examples of societies from all over the world, the most documentation comes from the Americas. One native in particular, a Wendat (Huron) Indian from the Michigan area called Kandiaronk, was a brilliant intellect, who drove the priests and soldiers crazy contradicting their religion and their society. They spent hours debating with him, and one French soldier turned his dialogues into a book (which I immediately tracked down. My review: https://medium.com/the-straight-dope/... ).
Here’s how the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia threw criticism back at the French: “They consider themselves better than the French: ‘For’, they say, ‘you are always fighting and quarreling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread, we share it with our neighbor.’ What seemed to irritate (chronicler) Biard the most was that Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as a result, ‘richer’ than the French. The French have more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.”
Far from being “noble savages”, incapable of being analytical or erudite, and being subhumans to be killed on sight by whites, the natives proved to be able to argue the invaders into the ground. The priests had a terrible time trying to convert them to Catholicism. They refused to know their place in the hierarchy of European values. Nonetheless, the stories that came down to us all portrayed the natives as ignorant, incapable, naive savages to be converted or eliminated.
The authors conclude “There is no ‘original’ form of human society. Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making.” Throughout history, there were bands, families, villages, towns and even cities with populations in six figures, all at the same time. It was not a linear progression. It did not reflect evolution. It did not reflect technology. And it did not reflect farming.
People formed societies in conjunction with three basic freedoms: freedom to move (away and live alone or join another group), freedom to disobey and ignore commands, and freedom to create or transform social relationships (make commitments to others). It is the administrative abuse of this last freedom that began the long slide to inequality, the authors say. Inequality is not a result of farming, technology or cities.
An important segment of the book deals with farming, because until now, social science believed it to be a focus and a goal of Homo sapiens the world over, and mastering it is what enabled cities to form.
Homo sapiens does not like to farm. It took thousands of years to domesticate wheat, a process that should take years, not millennia. People always look for the easy way out, in this case, taking wild wheat from hillsides and planting it in flood plains. Flood-retreat farming takes advantage of all the deposits from spring flooding, leaving the equivalent of plowed fields when it recedes. It is far less work than farming whole fields of wheat. It is the philosophy of farming-by-observation, maximizing the yield as nature does the necessary work. ”This Neolithic mode of cultivation was, moreover, highly successful,” the authors point out. Farming therefore took off much more slowly than we currently believe, and was not a prerequisite for the founding of cities, which had sprung up all over the world, three thousand years before farming became an industry. And when feasible, natives abandoned it altogether: “Even in the American southwest, the overall trend for 500 years or so before Europeans arrived was the gradual abandonment of maize and beans, which people had been growing in some cases for thousands of years, and a return to a foraging way of life.”
The result was an easier life, with time for sports, festivals and feasts. And arts. The Kwakiutl of the US and Canadian west coasts are world famous for their fantastical abstract art, from giant totem poles and canoes to tabletop artwork and jewelry. Many other native societies are recognized for their artistic achievements all up and down the Americas. Their system of governance produced a leisure ethic, permitted by respect for and working with nature to provide sufficient food and clothing and not be chained to accumulating material possessions.
Still at it a hundred pages later, the authors say “The underlying assumption was that these (Shang Chinese) were pretty much the same as Neolithic farmers were imagined to be anywhere else: living in villages, developing embryonic forms of social inequality, preparing the way for the sudden leap that would bring the rise of cities and, with cities, the first dynastic states and empires. But we now know this is not what happened at all.” What happened was that all forms of societies existed at the same time, often beside each other, without cross pollination.
As the authors say: “To say that cereal-farming was responsible for the rise of such states is a little like saying that the development of calculus in medieval Persia is responsible for the invention of the atom bomb.”
This sort of acidic comment is typical of David Graeber, who was direct, and stingingly so. Here’s another: “All this begins to make the anthropologists’ habit of lumping Yurok notables and Kwakiutl artists together as ‘affluent foragers’ or ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ seem rather silly: the equivalent of saying a Texas oil executive and medieval Egyptian poet were both ‘complex agriculturalists’ because they both ate a lot of wheat.”
And last but not least: “Who was the first person to figure out you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can almost be certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered ‘white’ if she tried to immigrate to a European country today,”
The lazy or labor-saving attitude toward farming is reflected in many other aspects of life in the Neolithic. Ceramics were invented long before the Neolithic, not for pottery, but for figurines of animals, people and spirits. Greek scientists developed the steam engine not for manufacturing, but to make temple doors magically open and close. The Chinese invented gunpowder for fireworks, not rifles. Mining was not about better weaponry, but pigments for decorating. Though Amerindians never employed the wheel for transport or work, they used them in toys. In plain English, our common knowledge is completely wrong.
There are three factors to governance from the anthropological view: sovereignty, administration (bureaucracy) and heroic/charismatic politics. Different cities and states exhibited one, two or three of these factors that differentiated them from their neighbors in other societies. The book shows it by examining the structures of societies in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica and China; it’s a valid approach globally. And this kind of society building was going on 3000 years before writing appeared, further burying the notion that farming and technology tilted the gameboard. Rather than evolve with farming as their basis, cities have come into being throughout history, flourished for sometimes a thousand years, and faded.
Societies might form around charismatic heroes - or not. Some formed around women, notably in Crete, where women ran everything. For American Indians, women were equal to men, period. Leaders could be chosen by sports or by eloquence. They could just as easily be deposed. Nobles were not permitted to intermarry. They had to marry commoners, precisely to prevent an elite class from forming. Farming was a communal task; no one fenced off fields and claimed No Trespassing. Some societies employed slavery. Severe justice was for aliens; tribal members treated their own as precious. Some societies had councils, some had corvées, where everyone right up to the chief had to labor on common projects. Some built mounds and pyramids. Some cities were famous for their parties and attracted residents from hundreds of miles around. Many cities ran peacefully without police or guards.
Still, there were angry tribes, empires, kingdoms and autarchies where live human sacrifices occurred regularly, but they were mixed right in with near total democracies or no leadership at all. There was a fully formed and stunning variety of systems in place globally 3000 and even 30,000 years ago, with far more variety than we see today, and many of them far less restrictive. Yet we have repressed this knowledge and learned nothing from it, thinking our ancestors were little more than erect apes, clubbing their way to survival. That’s why The Dawn of Everything is important.
While seriously monumental, the book also doesn’t take itself too seriously. I particularly like all the subheadings, written in a nineteenth century style, centered, large type, bold, far too long and all in capital letters. They appear every two or three pages. Here’s a typical one:
IN WHICH WE OBSERVE HOW GRAND
MONUMENTS, PRINCELY BURIALS AND
OTHER UNEXPECTED FEATURES OF
ICE AGE SOCIETIES HAVE UPENDED
OUR ASSUMPTIONS OF WHAT HUNTER-
GATHERERS ARE LIKE, AND CONSIDER
WHAT IT MIGHT MEAN TO SAY THERE
WAS ‘SOCIAL STRATIFICATION’
SOME 30,000 YEARS AGO
(The princely burials refers to archeologists always managing to find burial sites, with well-dressed skeletons surrounded by jewelry and cultural artifacts. When the authors thought about this, they realized this was not the way these societies buried their dead. Many people, if not most, weren’t buried at all. These particular burials were, judging by their skeletons, outliers. They were dwarves or overly tall, had physical disabilities and other markings setting them apart as special, beloved or appreciated far more than average. It was how humans honored their celebrities. They collected valuables to add to their graves out of respect, not because they belonged to the person.)
This is the fourth book of David Graeber’s that I have reviewed. With the others, Debt, The Democracy Project (Occupy Wall Street) and Bullshit Jobs, Graeber proved himself to be so widely read, so insightful, so challenging and in so many widely dispersed domains, it was a major crime that he died weeks after finishing The Dawn of Everything. He died last year at the age of 59, depriving the world of another three decades of his no-holds-barred attacks on misconceptions, misinformation, errors and outright lies in so much of modern life. He was a bad boy in the way Noam Chomsky is a bad boy, slinging discoveries and truths left and right regardless of how they might offend the establishment in government, military or academia.
David Wengrow spent ten years working with Graeber on this book. They clearly had too much fun. The research is, as I hope I’ve transmitted, phenomenal. I have not read any of his other books (mostly on archaeology), but this book is so well done, he is now on my list going forward. Together, they found so much that is new, so much that needs correcting and so many gaps where nothing is written at all, that this would have been the first of a shelf of books that would have rewritten the social sciences completely. We can only hope.
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-... (less)
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Stetson
Nov 06, 2021Stetson rated it it was ok · review of another edition
David Wengrow and the late David Graeber have chosen to venture into the pitched battlefield that is the telling and retelling of the origins of human civilization. Their tome (700+ pages or 24+ hours of audio) is ostensibly provocative though discursive and predicated on a questionable methodology (a more expansive, inclusive, and wide-eyed reading of primary sources on or from primitive human groups and their related artifacts) with the grandiose title The Dawn of Everything. They position their work as a more solemn, serious, and nuanced alternative to popular works by public intellectuals like Steven Pinker, Yuval Noah Harari, and Jared Diamond. The Davids assert these works are simplistic myth-making efforts that erroneously reify a Rosseauan or Hobbesian perspective on human nature (and thus are fatalistic about social organization) married to a teleological view of human progress. Although never explicitly acknowledged in the work, the authors have anarchic political sympathies and thus share the perspective that human nature is quite a bit more flexible and good natured (in the right conditions) than a mainstream read of the salient evidence from their discipline (anthropology) and related field like evolutionarily-oriented disciplines and sociology broadly would be. Considering these limitations, The Dawn of Everything is still probably a work worth reading; it just happens to either argue for things that aren't as impactful as they think they are (e.g. human behavior and social practices can be very flexible) or are just not well substantiated (e.g. that matriarchal societies existed in human history).
I think readers should forgive the Davids a bit for daring to make some zany claims (it is great to think daringly sometimes), but it would have landed better if they were a bit more deft and humble about it. A lot of their supposed rebuttals of fairly mainstream orthodoxies about the history and nature of human civilization (even ones that are simplifications) are premised on fairly tenuous evidence and often require some very generous interpretations of their sources. Moreover, the book is largely ignorant of or foolishly ignores the insights of linguistics, primatology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and ancient population genomics, especially in terms of the harder evidence they can provide about human behavior, socialization, and migration. This is a huge oversight as these types of discussions even make the pages of the purportedly simplistic popular works that the Davids scorn.
I think the real failing of the work is that the authors aren't actually able to provide an operational and detailed description of a supposed ideal modern human civilization at scale. There isn't a synthesis about what this should mean for our world despite their clear displeasure with how they think society is "stuck" in particular governing systems now. They give some small-scale and vague examples that aren't much more than fantasies. Plus, they dismiss concerns about scale, logistics, and transaction costs (not even addressed) flippantly and don't even tender a definitive perspective on human nature (implying inaccurately that it is more malleable than it actually is). There just is no serious thinking about political economy or information flow for a complex, technologically mature global society from their perspective. Despite often criticizing Rousseau's work, they still are seemingly siding with him about essential human nature, while ignoring the well-known, mainstream, agnostic resolution of the Rousseau-Hobbes debate, i.e. Lockean Social Contract Theory. Overall, The Dawn of Everything is an interesting but very messy and fanciful re-imagining of human history.
*Disclaimer: I received this audiobook as an ARC through NetGalley (less)
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Steffi
Jan 05, 2022Steffi rated it it was amazing
Shelves: 2021
Fuck.
First of all, this was another Mark Fisher moment for me aka I only found out about one of the authors, David Graeber, just after he died last year and upon stumbling his latest/final book. Then also realizing that I must have come across him - organizer and intellectual leader of the activist left on both sides of the Atlantic, credited, among other things, with helping launch the Occupy movement - a hundred times in my bubble but somehow didn't. Anyhow.
Fuck 2.
What an epic undertaking is THIS. In a nutshell, the book 'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) provides a ‘totally new’ account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau (and elaborated by subsequent thinkers). In other words, this 600 or so page book upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change. ‘In a nutshell’ lol.
One must really read this book (yay to very long winter holidays), there's almost no point in summarizing this book (at least not by someone like me) but here follow a few personal takeaways which, in no way, will do any justice to this epic book.
#1 - It took me a while to figure out what this book is 'really' about. Obviously, the point of challenging conventional accounts of social history is also to challenge conventional assumptions about human nature, and as such fundamental questions about freedom and equality and, of course, possible futures. Our understanding of history also determines our imagination of the future - you know how so many people will always say that certain more humane and egalitarian forms of social organizing are impossible because 'it never worked' and 'people are just like this' etc. This often comes down to specific assumptions about human nature that are usually derived from specific understandings of social history. So, the core argument of the book (see below) is extremely political and very relevant at this juncture of near-total destruction and exploitation of people and planet where we are being tested to think big but remain limited with shitty reforms of the status quo. It is no coincidence that the book opens with a line on the Greek concept of ‘kairos’ as one of those occasional moments in a society's history when its frames of reference undergo a shift and where real change is imaginable.
#2 - So, conventional history goes something like this: 'back in the day' (lol) humans lived in a simple state, either in total egalitarian forms (Rousseau) or constantly at each other's throats (Hobbes), but basically in some kind of 'natural human state' of foragers. Then, give or take 10,000 BC, came the Neolithic revolution, agriculture, settlements, cities, civilization, complex hierarchies and administrations, states, kings, inequality. A more or less straight line from the first domestication of plants and animals in what is now the Middle East down to f* 21st century capitalism and Amazon.
#3 - Now, turns out that, according to newer archeological evidence, human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands - the world of hunter-gatherers was actually one of bold social experiments and political forms. Contra the myth of the ‘stupid savage’ (which finds its origin in specific European Enlightenment thought), the authors show that our ancestors were not actually that stupid, but were instead self-conscious political actors, capable of making their own social arrangements depending on circumstances, often people would choose to switch seasonally between sociopolitical identities as to avoid the perils of lasting authoritarian power.
#4 – Newer evidence also shows that agriculture did not mean the inception of private property nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. in fact, many of the world's earliest cities were organized on egalitarian lines - new pieces of research exist to create an entirely different understanding of the ‘evolution’ of civilization. In fact, the very question of the ‘origin of inequality’ is misleading as it also presupposes some kind of Eden like state of innocence. The premise of the book is precisely to turn the question on the ‘origin of inequality’ into one of ‘why did we get stuck with it’ since nothing about inequality is a ‘natural outcome’ of technological progress and more complex forms of social organization (e.g., agriculture and the opportunity to create material surplus).
#5 – Various pieces of archaeological and anthropological evidence (reflecting the respective backgrounds of the authors) show that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Early farming embodied what Graeber and Wengrow call ‘the ecology of freedom’: the freedom to move in and out of farming, to avoid getting trapped by its demands or endangered by the ecological fragility that it entails. Hence, it also doesn’t make sense to speak of a ‘Neolithic revolution’ as there were long periods, covering millennia, where societies used certain agricultural practices in an experimental and playful manner, with newer research on the origins of agriculture (conventionally believed to be in Mesopotamia), showing that there are at least 15 independent sites of origin of agriculture and it actually took about 3,000 years where people deliberately engaged in some forms of agriculture but not fully committing to it.
#6 – Similarly, there are chapters on early settlements and cities and states (predating agriculture not the other way around) with the most diverse evidence from Mesoamerica, East Africa and Eurasia on large cities with no signs of authoritarian rule as well as temporal succession of different political orders, sometimes moving from authoritarian to egalitarian, which leaves the possibility of urban revolutions as a likely explanation for the change. The chapters on cities also put an end to the idea that large populations need layers of bureaucracy to govern them—that scale leads inevitably to political inequality. Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth. This is the case with what may be the earliest cities of all, Ukrainian sites like Taljanky, which were discovered only in the 1970s and which date from as early as roughly 4100 B.C., hundreds of years before Uruk, the oldest known city in Mesopotamia (modern day Syria). Btw, I was fortunate enough to visit Uruk in 2021 – I love when real life and reading experience connect in these ways.
#7 – The book also highlights that many of the most popular books on human history, think non-specialists in anthropology nor archeology like Steven Pinker (psychologist), Francis Fukuyama (political economist) or Yuval Noah Harari (historian), essentially reproduce the same old myths without being able to appreciate and interpret the massive shifts in archeological and anthropological science. Basically, recycling the same old myth about human nature to justify the status quo/ their political projects.
#8 - Actually, more than a book on inequality, the book’s central theme is human freedom. Based on their review of anthropological records, the authors identify three types of freedoms: freedom to abandon one’s community (knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands), freedom to reshuffle the political system (often seasonally), and freedom to disobey authorities without consequences — freedoms that appear to have been a given for our ancestors but are now largely lost (again, raising the question: how did we get stuck?). In fact, today’s (18th century Enlightenment based) concept of civilization is largely reserved for societies whose defining characteristics include autocrats, imperial conquests and the use of slave labour while rendering entire epochs of relative freedom, democracy and women's rights as so many 'dark ages'.
#9 – The book is also remarkable slash mind-blowing in terms of its approach and style. It is the outcome of a ten-year intellectual exchange between the two friends, the British archeologist David Wengrow and American anthropologist David Graeber. You can see that from the beginning this was a playful and experimental intellectual project, the two comparing notes on the latest shifts in their respective disciplines and slowly letting this develop into this humble (pointing out limitations) yet epic re-telling of human history. The playfulness and many digressions are of course also a challenge to the reader accustomed to scientific books with clear and logical lines of argumentation, oftentimes finding yourself lost in elaborations on, say, specific burial rituals of one group of prehistoric forager-farmers lol. Making it through this ‘beautiful chaos’ does take a good deal of patience and it’s best enjoyed once you manage to let go of the question of how exactly all of this links to the bigger picture (and what was this again?!) and just take it in; like in those movies where the story is told in reverse, all will make sense, eventually (for those with less time and patience at hand, there’s also a great The Dig podcast episode with an interview with the book’s co-author David Wengrow.)
#10 Of course, the most beautiful freedom 'the freedom to imagine society differently' which – and this is probably ably the bottom line of this book - seems to be what people have been doing since the beginning of time ❤
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Krista
Jan 01, 2022Krista rated it liked it
Shelves: 2021, nonfiction, arc
We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?
With the grandiose subtitle of “A New History of Humanity”, I was certainly expecting a lot from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything; and in retrospect, I may have been expecting too much, and too much of something different altogether. I love reading stories of how people live in different places and different times — and those stories are here — but mostly, this reads like a one-sided argument that I don’t know anything about and that I didn’t know was taking place. The bottom line: Graeber and Wengrow argue that there’s nothing inevitable about the progression of human civilisation to the point where we find ourselves today; and that modern academia is an echochamber for that theory of progress, dismissing and suppressing evidence to the contrary. I didn’t realise until afterwards that Graeber, who has since passed, was a noted anarchist activist and one of the founders of the Occupy Movement, so while I understand why this book is antiestablishment, I was nevertheless disappointed that it didn’t offer up any ideas for how we could be doing things better. Overall, this was an often fascinating and paradigm-challenging read, but it didn’t amount to much, and some quirky writing (which only served to lengthen a long book) force me to round down to three stars. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would otherwise be invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say that things are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévis-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.
Post-Enlightenment, we have been taught to think of early humans as living in one of two opposing states: that described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (a state of peaceful harmony with nature until the first person claimed a plot of land as their own; ushering in inequality, onerous bureaucracy, and state-sponsored violence) and that of Thomas Hobbes (who described life as “nasty, brutish, and short” until state control was introduced to stem interpersonal violence). Following in this vein, modern pop history writers — the likes of Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Yuval Noah Harari; all smugly dismissed by Graeber and Wengrow — take it for granted that the rise of human civilsation was an inevitable progression from unself-examined hunter-gatherer societies to early agriculture, the formation of cities, through to a culmination in modern democracy and capitalism. In particular, the authors chastise Harari (who once wrote that early humans were either as aggressive as chimpanzees or as peaceful as bonobos) as denying humanity to these early humans (literally comparing them to animals until they first started cultivating grain), and I must admit that that is a valid criticism: why can’t we think of early humans as actual people who made conscious choices about the kind of society in which they wanted to live? By telling the stories of many types of societies across time and space — including those that experimented with agriculture, monarchy, and city-states before abandoning them as untenable — the authors prove that there really isn’t anything inevitable about where we find ourselves today. I liked learning the stories of those who experimented with agriculture before giving it up (including the folks who built Stonehenge, who had reverted to acorn-harvesting at the time of their big project) and I appreciated that the authors took issue with historians who use terms like “intermediary period” or “proto-something” to describe times when early humans weren’t engaging in those activities we think of as markers of civilisation (as though people were living in stable societies for generations, just waiting for something important to happen). My thinking was challenged about these early societies — especially as it was mostly formed by the pop history writers that Graeber and Wengrow dismiss — and I like being challenged.
Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies — say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighbourhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction — will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids or statues more like historical curiosities. What if we were to take that approach now and look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternate possibilities: roads not taken?
Again, I appreciate the scholarship on display in The Dawn of Everything — and especially as it describes those people who simply walked away from the bureaucracies and overlords who made their lives unpleasant, leading to the ruins of former cities that now dot the globe — but while it is provocative to think of modern Western civilisation as an entirely replaceable construct (and I can’t deny that it doesn’t work for everyone), it feels naive for the authors to imply that it can all be torn down without offering an idea of what would come next. Honestly, as interesting as the history was, I kept waiting for the point; it’s not like today we could just walk away from our cities and countries and find empty space in which to mindfully start over; understanding history in this case does not feel, in itself, like a road map to a better future. I still enjoyed the read. (less)
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Brandon Westlake
Jun 26, 2021Brandon Westlake rated it really liked it
This unique book combines the skill of historical thinking and anthropology. Definitely not what I thought I was going to read; it ended up being much more than that. There are some echoes of the work of Diamond here, but on a different scale and perspective. It is a great look at the long view of history and how we have come to understand ourselves. The idea of inequality is at the heart of the book, and makes the case that our view of humanity is quite inaccurate. There's a lot to work through here, and there are instances where the writing can get a bit heady. This is not a quick read; you'll want to take it in slow, savory doses. (less)
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Veronica Watson
Dec 05, 2021Veronica Watson rated it it was amazing
Having read Sapiens and Guns, Germs and Steel, or various nature writers, I am familiar with the assumptions that has tended to crop up in this field of Big History. And then, having soft formed ideas that something just didn't connect, while enjoying the sweep of their logic and arguments, I shook my head with vague consternation at my instincts. This book, brilliantly elucidated, written for the general reader (ie well written) lays out in so many ways my issues with Big History books.
The authors clearly and pragmatically disentangle myths around prehistory and popular philosophical understanding of human nature, the past and all that combines in social theory dealing with history. They do it so well you almost are like "but of course!" But not of course seeing so many of the ways researcher and authors continue to frame the past. Ideas have their history too and some have become so integrated in our modern consciousness that they have been proliferating in our popular imagination and writing for centuries. The question of the origin of social equality itself has origin and that's where the authors begin.
Let's go on and name a few myths. That we must choose between Rousseau or Hobbs when describing the nature of man and stripped away from "civilization". And underlining this assumption is that only Modern Man has historical consciousness, imagination and social awareness enough to be agents of history and consider implications of power and culture. Or as they say become historical actors within the constraints that always are involved.Those humans in prehistory either dwelt in some mysterious and unburdened garden of Eden, equal in all, in a state of blissful nature or they were at any time waiting to act on brutal impulses and competitive, testosterone laden displays of power.
Second, there is a implicit teological impetus within historical epochs as previously described. That social evolution progresses the same way in all parts of the world and never goes back or follows different ways or paths. In this, we are in some ways chained to the consciousness and cultural chains of whatever epoch we happen to be in. Here is said, are measurable historical landmarks such as the agricultural revolution, the urban revolution and the industrial revolution. And change happened just like that. Social evolution went the way of the arrow, bands of hunter/gatherers, chieftain and charismatic leaders, cities, bureaucratic infrastructure and kings to large scale civilization.
There is no such teleology as shown in the archaeological record or in history seen from a broader standpoint. The evidence is simply not there to support this tidy evolution. It seems that there's more evidence that Paleolithic and Mesolithic peoples played with political arrangements and with materials/technologies a long time before they became used in what we think as "important". They played with agriculture...meaning starting in gardening and botany. On small scales most likely in the science of women. Moreover, women played various parts on social arrangements all over the world, neither always the dominated or privileged gender as seen by so many leftist thinkers.
Just as it is in cultures all over the world today, people of the upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic had different ideas about how to live, sometimes contrasting with their neighbors intentionally. These ancestors were just as complex and diverse as modern people, yet the forms that their complexities took is richly different from our own. What we think happened is never as interesting as what often did happen. In some ways, casting back our own presumptions into the past is just as problematic as envisioning them as blissfully ignorant.
The authors offered several new conceptions and probable causes for cultural differences that we see in history, or the origin of our singular ways of thinking and in the process call into questions so many of the ways that we have framed these sciences and disciplines, particularly in the popular sphere.
In effort not to go on and on I will wrap up this review by saying I highly recommend this book to any and all whom are interested. It is a long book but not egregious. I felt it was well written, in an engaging, refreshing style. But more than anything it is conceptually refreshing. (less)
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Nate Miller
Dec 04, 2021Nate Miller rated it did not like it
Okay—first I’ll try to say something nice about this book. I truly enjoyed reading about Kandiaronk. And about the evidence that North American Indian ideas about individual liberty and autonomy spread to and deeply affected settlers in the New World--perhaps changing the entire course of world history.
But I pretty well hated the entire book.
Because the authors are dressing up fanciful ideas as plausible, evidence-backed ideas. They do admit to some speculating, but the whole tone of the writing is meant to obscure the fact that they are basically spitballing. Every page is perfectly littered with the phrases, “perhaps,” and “it’s possible that.” The reader is bombarded with rhetorical questions meant to imply that some absurd, remote possibility is actually plausible and sensible.
The authors never once make a bold statement. They hide in the brush for all 500 pages, sniping at other writers, while never committing to an idea that could be challenged in broad daylight. Every vague idea they put forth, soon gets qualified in eight different ways, until it means almost nothing. It’s watered down tea. Unappetizing. My conclusion is that the authors, who seem to be quite intelligent, take this approach b/c they are keenly aware of how weak their arguments are. But it’s obnoxious. It would be better if they just said: Here’s some wild speculation, with very little evidence, just for fun.
Instead they take themselves quite seriously. They insinuate they are doing groundbreaking, earth-shattering work. But they are not. And so they strike me as arrogant and self-important. They are scrupulously and nauseatingly politically correct. Plus I think they wasted my time by not giving me much to sink my teeth into it.
Their big idea about “the 3 basic freedoms” is garbage in my opinion. Their relentless insistence that we of the modern age are “stuck” in our ideas about social arrangements is blindly ignorant. There have been, in recent history, in many different places, an incredible number of creative plots and daring attempts at all kinds of wildly different social arrangements.
One more thing I noticed. If you care about this sort of thing. The authors are die-hard Marxists. They don’t’ come out and say this. But the dead giveaway is a ridiculous over-usage of the adjective “radical.” I would guess it pops up about 30 times. Also, the word “revolutionary” pops up quite frequently. I’ve observed this pattern in 2 or 3 books I’ve read lately. I’m not sure why Marxists do this. Maybe to signal their peers? I don’t know. It’s amusing that they think it’s somehow subtle. But also, I see it as a sign that I am reading an agenda-pushing ideologue, and not a genuinely curious scientist. There are several other clues in the book regarding all this but I want to keep it short here.
I will try not to hold a grudge over any of these faults. I’m sure the authors meant well. But I will recommend you all avoid this one.// (less)
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Morgan Blackledge
Jan 08, 2022Morgan Blackledge rated it it was amazing
Author David Graeber is an anarchist anthropologist (AA).
That has to be dorkiest/coolest profession of all time.
⚠️WEIRD TANGENT/RANT ALERT ⚠️
The only way to amp up that (anarchist/anthropologist) résumé would be to add dungeon master to it somewhere.
By dungeon master I mean the dungeons and dragons (D&D) kind not the bondage and dominance, sadism and masochism (BDSM) kind.
Although, real talk, there actually is a big crossover between the D&D crowd and the BDSM crowd.
I totally shit you not.
I know (or have known) a good many BDSM folks, and their dirty little secret is, they’re all nerds.
Like, hook up at a Magic: The Gathering (MTG) tournament, Star Trek: The Next Generation (STNG) super-fan types.
Maybe Harry Potter (HP) is a better (more timely and ironically MUCH more loaded - based on miss thing’s outspokenness against trans folk) emblem of nerdiness.
Extruding on that (however cringy) Graeber Is a good little wizard, and this book is legit spellbinding.
Anyway…
Moving on from this AA/D&D/BDSM/MTG/STNG/HP tangent.
⚠️ END OF WEIRD TANGENT/RANT ALERT ⚠️
From what I gather, if you’re a scholar/anarchist, your vocation (day job) is to research and publish in your field, and your avocation (raison d’être - that’s French for ‘the most important reason or purpose for someone or something's existence’, not diet of raisins as you may reasonably guess) is to undermine state power by (in part) challenging banal assumptions regarding the inevitability, efficacy and favorability of state control.
Mind you, I’m reverse engineering this (scholar/anarchist) job description based on this reading alone. So please forgive me if it’s either primitive (primate and primitive have the same Latin root word by the way, primus meaning ‘first’ or essential) or naïve (derived from the mid 17th century French word naïve, meaning feminine, or maybe from Latin nativus ‘native, natural’).
Just as words like ‘primitive’ and ‘naïve’ are both problematic as fuck (in that racist, sexist, classist, imperialistic, heteronormative, homophobic, humanocentric, phallocentric, eurocentric kind of way), particularly when you know their origin.
NOTE: noxious examples may include: Monkeys (primates) are ‘primitive’ people. Primitive people are like monkeys. Women are naïve, and naivety is the feminine quality. Native people are natural, and therefore naïve. I could go on but…yuck🤮.
Anyway.
Just like all that.
Graeber asserts that similar commonplace assumptions regarding the inevitability and primacy of nation statehood are equally problematic.
According to Graeber, modern (as opposed to postmodern) scholars observed that nation states were the dominant form of government in their day, and assumed that this was the ‘pinnacle’ and teleological end game of human progress and evolution.
Then they went digging around in the dirt for evidence of the evolutionary trajectory from ‘primitive’ statehood, to contemporary ‘advanced’ statehood, wile concurrently and conveniently (two of my very favorite C words) dismissing all of the copious (there’s another C word) disconfirmatory evidence a priori.
Graeber cites Steven Pinker’s Better Angels (incidentally one of my all-time favorite books by one of my all-time favorite intellectuals) as the most recent and most egregious one of those, and claims Pinker is the heir apparent to this tradition.
For those of you that haven’t read Pinker’s work in this area. His basic claim is: over the long term, and on average, life for people is getting better and better all the time, as evidenced by longer lifespan‘s, less violence, and more political freedom and equality for more and more people (not just westerners), due to the humanitarian and stabilizing affects of science, technology, civilization, rule of law, advanced capitalism, and yes… nation states.
Graeber installs a new a-hole into Pinker’s posterior by making plausible claim after plausible claim that the history of human governance is far from homogeneous.
Graeber presents plausible example after plausible example as evidence for the claim that people have achieved egalitarian self governance via many means, throughout pre-history and to the present.
Graeber claims that autocratic statehood is founded on: (a) control over violence, (b) control over information, and (c) charismatic power (think Donald Twitler and/or Adolf Stalin if you need a quick reference).
Graeber ultimately claims that autocratic state control is FAR from inevitable, and that we could just as easily create a just culture, with social justice, cooperation and sustainability as organizing principles.
And yes to that.
Please.
And yes to Pinker too, I guess?
I think their (somehow) both right.
But whatever.
I am neither a anarchist/anthropologist or a rational optimist/evolutionary psychologist/linguist. So I’ll leave that clash to these titans (but I will enjoy the hell out of my front row seats).
Some of Graeber‘s best work in this book is in his account of what he terms “the indigenous critique of European civilization”, whereby Native American intellectuals met with early European missionaries and philosophers and other such thinkers, and not only demonstrated a superior, more egalitarian way of life, but also deconstructed and critiqued systems of European autocratic domination in favor of what we now call democracy.
Essentially, Graeber asserts that Native American intellectuals were highly influential (seminal if you will 😜) to the western enlightenment. And we’re nearly entirely expunged from the historical record, but who’s influence is very clear when examining source and documentary texts of the time.
NOTE: the failure of most historians to even do so much as to acknowledge the fact that there were highly influential Native American intellectuals that played a prominent role in the “western enlightenment” is one big fat clue to how Eurocentric conventional historical accounts are.
Graeber further asserts that many of the Janus Faced (referencing the two faced Roman god Janus, and referring to having two sharply contrasting characteristics) nature of American society we currently experience (and will hopefully outlive) was present long before European’s arrived.
Specifically, the polarity between the interests and politics of a slave holding, land holding elites verses those of egalitarian peace loving migratory common folk were common place among first nationals of the time, explaining (in-part) some of their advanced insights regarding politics and governance of culturally and politically diverse people.
THE 3 FREEDOMS
Graeber concludes with another numbered list (and I ❤️ those -particularly this one) the 3 basic freedoms:
1. the freedom to relocate
- i.e. the freedom to DIP!
2. the freedom to disobey
- i.e. the freedom to say FUCK YOU and FUCK ALL THIS
And (last but ABSOLUTELY not least)
3. the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality.
Let’s all please savor that for a moment…
The freedom to create new and different forms of social reality.
I vote for that.
There’s much more (or perhaps much less) to say about this remarkable, entertaining and yes, enlightening book.
But I will conclude this (tragic hot mess of a) book review by declaring:
David Graeber is the doyen (doy·en /doiˈ(y)en,ˈdôyən/ noun 1. the most respected or prominent person in a particular field) of dungeon master anarchist/anthropologist’s.
This is a fucking FANTASTIC book.
5/5 ⭐️ (without reservations - no pun intended)
From Wikipedia: Graeber died unexpectedly in September 2020, while on vacation in Venice. His last book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-written with archaeologist David Wengrow, was published posthumously in 2021. (less)
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Kosta Dalianas
Oct 21, 2021Kosta Dalianas rated it it was amazing
Dunks on idiots like Harari and Diamond
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Graeme Newell
Dec 24, 2021Graeme Newell rated it liked it
Shelves: nonfiction, audible
Five stars for information…two stars for readability.
This book lays out some fascinating new findings on the origins of humanity and civilization. I was taught in school that hunter-gatherers led short brutal lives; then, humanity’s ascent to agriculture, cities, and governments was a deliverance from darkness and ignorance. Well, this book pretty much turns this whole model on its head.
Because Europeans wrote down their history in books and ancient civilizations didn’t, the 18th & 19th century scholars conveniently conjectured a self-aggrandizing story of our ancestors. The “noble savage” myth was born - grunting cave people more akin to apes than men.
Turns out that most of this trope got started back in the heyday of colonialism when Europeans needed moral justification for the genocide they were perpetrating across the globe. Gaeber & Wengrow present a trove of convincing evidence that the pinnacle of civilization was actually achieved in ancient times.
New archeological evidence shows that life in ancient times was pretty darn nice: large cities, sustainable land management, effective community policing, and a good life. The authors lay out a solid case that some of humanities greatest suffering has just come about recently with the advent of large centralized governments.
For most of human history we haven’t had priests, bureaucracies, and kings. Instead, we’ve had local municipalities, much like old-style New England town meetings. These governing councils did a bang-up job of building a good quality of life for most everyone. And many of these cities were BIG…many with thousands and thousands of people. They got big municipal projects accomplished, prevented abuses of power, and assured that no one person subjugated the populace.
It’s only been in modern times that this has fallen apart. Today, the top 1% have 43% of the resources. New archeological evidence shows this rarely happened in ancient times. The authors make the case that today we’re living at the nadir of civilization.
The evidence presented in this book is quite convincing and quite exhaustive, and I mean that literally. This is an exhausting book - 700 pages of minutia. I get the feeling the authors were primarily interested in building a solid case for their premise. Unfortunately, they neglected basic storytelling. I continually found myself nodding off in the middle of a paragraph on some esoteric piece of evidence. There are so many examples and so many civilizations profiled that it’s just darn hard to follow.
This could have been an outstanding book…if only it had been graced with a capable editor.
The information is groundbreaking, but it’s a long slog. (less)
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Gary Beauregard Bottomley
Dec 15, 2021Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it really liked it
The authors know there is no central overriding authoritative narrative explaining the past through fabricated “just so stories” and our understanding of our beginnings is often tainted by pernicious teleology.
Charles Mann, an author cited in this book for falsely describing pre-Columbus South America in terms of Kingdoms because he could only think in terms of his own world-view. Mann wrote the Wall Street Journal book review for Homo Sapiens and it was clear he had no idea what it meant since Mann was only capable of seeing the world linearly as a series of progressions and with the end point already known since history had led to him and according to him history must always have a narrative about the narrative which justifies that end point. These authors will make the point that the word “state” would have not been in the vocabulary of the early conquistadors and that way of thinking about the world would have been an anachronism.
These authors understand that Mann’s way is fraught with errors. Stephen Pinker’s evolutionary psychology is bogus, Jared Diamond’s generalities are dangerous, Fukuyama’s end of history and tone deaf understanding of identity is bereft of wisdom, and at times Yuval Harari was intentionally misleading.
There is no meaning to the past except for the meaning we give to it today. As things are happening, they are not understood through modern eyes at the time they happened. Marc Bloch, a medieval historian, said that it was impossible to have been an atheist in medieval European times since everything that made the world including culture, knowledge, religion, education and language would have included the assumption of a creator God and to have believed differently would have meant to be completely removed from everything around you and the world described by those experiences would have failed you. These authors understand the trap that others have fallen into through using the false Rousseau and Hobbes narratives and they guide the reader from falling into the same outmoded way of thinking.
There was no smooth transition from hunter-gatherers to larger groups of humans and there was no teleological certainty. The authors will argue that pre-historical societies and indigenous peoples were more just than previously acknowledged and often our current end points of today do not indicate progress but a regression from what was.
With all human understanding there is a dichotomy between the individual and the self-identified group they belong too. The authors tilt towards the individual in most of their pre-history explanations and describe freedom and equality with that in mind. The Bhagavad Gita paradox between what is within us and outside of us and resolving it through our actions, knowledge and acceptance of the universe or divine is never that clear cut for me.
It’s hard not to enjoy a book that calls out some of my least favorite authors for their misleading takes on pre-history or their inability to understand the Enlightenment while writing books with that in their title. These authors of this book know there is no universal story about the story concerning early human development and tell their story with the complexity and the moving pieces that it deserves. (less)
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Stetson
Nov 05, 2021Stetson rated it it was ok
Shelves: history, non-fiction, social-commentary, anthropology
David Wengrow and the late David Graeber have chosen to venture into the pitched battlefield that is the telling and retelling of the origins of human civilization. Their tome (700+ pages or 24+ hours of audio) is ostensibly provocative though discursive and predicated on a questionable methodology (a more expansive, inclusive, and wide-eyed reading of primary sources on or from primitive human groups and their related artifacts) with the grandiose title The Dawn of Everything. They position their work as a more solemn, serious, and nuanced alternative to popular works by public intellectuals like Steven Pinker, Yuval Noah Harari, and Jared Diamond. The Davids assert these works are simplistic myth-making efforts that erroneously reify a Rosseauan or Hobbesian perspective on human nature (and thus are fatalistic about social organization) married to a teleological view of human progress. Although never explicitly acknowledged in the work, the authors have anarchic political sympathies and thus share the perspective that human nature is quite a bit more flexible and good natured (in the right conditions) than a mainstream read of the salient evidence from their discipline (anthropology) and related field like evolutionarily-oriented disciplines and sociology broadly would be. Considering these limitations, The Dawn of Everything is still probably a work worth reading; it just happens to either argue for things that aren't as impactful as they think they are (e.g. human behavior and social practices can be very flexible) or are just not well substantiated (e.g. that matriarchal societies existed in human history).
I think readers should forgive the Davids a bit for daring to make some zany claims (it is great to think daringly sometimes), but it would have landed better if they were a bit more deft and humble about it. A lot of their supposed rebuttals of fairly mainstream orthodoxies about the history and nature of human civilization (even ones that are simplifications) are premised on fairly tenuous evidence and often require some very generous interpretations of their sources. Moreover, the book is largely ignorant of or foolishly ignores the insights of linguistics, primatology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and ancient population genomics, especially in terms of the harder evidence they can provide about human behavior, socialization, and migration. This is a huge oversight as these types of discussions even make the pages of the purportedly simplistic popular works that the Davids scorn.
I think the real failing of the work is that the authors aren't actually able to provide an operational and detailed description of a supposed ideal modern human civilization at scale. There isn't a synthesis about what this should mean for our world despite their clear displeasure with how they think society is "stuck" in particular governing systems now. They give some small-scale and vague examples that aren't much more than fantasies. Plus, they dismiss concerns about scale, logistics, and transaction costs (not even addressed) flippantly and don't even tender a definitive perspective on human nature (implying inaccurately that it is more malleable than it actually is). There just is no serious thinking about political economy or information flow for a complex, technologically mature global society from their perspective. Despite often criticizing Rousseau's work, they still are seemingly siding with him about essential human nature, while ignoring the well-known, mainstream, agnostic resolution of the Rousseau-Hobbes debate, i.e. Lockean Social Contract Theory. Overall, The Dawn of Everything is an interesting but very messy and fanciful re-imagining of human history.
*Disclaimer: I received this audiobook as an ARC through NetGalley (less)
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Rhys
Nov 01, 2021Rhys rated it it was amazing
Graeber and Wengrow have offered an interesting synthesis of the anthropological/archeological record of human organization over the ages. They challenge the simple explanations of 'progress' from small clans to complex states. In essence, they challenge our 'stuckness', accepting State organization as the inevitable outcome of complex, urban life.
The Dawn of Everything is bookended with the assertion that doctrines of individual liberty, mutual aid and political equality, as famously articulated by Rousseau, were derived from the words of 'Amerindian' elders and sages in their contact with French colonists. For this alone, the book is worth reading.
Freedom becomes the freedom 'to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties', as illustrated many times in the span of human organization. One wonders how this could apply to today's surveillance-based state capitalism.
I hope Wengrow will proceed with the future books the two authors had planned prior to Graeber's untimely death. The authors made a number of oblique correlations between female-lead organizations and the rise of art and culture; or was it during times of low-authoritarianism; or are these the same things? I am reminded of Rudolf Rocker's Nationalism & Culture - Greaber/Wengrow might offer new insights on this theme.
I hope The Dawn of Everything will inspire a new worldview, one where we can become 'unstuck'. (less)
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Adrian Hon
Oct 28, 2021Adrian Hon rated it it was amazing
Hard-going at times (the intro and final chapters), frequently too hand-wavy - yet so dazzling and daring that it’s well worth the effort
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Thomas
Oct 27, 2021Thomas rated it it was amazing
Seems like an odd thing to say, but this read like an Adam Curtis film. If the BBC archives went back to the dawn of time, I can imagine this alternative history playing out over low-fi synthonic beats.
I think the reason I’m making that connection is because I was originally hipped to the work of Graeber from a quote in one of Curtis’ films.
Clearly I can’t think of any better compliment to to give this book beyond drawing the aforementioned comparison.
It seems strange that as time goes on, we ...more
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Keith Daniels
Nov 03, 2021Keith Daniels rated it it was amazing
One of the best books I've ever read. An openly leftist-anarchist re-reading of human history which, fundamentally, seeks to demonstrate the idea that the late-stage capitalist dystopia we currently live in wasn't inevitable and isn't inescapable. Better alternatives not only can be conceived, they were implemented successfully many times throughout human history. RIP David Graeber, sorely missed. (less)
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Lloyd Fassett
Oct 20, 2021Lloyd Fassett marked it as to-read
10/20/21 found it because Google pushed a review from The Atlantic magazine to me, which is here https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/artic... (less)
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Tim O'Neill
Jan 14, 2022Tim O'Neill rated it it was amazing
Shelves: history
Having just finished this very long and fairly dense book, perhaps now isn't the best time to write a detailed review. There is a lot to digest here, in many senses. Leaving the sheer bulk of the work aside, the breadth of the subject matter (literally thousands of years of prehistory) and the nature of the book (synthesis across a range of fields and areas of archaeology and anthropology) means detailed analysis of it would be difficult, even for a specialist.
But my overall impression is that this is a book that has successfully challenged many of my preconceptions about prehistory and the early history of farming, city states and the origins of historical social structures. That Graeber (and, possibly, Wengrow) was clearly inclined toward Anarchism is fairly clear, but that weighs more lightly on the book's analysis than the ideologies of, say, Steven Pinker does on that writer's rather more overtly polemical works. The simple but profound insight that our 100,000 plus years of prehistory are unlikely to have been simply egalitarian hunter gatherer bands of either a Hobbsian or Rousseauian nature, with no other variants or experimentation of societal structures, is worth the book's price of admission on its own. Even if not all of Graeber and Wengrow's arguments are wholly convincing, this book will make me look at many things from a new angle.
Of course, works that make a claim to "Everything" in their title are necessarily biting off and chewing a great deal. I'm certainly not a specialist or even a well-read layman in the periods and subjects surveyed and synthesised here and so while I enjoyed the ride, I was alert to the fact that I was being given basic instruction in much of the relevant material by the writers as they shaped and presented their arguments. It's always a trap to be carried along by a thesis without the rudder of a deep understanding of the evidence and so little to no capacity for formulating counter arguments or asking critical questions. Occasionally the authors touched on subjects I do know about and I saw flashes of problem. Australian Aboriginal societies don't get much reference by Graeber and Wengrow, for example. But the fact that on one of the few occasions where they do mention them, the authors cite the highly controversial, in places quite dubious and heavily disputed work of the amateur writer Bruce Pascoe rang a warning bell for me.
Similarly, the idea that the Enlightenment was inspired largely by an "indigenous critique" by Native Americans who interacted with European intellectuals and criticised Western society was not something I'd encountered in my reading on the origins of that movement. So I was not too surprised to find that actual historians of the Enlightenment have found that section of Graeber and Wengrow's book pretty dubious.
This means while I have enjoyed this book immensely and know it embodies a new perspective I'll be utilising from now on, I'll be watching with interest how specialists in the many subject areas and fields it covers receive it and what impact it has. Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel made a similar splash on its first publication and I found it similarly provocative. It has since not fared well as its flaws have been exposed by subsequent years of critique. It will be interesting to see how time and critical analysis treats The Dawn of Everything. (less)
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Greg
Dec 19, 2021Greg rated it it was ok
I cannot recall the last time I was so disappointed by a book that seemed to promise so much!
First of all, and very importantly, this work is BLOATED and desperately calls out for a good editor who would likely be able to slash at least 1/3 or more of its current bulk without losing anything of importance.
The "arguments" contained are repetitious and often circular, and I hardly think it deserves the title "A New History of Humanity."
Yes, we are learning -- and clearly have much yet to learn -- about our distant ancestors, human and prehuman hominids, and yes, they were far more accomplished in using the things of their world and time than we once thought. There is intriguing evidence that their social structures -- including governance patterns -- were much more wide-ranging than we once believed.
In my reading, I have found others arguing for the virtues and freedom that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle offered and who questioned whether the "advance" of agriculture that we have so long thought heralded the "dawn of civilization" occurred quite the way we once thought.
But their suggestions that human beings may be more peaceful and cooperatively inclined than current evidence suggestions were very hard for me to swallow. Did our "nature" change suddenly from the times of pre-recorded history (most of our past) so that it is only in recorded history that we have kings, hierarchical structures, wealth inequities, and near-constant warfare? Were not the "seeds" of such behavior "planted" in our very nature from the beginning?
For those with the time and patience to wade through this inflated volume, there are, indeed, many interesting and wonderful things to discover and ponder.
But I believe the same could have been achieved in a volume of half the size, with brisker and more succinct language.
Color me highly disappointed! (less)
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Derek Shouba
Dec 31, 2021Derek Shouba rated it really liked it
I felt that the authors were overly ambitious and often strained to sustain their thesis that human history is completely open-ended, promiscuous, and unpredictable. I never thought I’d say this, but the book actually made me realize Hegel’s teleology has something going for it.
The authors’ broad archeological expertise is impressive and their writing is playfully exhilarating. The book is also filled with fascinating thought experiments and fascinating archeological and anthropological case studies from around the world. The authors have surely exposed many naked emperors. However, I suspect that their own nakedness will be revealed in short order.
I did love the attention they gave to Rousseau and Hobbes and other thinkers but I think philosophers weren’t really that serious about analyzing an historical or anthropological state of nature. Rather, I would argue that they they were conducting logic thought experiments. At any rate, the book is very provocative, gave me a lot to think about, and I will be happy if I have the chance to read it again. (less)
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Frank
Nov 19, 2021Frank rated it it was ok
I couldn't finish this. It's super long and reads like a personal takedown of previous writers and scientists. I whish they had just focussed on the story they wanted to tell, on their own research and science, which is impressive in itself. (less)
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Randall Wallace
Dec 13, 2021Randall Wallace rated it it was amazing
This book is a refreshing gentle mélange of Rousseau and Hobbes – it’s a breath mint, it’s a candy mint – its two – two philosophies in one. Graeber shows you both sides of the fence on the “early man: was he more or less violent?” debate. Both Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels” and “Enlightenment Now” books (and “War before Civilization” and “Ultra Society”) are extreme Hobbesian. The problem is that some tribal groups are very Rousseau (Hadza, Pygmies, Kung) while others, like the Yanomami, are very Hobbesian (truth be told, the Yanomami aren’t particularly that violent). And so, if you cherry pick, you can prove either side’s thesis. Archaeological truth is, in some sites, they found skeletons who received wanton violence, while in other sites, were found skeletons (like the 10,000 year-old Romito 2 from Calabria) that show extreme caring.
The Right has long favored Hobbes, while Left has long favored the Rousseau position. Lefty Ben Franklin wrote how more Indian kids leave whites to go back home, than whites leave Indian adopted families to return to whites. The Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia told the French, we are richer than you, we have ease, comfort and time while you are engaged in fighting, envy and slander, being covetous liars neither generous nor kind. The Wendat (Huron in Quebec) also thought the French were not generous and kind. These natives clearly saw Europeans, not themselves, through a Hobbesian prism. Wendat statemen knew freedom and couldn’t make anyone do anything if they wanted to. The Montagnais-Naskapi thought the French were like slaves, living in fear of their superiors. When a crime was committed, the native clan of the offender paid compensation, not the offender. It became the clan’s responsibility then to keep members under control. Because of this Father Lallemant referred to natives as a free people. The Jesuits, who interacted with natives, “were the intellectuals of the Catholic world.” Their written findings on the morals of natives would lead to the Enlightenment. Suddenly, New World “savages” were teaching them how to make things better back at home. Natives couldn’t understand the benefit of having more than those around you, let alone being respected for just your wealth. Natives understood Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid” before he wrote it. Why bow and scape before someone just because he thinks he’s fancy? As Kandiaronk asked, if you have money, why not feed someone who is hungry? He also asked, if you have a sword, why not use it to stop a poor person from being impressed into military service? Montesquieu, Diderot, and Voltaire freely borrowed from Kandiaronk and other natives, when writing. Why turn wealth into power over other human beings? As Rousseau wrote, “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.” Back when the Enlightenment and American Revolution happened there was still no Left and Right in politics. Pre-Revolutionary travelers’ accounts were much more complicated, viewing natives in a “much more ambivalent way in regard to virtues and vices”.
Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss thought that “early humans were our intellectual equals.” The term prehistory arrives in 1858 (Brixham Cave discoveries) but the shortcoming of the term became quickly obvious; prehistory covers a rather large span of some 3 million years. Some of its treasures are exceptional: the Sunghir beads (grave goods) alone took 10,000 hours of work). Ice Age burials don’t show the trappings of power you see in the Bronze Age. Primitive societies, with their rejection of coercion, tolerated personal eccentricity. Every society has non-conformists. What matters is how societies respond to them. They might be made fun of, but they wouldn’t be punished by natives. The Nuer hated anything that smacked of government. David writes that some prophets “sat with tethering pegs up their asses”; it would be great to see Joel Osteen do a sermon like that today. That could increase viewership.
The Hobbesian crowd often ignores that many early native groups that used two systems annually: hunting and gathering part of the year and farming another part. The Hobbesian see these as two different stages of development, and don’t report on the many societies which repeatedly went back and forth between one and another technique annually. Such seasonal dualism (the Osage even moved between three seasonal locations) cannot be ignored because it means that societies were annually and successfully moving back and forth reestablishing hierarchies then dismantling them. You can still see lingering seasonal dualism in the US: most of the year is spent in an Ayn Rand wet dream making money while ignoring those less fortunate, then in December, morals are unwrapped with the stored ornaments, for a time when thinking of someone other than your all-white social milieu is not made fun of, but actually (although briefly) encouraged.
Some early groups, like Aboriginal Australians, moved over a range of thousands of miles. In the 1880’s workers fought the police over the 8-hour day, yet during the Middle Ages, serfs worked fewer hours daily under their lords. Victorians were prone to say that dark world of Dickens was an improvement over pre-state life. Then along comes Marshall Sahlins in 1968 with his “The Original Affluent Society” essay which plunged a Rousseau arrow into the wildly beating Hobbesian chest.
Poverty Point in Louisiana dates to 1,600 BC. A million cubic meters of soil was displaced to create its amphitheater. Those who sat in it were not farmers, but were hunters, fisherman and foragers. I wonder historically who set up the first concession stand. Poverty Point is “a Stone Age site in an area where there is no stone.” This was early public architecture, which you find elsewhere on the planet. The hunter-gatherer Gobekli Tepe site in Turkey dwarfs the Poverty Point complex. These sites just by existing clearly questions the idea that before agriculture there was no civilization. By the 1600’s, you have people returning to Europe from America saying the natives have it better in many ways. Native dispossession came from: if they aren’t working the land, we will (Locke’s disciples say w/o one’s labor no property rights – “lazy natives” theory), and if they are “children of nature” then guess what? They are not mature enough to… yadda yadda. White conceit led the invaders to see the native landscape as untouched whereas the trained eye would have seen untold “years of controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, fertilizing and pruning, terracing estuarine plots to extend the habitat of certain wild flora, building clam gardens, creating weirs to catch salmon, bass and sturgeon, and so on.”
On the Hobbesian side, the Calusa (Florida) would kill a quota of Calusa subjects when its ruler died. Moral: If someone wants you to join the Calusa, say no. But the Calusa never planted a seed or tethered an animal. That’s pretty much the definition of a foraging group. Modern foraging is very hard; it first requires land no one else wants to be in like the Kalahari, or the Arctic, or parts of New Jersey. The Calusa lived in coastal Florida and were among the first groups destroyed by Spanish invaders when they landed in the 1500’s to claim the land for Shakira. The Natchez had a monarch named the Natchez Sun who seems to have unlimited power and there was a lot of arbitrary executions but not many miles away, his representatives would be literally laughed at. Clearly some of these pre-state societies could have supported royal courts or armies, yet there is no evidence that they did so.
So, before the dawn of agriculture, there were architects, villages and towns, and great structures requiring serious computational skill. “Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal.” Explain this one: historically, Inuit wouldn’t adopt Athabascan snowshoes and Athabascans wouldn’t adopt Inuit kayaks. The West Coast of the US may well have once had the longest contiguous chain of foraging societies (fish, game, or nuts and acorns) in the world. This highly efficient lifestyle was killed off by fur trading and the Gold Rush. Californians refused to do slavery but, above the Klamath River natives were warriors who raided other groups and who kept slaves. How did this happen? How did the boundary emerge? “Throughout this entire region, a 1,500-mile strip of land from Cape Mendocino to the Copper River Delta, intergroup raiding for slaves was endemic, and had been for as long as anyone could recall.” Think of groups of no more than 100 to 200 people. “Full-fledged chattel slavery was quite unusual in other parts of aboriginal North America”. The amount of slavery in the Pacific Northwest was similar to that of Athens or Rome. One Brazilian anthropologist calls these groups “capturing societies”. The word “friend” comes from the word “free”, as slaves can’t have friends. Travelers reported from this era, “Salmon runs so massive you could not see the water for the fish.” You stopped getting good nut/acorn gathering on the West Coast further north where conifers took over. Nuts/acorns are back loaded: after harvesting, you can take your time processing them. Fishing is front-loaded, you can’t take your time, processing or eating. If you are a raider from afar, you want fish to feed your men, and don’t want no stinking acorns that takes forever to do stuff with. Natives didn’t need to protect their cache of acorns. Northwest Coast societies were partly warlike because they had no war-proof foods like acorns. And transport costs were huge so you didn’t raid other people simply for food and then have to trek it home along with the food you will consume on the trip. Some of that Northwest slavery comes not from needing labor but needing “controllable labor at key times of the year”. Yuroks demanded after raids that the raiders pay compensation for anyone killed. This helped curb raids.
Slave raiding was done to save the aggressor the years of feeding and raising their own slaves. Organized violence to feed off of other populations. It’s easier to do the slavery thing when your slaves clearly don’t look or act like they come from your group. This also happened in Northwest Amazonia and the Paraguay River basin and with the Calusa. Amazonian slaves, having experienced social death would be treated like pets. There they would actually be killed at “collective feasts”, and sometimes served, if not as the main course, then perhaps as an amuse bouche. “Darling, you simply must have some Eduardo”.
The move to agriculture didn’t happen overnight, it took three thousand years. Calling it the Agricultural Revolution is wrong; no revolution was ongoing for 3,000 years. Early cultivators spent the least amount of time possible growing stuff and also fished, foraged and traded. In China, millet farming stayed small scale for 3,000 years. In the Fertile Crescent, stratification and violence arose upland clearly away from the agricultural zones. And so, we see that just planting seeds or raising livestock doesn’t make inequality. Communal land tenure (Russia, Bali, Scotland, the Balkans, Palestine) was common and widespread around the globe. It’s hard to find many linear trajectories from food production to state formation. In contrast, there are twenty archaeological sites found so far that disprove the linear trajectory to state theory. Some places like California simply rejected agriculture, as they had already rejected slavery. If humans had been around for 200,000 years prior, why didn’t agriculture take off sooner?
During the warm Eemian interglacial period, Hippos could be found on the banks of the Thames and Rhine Rivers. The Holocene had been a clean start for humans and look what they did with it. By 8,000 BC, two-thirds of the planet’s megafauna had been wiped out. Things did not turn out well for Europe’s first farmers; they had a regional collapse between 5000 and 4500 BC. Part of the problem was soil depletion and lack of mutual aid. It would take another thousand years for cereal farming in Europe to take off again. Farming usually began when you had no other options. It didn’t really take off as a “thang” until livestock was added to the mix. By 2000 BC agriculture was supporting large cities from China to the Mediterranean.
95% of our evolution was spent hanging around in groups of under a dozen people. City dwellers today strangely echo that in the way they can spend weeks never venturing further than a few blocks. Not all cities in early history are alike. Some cities had no administrators or rulers. Some operated for centuries without temples and palaces. Family isn’t always a binding force; toxicity in families happened throughout history, even with hunter-gatherers. In Peru, archaeologists have found sunken plazas and platforms 4,000 years older than the Inca (the Caral civilization). There is a long history of early copper extraction from the Balkans, with almost no history there of battling over stock and supplies. Graeber sees “proof (like Basques villages) that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.” Uruk is “the first city for which we have extensive records.” Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan is the most “completely preserved city of the Bronze world.” Don’t accept the evolutionary narrative that all cities lead to authoritarian rule as it was “surprisingly common” for them to not be so. Chinese political history begins with the Shang in 1200 BC. The Inca empire extended 2,500 miles long.
“Teotihuacan had, at its height of power, found a way to govern without overlords” (as did “prehistoric Ukraine, Uruk-period Mesopotamia, and Bronze Aged Pakistan”). In Teotihuacan’s early years it was clearly authoritarian and then by 300 AD had changed course for “collective governance”. During its dark years, there were human sacrifices, even infant sacrifices but then Teotihuacan stopped for some unknown reason (not by foreign invasion) and became “self-consciously egalitarian” with public projects and urban renewal. After “the change”, you had “100,000 or so residents living in palatial or at least very comfortable surroundings.” This was a standard of living better than in any city today. And it produced trippy Teotihuacan mural art on Google Search that still inspires today. The Spanish arrive and write home that the native government is like Venice, Genoa, and Pisa with no “supreme overlord”. The natives meanwhile debated amongst themselves about the Spanish and recorded it: here’s Xicotencatl’s voice, “There are barely enough chickens, rabbits or corn fields in the entire land to feed their bottomless appetites. Why would we who live without servitude, and never acknowledged a king – spill our blood, only to make ourselves slaves?” Teotihuacan political debates sure seem more eloquent than today’s political yawn fests. Was Tlaxcala a pre-Columbian political democracy? Tlaxcala can be traced back to what was learned through experiments in social welfare 1,000 years prior at Teotihuacan. In contrast, the Aztecs were a “capturing society” on a grand scale, (unlike the group Aztec Camera whose tedious groove captured no one). Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor was the scene of the nasty Aztec sacrifices: picture “thousands of prisoners, waiting in line (well before Takacheck machines) to have their hearts ripped out by masked god-impersonators.” The original Henry Ford assembly line.
There were cities that were not part of states; look at Basque villages. “Cretan palaces were unfortified, and Minoan art makes almost no reference to war, dwelling instead on scenes of play and attention to creature comforts.” The opposite of what was happening in mainland Greece. Minoan Crete suggests “female political rule”. Mongolian adage: “One can conquer a kingdom on horseback, to rule it one must dismount.” Thai adage: “Man going backward through airport turnstile, is going to Bangkok.” The history of pre-Columbian North America shows that it is not pre-ordained that cereal agriculture is “a trap” leading to “bureaucratically administered violence”. There are exceptions.
You can’t say that once state formation happens “there’s no turning back”. Look at Cahokia, which had “overweening lords and priests” yet reorganized itself into a free republic. The North American indigenous not only escaped the “agriculture leads to a state or empire” trap, but also had a deep influence on Enlightenment thinkers. French Enlightenment thinkers who influenced our Founding Fathers were strongly influenced by the “indigenous doctrines of Liberty, mutual aid, and political equality.” “For the Haudenosaunee, the giving of orders is represented as being almost as serious an outrage as the eating of human flesh.” “Any member of an Iroquoian society given an order would have fiercely resisted it as a threat to their personal autonomy” – unless maybe the order happened in someone’s dream (dreams were treated as if they were commands). If Western Civilization was “all that and a bag of chips”, then why did it, so often, have to be spread at gunpoint? Explain this one: Mesoamericans made toys for kids that had wheels, axles, and spokes yet they never created wheeled transport. The Greeks invented their own steam engine way before England but only used it to open doors as if by magic. Famed anthropologists Pierre Clastres and Christopher Boehm “conclude that for 95 per cent of our species’ history those same humans recoiled in horror from all social worlds but one: the small society of equals.” Believers of the book “War Before Civilization” will be interested to learn that before civilization, “there’s no actual reason to assume that war has actually existed.”
Here you learn that for 5,000 years “cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies, or debt peonage.” And then it did. And Slavery was abolished many times in history, and possibly war as well. I am a huge fan of James C. Scott (Graeber was too) and this book fits hand in glove with his many books on the world beyond the state. Fans of Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen will find much in this amazing book that resonates with them by showing the clear dangers of past Hobbesian cherry-picking. This densely footnoted 600-page book shows how all those comically depressing Hobbesian theories (pedaled recently in books by Peter Turchin, Lawrence H. Keeley, Richard Heinberg, and Steven Pinker) are built on cherry-picked archaeological evidence to promote an agenda, and not the clearly more complex reality. (less)
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Andy Jones
Oct 03, 2021Andy Jones rated it really liked it
Graeber and Wengrow discuss how latest research and new evidence supports a reinterpretation of how human societies evolved and interacted. Challenging the 'selfish humanity' that was first propounded by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th Century, the authors also reject Jean Jacques Rousseau's thinking around an idealised 'social contract' , and propose a third alternative based on their research into the interactions between various Native American cultures and the European explorers/invaders.
When faced with a tome that runs to over 700 pages, of which Notes and Bibliography comprise about 30%, even without an index, it's clear that this is a publication targeted at an academic audience; both the style and content make it fairly inaccessible to the lay reader, which is disappointing because contained within are some fascinating insights that extend our understanding of how civilisation has impacted human society and personal development that should be relevant to contemporary discourse around freedom of the individual and the responsibilities of good governments.
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donna backshall
Jan 06, 2022donna backshall rated it it was ok
Shelves: 200-in-2022, aborted-efforts, reviewed-goodreads, reviewed-netgalley, terrible-recommendation, oh-the-disappointment, on-netgalley-shelf, too-dense-to-finish, least-favorite-narration
Oh boy. I tried, I really did. NetGalley, thank you for giving me a chance to listen to this audiobook, but I must confess: I couldn't do it.
The narrator was so monotone and dry, I had to bail. I felt like I was in that one required course, only taught by that one stodgy professor, that I'd put off until senior year because everyone warned me it was a snooze.
I kept thinking, "how do I make it through 24 hours of this?" Then I remembered I didn't need the credit, I'd already graduated, so I could walk away. *whew*
Don't judge me, but I gave up. I hate giving up, but every once in a while, there's a book that has me thinking, "I can be a quitter." In bright shiny 2022, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is that book. (less)
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Inderjit Sanghera
Dec 24, 2021Inderjit Sanghera rated it really liked it
Graeber and Wengrow brilliantly dissect the (often Euro-centric) myths which have perpetuated around human and cultural development. Instead of perpetuating the myth the the slow march to Western democracy was the inevitable culmination of agricultural and cultural progress, they dissect the idea that human progress follows a straight path towards ‘enlightenment’. For Graeber and Wengrow, the idea Progress itself is a loaded word and a simplistic way of describing the development of civilisations and cultures. Societies react not just to the past, but to their environment and, most importantly, the cultures which exist around them and concepts such as inequality often predated agriculture and the creation of property, just as war and violence predated the formation of the state.
Graeber and Wengrow also explore how complex social structures and bureaucracies aren’t solely contingent on the creation of the state, how what we would term ‘inventions’ are really the product of many minds and years as opposed to the sudden realisation of a single person and how monarchies and government were just as likely to be a product of totemic and playful cultural traditions and norms. ‘The Dawn of Everything’ is a brilliant and insightful exploration of human society, culture and civilisations.
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Devina Heriyanto
Nov 21, 2021Devina Heriyanto rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
The Dawn of Everything, posthumously published after David Graeber's passing in September 2020, is an ambitious project. At its heart, the book asks us to unlearn what we think we know about how civilizations came to be (including what the word even means) and to imagine systems or structures of society that can be organized with what we learn through archaeological and anthropological findings in recent decades.
Graeber and his co-author David Wengrow began the book by tracing the history of our knowledge of the past, in which we think of pre-history as linear progress: humans started as hunter-gatherers, before discovering agriculture and settling down into small villages and towns, then forming hierarchy as society became bigger and finally, there was kingdoms, empires, and states. As a result of this understanding, there is this conception that we have reached the highest level of human civilization, meaning that everyone else who's still living in traditional or indigenous societies is backward and simple-minded. This in turn leads to our failure in imagining that our ancestors have the intellectual ability and complexity while living as a hunter-gatherer or as an early farmer.
The Dawn of Everything has a lot to unpack, and the book does it meticulously by elaborating on where our misconception of the past came from and the findings or theories that can debunk or challenge the status quo. While others are pondering on the origin of inequalities, the authors question how we get stuck in such an unequal society, arguing that even in small empires with kings and hierarchy, society can still uphold egalitarian principles so long as everyone has liberty and freedom. The latter, in the book, is defined with three aspects: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to shape or transform society.
In this sense, what The Dawn of Everything aims to tell us boils down to one point: that we are stuck in our current way of living because we are losing our freedom gradually. In our globalized world, only a few percent of the society is able to move around due to regulations and financial restrictions. The freedom to disobey is such a rare thing that civil disobedience has become a radical act. The last, the freedom to shape or transform society, is largely eradicated since the 20th century, with some people even arguing that we have reached the end of history.
Reading this reminds me why one reads at all: to understand something that is beyond our own self, to acknowledge our own limited knowledge and bias, and to discover new possibilities of the past and the future. Imagination is a kind of freedom that we all need to seize back. (less)
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