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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Dawn of Everything
by David Wengrow, David Graeber
The Dawn of Everything is a tour de force. Graeber and Wengrow aimed high, to redefine human history and our own understanding of our present and potential as a species, and they for the most part succeed.
Grand narratives of humanity follow one of two major themes. In one, we fell from an Edenic origin, Rousseau's noble savage or Christian myth to our current greedy corruption. In the other, we were violent brutes saved from Hobbes' war of all against all by gods, kings, and bureaucracy. Either way, the yoke of civilization is no more than what we deserve. Rousseau and Hobbes can be forgiven, because they were writing thought experiments at the dawn of modern political philosophy and had little actual evidence of our origins. The authors who cannot be so easily forgiven are their modern descendants, Jared Diamond (ecological geography), Yuval Harari (medieval history), and Steven Pinker (cognitive science), who present a grand narrative of humanity that is blinkered, boring, and wrong.
The essence of Graeber and Wengrow's work is to argue that a synthesis of research from anthropology and archeology shows that the modern world, defined by agriculture, industry, debt, domination, and war is not inevitable. Against the argument that cities and complex societies require hierarchies of control, Graeber and Wengrow show that simple chronology indicates that cities and agriculture arrived thousands of years before the chains of civilization, and that kings and debt slavery are late arrivals to people who made fundamental advances in domestication, pottery, metallurgy, and textiles.
The people of the Americas provide a second strand to this story. Graeber and Wengrow take period accounts of contact between the French and indigenous people of the northeast to show that the French regarded average the Huron or Iroquois as equal to one of their leading scholars in rhetoric and erudition, and by comparison Native Americans saw the French as little more than slaves. The peoples of the Americas had complex long-distance trade networks. Their political systems could be remade if they did not match their values. And in every aspect of quality of life, their lives seem better than their European contemporaries.
In a moment of discontent, possibly even one of breach, Graeber and Wengrow make a specific argument that rather than talking abstractly of equality and freedom, we need to think instead of the protection of three fundamental liberties: The freedom to move away from one's surroundings, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to shape entirely new social realities. The apparatus of social science, laid down by conservative men in the 19th century, has been one of limits. Instead, we need to think in terms of potential, and know that in the past and in other places, people had freedoms we can only dream of.
This book is a dazzling display of evidence that better worlds are possible, and a fascinating refutation of the standard lies we learned in school, which we trimmed to fit the colonialist ideologies of the past. I've complained about Graeber's sourcing in the past, but it looks fine to me, and my wife, who is an actual professor of archeology instead of some guy with an unrelated doctorate, will double check. For all its brilliance, there are some flaws. I think that the two Davids could have benefited from a more explicitly feminist approach to their topic, or at least another chapter with a feminist standpoint. The argument that the democratic and constitutional philosophies of the Enlightenment owe their origins to contact with Native Americans are plausible, but I would love a period scholar to really nail down the links, aside from the statements that everybody was reading period accounts of contact, and that Native ambassadors and Enlightenment philosophers were in the same city at the same time. Even so, these weaknesses point out fruitful areas for future work, and not major errors.
Read this book. You'll enjoy it, you'll learn something, and from a narrowly tactical sense, it takes the prior grand histories I mentioned above and stomps them in the dust.
Grand narratives of humanity follow one of two major themes. In one, we fell from an Edenic origin, Rousseau's noble savage or Christian myth to our current greedy corruption. In the other, we were violent brutes saved from Hobbes' war of all against all by gods, kings, and bureaucracy. Either way, the yoke of civilization is no more than what we deserve. Rousseau and Hobbes can be forgiven, because they were writing thought experiments at the dawn of modern political philosophy and had little actual evidence of our origins. The authors who cannot be so easily forgiven are their modern descendants, Jared Diamond (ecological geography), Yuval Harari (medieval history), and Steven Pinker (cognitive science), who present a grand narrative of humanity that is blinkered, boring, and wrong.
The essence of Graeber and Wengrow's work is to argue that a synthesis of research from anthropology and archeology shows that the modern world, defined by agriculture, industry, debt, domination, and war is not inevitable. Against the argument that cities and complex societies require hierarchies of control, Graeber and Wengrow show that simple chronology indicates that cities and agriculture arrived thousands of years before the chains of civilization, and that kings and debt slavery are late arrivals to people who made fundamental advances in domestication, pottery, metallurgy, and textiles.
The people of the Americas provide a second strand to this story. Graeber and Wengrow take period accounts of contact between the French and indigenous people of the northeast to show that the French regarded average the Huron or Iroquois as equal to one of their leading scholars in rhetoric and erudition, and by comparison Native Americans saw the French as little more than slaves. The peoples of the Americas had complex long-distance trade networks. Their political systems could be remade if they did not match their values. And in every aspect of quality of life, their lives seem better than their European contemporaries.
In a moment of discontent, possibly even one of breach, Graeber and Wengrow make a specific argument that rather than talking abstractly of equality and freedom, we need to think instead of the protection of three fundamental liberties: The freedom to move away from one's surroundings, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to shape entirely new social realities. The apparatus of social science, laid down by conservative men in the 19th century, has been one of limits. Instead, we need to think in terms of potential, and know that in the past and in other places, people had freedoms we can only dream of.
This book is a dazzling display of evidence that better worlds are possible, and a fascinating refutation of the standard lies we learned in school, which we trimmed to fit the colonialist ideologies of the past. I've complained about Graeber's sourcing in the past, but it looks fine to me, and my wife, who is an actual professor of archeology instead of some guy with an unrelated doctorate, will double check. For all its brilliance, there are some flaws. I think that the two Davids could have benefited from a more explicitly feminist approach to their topic, or at least another chapter with a feminist standpoint. The argument that the democratic and constitutional philosophies of the Enlightenment owe their origins to contact with Native Americans are plausible, but I would love a period scholar to really nail down the links, aside from the statements that everybody was reading period accounts of contact, and that Native ambassadors and Enlightenment philosophers were in the same city at the same time. Even so, these weaknesses point out fruitful areas for future work, and not major errors.
Read this book. You'll enjoy it, you'll learn something, and from a narrowly tactical sense, it takes the prior grand histories I mentioned above and stomps them in the dust.