Commissar SFLUFAN Posted October 22, 2021 Share Posted October 22, 2021 This article caught my attention as I've recently become incredibly interested in the pre-history of humanity through Patrick Wyamn's podcast. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to request the book on which this article is based for a Christmas present. Review: ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’ - The Atlantic WWW.THEATLANTIC.COM A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change. Quote And what a gift it is, no less ambitious a project than its subtitle claims. The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men. Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us). It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong. Drawing on a wealth of recent archaeological discoveries that span the globe, as well as deep reading in often neglected historical sources (their bibliography runs to 63 pages), the two dismantle not only every element of the received account but also the assumptions that it rests on. Yes, we’ve had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the next—all this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them. 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fizzzzle Posted October 22, 2021 Share Posted October 22, 2021 I'm really interested in this. I think "1491" was the first book that got me really interested in misconceptions we might have about prerecorded history. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
b_m_b_m_b_m Posted October 22, 2021 Share Posted October 22, 2021 31 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said: More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them. 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. This thought is so foreign to some people, especially here in the US. And because this idea is not embraced it feeds a lot of doomerism! There seems to be an underlying thought that we have reached the "end of history" even while mocking Fukuyama for his book that shares that name. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unogueen Posted October 24, 2021 Share Posted October 24, 2021 There's the truth that every generation thinks they invented everything. Everyday people tend to be myopic of historical intersection with the state of the present. The West is particularly susceptible since the reason for much of it's plenty is given no real introspection, often gliding from hot talking point to the next. If corona has changed the world at all, I hope it's for people to realize that nothing is immutable, and the race of evolution is hardly over. And as such everything is on the table. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Remarkableriots Posted October 24, 2021 Share Posted October 24, 2021 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Commissar SFLUFAN Posted November 9, 2021 Author Share Posted November 9, 2021 The book hit stores today so there have been more reviews for your consideration: Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out | The New Yorker WWW.NEWYORKER.COM A contrarian account of our prehistory argues that cities once flourished without rulers and rules—and still could. Quote About a decade ago, the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, who died suddenly last year, at the age of fifty-nine, and the archeologist David Wengrow began to consider, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, how they might contribute to the burgeoning literature on inequality. Not inequality of income or wealth but inequality of power: why so many people obey the orders of so few. The two scholars came to see, however, that to inquire after the “origins” of inequality was to defer to one of two myths—roughly, Hobbes’s or Rousseau’s—based on a deeply ingrained and deeply misleading fantasy of the human career. The product of their extended collaboration, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is a profuse and antic account of how we came to take that old narrative for granted and why we might be better off if we let it go. David Graeber’s Possible Worlds NYMAG.COM The author of Debt and The Dawn of Everything left behind countless admirers and an abiding belief that society could be changed for the better. Quote Graeber also left behind the staggeringly large project he finished three weeks before he died: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Written in collaboration with the archaeologist David Wengrow, the book draws on new research to challenge received wisdom on civilization’s course. The story of humanity, as it is typically told, proceeds along a linear path. It passes in distinct stages from foraging bands and tribes on to agriculture, cities, and kings. But, surveying the historic and archaeological record, Graeber and Wengrow saw a wealth of other stories, taking humanity on varied and unpredictable routes. There were societies that farmed without really committing to it, for example. There were societies whose authority figures’ power applied only during certain parts of the year. Cities coalesced without any apparent centralized government; brutal hierarchies took shape among people who later reversed their course. The book’s 704 pages teem with possibilities. They are a testament, in the authors’ view, to human agency and invention — a capacity for conscious political decision-making that conventional history ignores. “We are projects of collective self-creation,” write Graeber and Wengrow. “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?” Opinion | What Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari Get Wrong About History - The New York Times WWW.NYTIMES.COM New research on humanity's deep past holds lessons for the future. Quote Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but we have next to no idea what was happening for the majority of that time. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 B.C. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during that period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were. This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly — the reasons for war, greed, exploitation and indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong? ‘The Dawn of Everything’ rewrites 40,000 years of human history | Science News WWW.SCIENCENEWS.ORG A new book recasts human social evolution as multiple experiments with freedom and domination that started in the Stone Age. Quote Concerns abound about what’s gone wrong in modern societies. Many scholars explain growing gaps between the haves and the have-nots as partly a by-product of living in dense, urban populations. The bigger the crowd, from this perspective, the more we need power brokers to run the show. Societies have scaled up for thousands of years, which has magnified the distance between the wealthy and those left wanting. In The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow challenge the assumption that bigger societies inevitably produce a range of inequalities. Using examples from past societies, the pair also rejects the popular idea that social evolution occurred in stages. 'The Dawn of Everything' Aims to Rewrite the Story of our Shared Past - The New York Times WWW.NYTIMES.COM In “The Dawn of Everything,” the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow aim to rewrite the story of our shared past — and future. The Radical Promise of Human History BOSTONREVIEW.NET A sweeping new history of humanity invites us to imagine how our own societies could be radically different. Quote As they state in the introduction, Graeber and Wengrow didn’t originally set out to write a total history of humanity. The original question, which they first entertained in a 2018 piece published in Eurozine, was: “What are the origins of social inequality?” And yet, as they rapidly found, this frame seemed to unnecessarily limit the field of inquiry, leading to intellectual contortions like attempting to calculate Gini coefficients for Paleolithic settlements and letting Jean-Jacques Rousseau dictate the terms of intellectual engagement. Graeber and Wengrow instead ended up with two linked projects, which come together in this book. The first is to show that the Standard Narrative was the product of a conservative response to an Indigenous critique of European society and political inequality in the eighteenth century. The second is to consider the evidence for what Paleolithic humans and their descendants across the millennia have actually been doing, regardless of how well or poorly that evidence fits the terms the Standard Narrative has led us to expect. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow review – inequality is not the price of civilisation | History books | The Guardian WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM An archaeologist and an anthropologist dismantle received wisdom about the way early societies operated Quote History matters. As we debate statues and slavery and dispute the role of empire, we have become accustomed to constant sparring over the past. But there is one branch of history that has, so far, remained above the fray: the story of our very early past, the “dawn” of humanity. For the anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, this consensus is a problem. As they argue in this iconoclastic and irreverent book, much of what we think we know of this distant era is actually a myth – indeed it is our origin myth, a modern equivalent of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. At its core is a story of the rise of civilisation and, with it, the rise of the state. Like all origin myths, this narrative has enormous power, and its reach and resilience are preventing us from thinking clearly about our present crises. This myth, they argue, can be found on the shelves of every high-street and airport bookshop, in super-sellers such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday and Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. All of these books share a common assumption: as societies become larger, more complex, wealthy and “civilised”, they inevitably become less equal. Early humans, it is said, lived like the foragers of the Kalahari, in small, mobile bands that were casually egalitarian and democratic. But this primitive idyll or Hobbesian hell (views differ) disappeared with settlement and farming, which required the management of labour and land. The emergence of early cities, and ultimately states, demanded even steeper hierarchies, and with them the whole civilisational package – leaders, administrators, the division of labour and social classes. The lesson, then, is clear: human equality and freedom have to be traded for progress. Were the Earliest Societies Anarchists? NEWREPUBLIC.COM David Graeber and David Wengrow’s "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" looks for the origins of authoritarianism and freedom. Quote Anarchism is the black sheep of political theories. A glance at its main tenets will explain why: the absence of a state or of representative government; politics as face-to-face relations within small groups; decisions by consensus; no authority; no leadership; no coercion, even of the obstreperous; and a deep suspicion of expertise as somehow subversive of equality. (Worst of all, perhaps: drum circles.) Most Americans find these ideas bewildering. Most senior academics, secret authoritarians that they are, find them abhorrent, even ghoulish, especially as applied to their own department. Which is why the anarchist writer David Graeber, who died last year, was the black sheep of academic anthropology. As a popular and prolific assistant professor at Yale, he was thought to be a sure bet for tenure. But the department turned him down, with almost no explanation. It was universally assumed that Graeber’s anarchist principles, activist politics—especially his support for Yale graduate students trying to organize a union—and cheeky personality cost him the prize. (No doubt the department shuddered with relief at its near escape when he later became a leading interpreter and spokesman for Occupy Wall Street.) Offers from other departments trickled in—he ended up at the London School of Economics—and the huge success of his Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) must also have assuaged the bitterness. But the lesson had been delivered: Outspokenness was not costless. Outspokenness, however, was instinctive with Graeber, as was his extraordinary generosity to students and younger colleagues, who responded with extraordinary affection, even love. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s Anarchist History of Humanity | The Nation WWW.THENATION.COM In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow offer a sweeping and ambitious exploration of life without the state. Quote Another way to show that, Graeber believed, was for anthropologists to document societies that have gotten by without structures of domination. And so, for more than a decade, he worked with the archaeologist David Wengrow on another book, focused on early non-state societies. What began as “a diversion” for the authors became an epic, the 700-page first installment of a tetralogy that would “easily outsell The Lord of the Rings,” Graeber playfully predicted. Wider in scope than even Debt: The First 5,000 Years, the projected series was to be a grand retelling of the history of our species. But it was a story that Graeber would never fully tell. On August 6, 2020, at 9:18 pm, he declared the first volume finished. Less than a month later, on September 2, he died suddenly of necrotic pancreatitis in Venice. Wengrow carried the book to publication, just in time for Occupy Wall Street’s 10th anniversary. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a work of dizzying ambition, one that seeks to rescue stateless societies from the condescension with which they’re usually treated. Yet it succeeds better in uprooting conventional wisdom than in laying down a narrative of its own. The result is a book that is both thrilling and exasperating, showcasing the promise and the perils of the anarchist approach to history. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow review – have we got our ancestors wrong? | History books | The Guardian WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM This imaginative attempt to reconfigure humanity’s roots contends that early people were free to shape their own lives Quote Since the Enlightenment, there have been two conflicting visions of humanity stripped of its civilised trappings. On the one hand, there is Hobbes’s notion of us as predisposed to violence – waging war against each other in a “nasty, brutish and short” existence. On the other, Rousseau’s idyll of prelapsarian innocence, in which humanity led a life of Edenic bliss before being destroyed by the corruptions of society. Both these understandings of humanity’s roots are manifestly wrong, contend the late anthropologist David Graeber and his co-author, the archaeologist David Wengrow in their new and richly provocative book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. As the title suggests, this is a boldly ambitious work that seems intent to attack received wisdoms and myths on almost every one of its nearly 700 absorbing pages. David Graeber Knew Ordinary People Could Remake the World JACOBINMAG.COM A new book by David Wengrow and the late David Graeber is a brilliant rejection of the fatalistic myths of human history — and a defense of our power to shape our own world. Quote These are two variants of the same myth because they both assume 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 David Graeber and David 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. The Dawn of Everything rewrites history so we can reimagine the future – Bella Caledonia BELLACALEDONIA.ORG.UK The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (allenlane) by David Graeber and David Wengrow launches at the LSE this Wednesday. The myth that there is no political alternative has been with us… Quote The myth that there is no political alternative has been with us since European colonisation. Structural racism is built on white Europeans defining themselves as the apex of human progress, furthest away from everyone else on an evolutionary ladder, as we have risen the highest via agriculture, property, cities, nation states and the industrial revolution. The message says: if you want writing, music, art and the like, suck up all the exploitation. The Dawn of Everything untangles this myth – and many more – from reality. Published 18 October and written by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, it releases our collective ancestors from caricatures. Essentially, it undermines the cornerstones of ongoing oppression of the majority of people; whilst freeing us all to imagine different political futures. The book explores the fluidity of social systems – some dominated by a few, others co-created by the multitude. But there is no concrete law of history determining what happened, nor what will happen. Today, if you say that the world could be more just, you will often be told to grow up: a complex yet just society cannot exist as it hasn’t existed, goes the almost reflex-like supposed common sense. The Dawn of Everything shatters this dogma, with examples spanning thirty millennia. How fear makes us human - New Statesman WWW.NEWSTATESMAN.COM The late David Graeber’s history of early human societies presents civilisation as a descent from anarchy into servility. But was man ever free? Quote How did we get stuck? According to the late David Graeber and his co-author David Wengrow, this is the most important question that can be asked about human history. For “the vast majority of human social experience”, we enjoyed “three primordial freedoms”: “the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships”. Early human societies were not without what we today would describe as inequalities, but they lacked the structures of domination that go with hierarchical government. Humankind lived in a peaceful anarchy. Then something went “terribly wrong”: It’s clear that something about human societies has really changed here, and quite profoundly. The three basic freedoms have gradually receded, to the point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehend what it would be like to live in a social order based on them. How did it happen? How did we get stuck? And just how stuck are we really? Our ancient ancestors may have been more civilized than we are WWW.MACLEANS.CA A new book offers a version of history in which we lived for thousands of years in large and complex societies without kings or cops Quote We like to think of ourselves as living in scientific times, but what if the familiar story of “civilization” is mostly myth? This is the question asked in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a new book by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. What began as the authors’ inquiry into the origins of the idea of inequality turned into something even more ambitious: an updated history in which we lived for thousands of years in large and complex societies without kings or cops. In this telling, our ideas about prehistory and the inevitable rise of things like “the state” are actually repetitive misunderstandings of thought experiments by Rousseau and Hobbes. Stories we tell ourselves about why we live in a world shaped by domination and violence—that large groups of people can’t live in egalitarian societies, for example, or that material surpluses inevitably produce inequality—were true for many people in the past 2,000 years or so, but there were also thousands of years when this was not the case. The idea that societies must “develop” according to rules of human behaviour was a response, say the authors, to a 17th-century encounter between European and Indigenous thought. Published dialogues with intellectuals like the Wendat leader Kondiaronk circulated in Europe and prefigured Enlightenment debates in form and style, but it was the Indigenous voices and not the European ones that argued for now familiar values like reason and freedom. The book claims that we’re still stuck with the European defence, which was to invent the idea of primitive societies to avoid facing Indigenous peoples as equals who had chosen a different path. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 I picked up the audio book, excited to give it a listen Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr.Vic20 Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 On 10/21/2021 at 9:46 PM, Commissar SFLUFAN said: This article caught my attention as I've recently become incredibly interested in the pre-history of humanity through Patrick Wyamn's podcast. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to request the book on which this article is based for a Christmas present. I would be honored to be the purchaser sir! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarkStar189 Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 Sounds very interesting. Just put in an order. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperSpreader Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 Y'all need Jesus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bloodporne Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 I feel too dumb for this thread but also thoroughly interested so I'll put that one on my book list. If I mentioned what I was currently really into reading about in here...and yes, it's astral projection. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unogueen Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 3 hours ago, SuperSpreader said: Y'all need Jesus Jesus basically said send the jesuits as pretext for conquest,No more jesus pls. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skillzdadirecta Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 48 minutes ago, unogueen said: Jesus basically said send the jesuits as pretext for conquest,No more jesus pls. He did? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unogueen Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 3 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said: He did? Who did then? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skillzdadirecta Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 3 minutes ago, unogueen said: Who did then? Huh? I'm asking you! Thought you knew something I didn't. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unogueen Posted November 10, 2021 Share Posted November 10, 2021 It's between politics and love. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Commissar SFLUFAN Posted November 19, 2021 Author Share Posted November 19, 2021 On 11/9/2021 at 12:00 PM, Mr.Vic20 said: I would be honored to be the purchaser sir! You know what? I'm gonna take you up on that offer! Thank you very much! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
b_m_b_m_b_m Posted November 19, 2021 Share Posted November 19, 2021 I've decided to get this on audiobook seeing as how I don't otherwise have any time to read really Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted November 19, 2021 Share Posted November 19, 2021 2 hours ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said: I've decided to get this on audiobook seeing as how I don't otherwise have any time to read really I finally started listening in the last couple of days and while I find the content intriguing, I also find the reader a bit difficult to listen to. And it is 24 hours long Definitely not the worst, but given how often I listen while driving I feel a tiny concern I may fall asleep. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
b_m_b_m_b_m Posted November 20, 2021 Share Posted November 20, 2021 16 minutes ago, sblfilms said: I finally started listening in the last couple of days and while I find the content intriguing, I also find the reader a bit difficult to listen to. And it is 24 hours long Definitely not the worst, but given how often I listen while driving I feel a tiny concern I may fall asleep. I've got a drive to Detroit next week for Thanksgiving so time isn't an issue. And now that I'm fully WFH and an hour ahead of the office in MN, I've been walking my dogs every morning for a solid 30 minutes and so it will finish before I know it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted November 20, 2021 Share Posted November 20, 2021 7 hours ago, sblfilms said: I finally started listening in the last couple of days and while I find the content intriguing, I also find the reader a bit difficult to listen to. And it is 24 hours long Definitely not the worst, but given how often I listen while driving I feel a tiny concern I may fall asleep. Update: not sure how, but Audible was set to playback at .7x Guy has a lot more pep at regular speed 😂 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
b_m_b_m_b_m Posted November 20, 2021 Share Posted November 20, 2021 11 hours ago, sblfilms said: Update: not sure how, but Audible was set to playback at .7x Guy has a lot more pep at regular speed 😂 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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