The Dawn of Everything

Hardcover, 691 pages

English language

Published Oct. 17, 2021 by Signal.

ISBN:: 978-0-7710-4982-8

(2 reviews)

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 only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and 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 path-breaking 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% of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that …

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 only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and 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 path-breaking 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% 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? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"? 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.

2 editions

Jamin Bogi reviewed The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber

Beyond great.

5 stars

Dream quests. Empires without war. Women leadership. A city centered around hallucinogenic journeys filled with weird architecture. An enlightenment of democratic settlements blossoming from the ruins of a centralized, aggressive kingdom throughout the current USA. Being able to travel across all of North America and find allied clans who must help you, even though you don't share the same language. People groups taking up farming, and then discarding it. The potential origins of private property. Axes of ideas that lead to entrenched arbitrary power, and the multiplicative danger that comes when multiple axes are involved.

The authors do cherry-pick examples from history to support their thesis that people throughout history lived in a wide variety of political structures, and that history is not stuck in a set evolutionary channel, because, well, that's what actually happened. History is much more complicated than most people think, and this means that the present …

Dream quests. Empires without war. Women leadership. A city centered around hallucinogenic journeys filled with weird architecture. An enlightenment of democratic settlements blossoming from the ruins of a centralized, aggressive kingdom throughout the current USA. Being able to travel across all of North America and find allied clans who must help you, even though you don't share the same language. People groups taking up farming, and then discarding it. The potential origins of private property. Axes of ideas that lead to entrenched arbitrary power, and the multiplicative danger that comes when multiple axes are involved.

The authors do cherry-pick examples from history to support their thesis that people throughout history lived in a wide variety of political structures, and that history is not stuck in a set evolutionary channel, because, well, that's what actually happened. History is much more complicated than most people think, and this means that the present can be different as well.

I finished the book wanting so much more about how societies can break free from solidified power structures, but that's no criticism of the book. It also has made me much more interested in learning anarchist theory, on various forms of voluntary organization. And, and, I really want to know how an anarchic grouping of people could (could they?) resist a more centralized attacker.

Read this! Your mind will be cracked open, over and over.

pdotb@wyrms.de reviewed The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber

Didn't really work for me, I'm afraid...

4 stars

It feels odd giving anything but an enthusiastic review to a book co-authored by the late, great David Graeber, but I'm afraid this one didn't really work for me. In my (and perhaps the book's?) partial defence, the circumstances weren't ideal. I read it as an ebook (so hard to flip back to check on facts) and, what's more, as a library ebook (so with limited time to finish it). I also haven't really been firing on all cylinders over the break, so maybe that's part of the problem? Anyway, if you take all those mitigating factors away, what I think we're left with is a book that somewhat uncomfortably straddles an attempt to provide a comprehensive, but alternative, 'big history', with an attempt to advance a counter to the default assumption of a teleology of societal evolution, that holds that agriculture is inevitable (and so hunter-gatherers are really just …

It feels odd giving anything but an enthusiastic review to a book co-authored by the late, great David Graeber, but I'm afraid this one didn't really work for me. In my (and perhaps the book's?) partial defence, the circumstances weren't ideal. I read it as an ebook (so hard to flip back to check on facts) and, what's more, as a library ebook (so with limited time to finish it). I also haven't really been firing on all cylinders over the break, so maybe that's part of the problem? Anyway, if you take all those mitigating factors away, what I think we're left with is a book that somewhat uncomfortably straddles an attempt to provide a comprehensive, but alternative, 'big history', with an attempt to advance a counter to the default assumption of a teleology of societal evolution, that holds that agriculture is inevitable (and so hunter-gatherers are really just proto-farmers) together with an assumption that the surplus that agriculture provides will inevitably lead to administration, bureaucracy, and loss of freedom. If felt to me that the latter arguments were rather lost in the weight of historical/pre-historical detail, while the former big history was hard to follow as it jumped around trying to justify the argument. It's also, to be frank, a pretty long book, which seems to me to require either stamina (which I seem to be lacking at the moment) or a compelling narrative (which also seemed to be lacking). There was lots of good stuff offering an alternative to Eurocentric views on North American prehistory, and it would probably work pretty well as something to dip into for such insights, but for me, as a straight read-through, I'm afraid it didn't really work.