Name: Truman M Halladay's review of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber
Item: The Dawn of Everything
Rating: 4.5
Author: Truman M Halladay

David Graeber

David Wengrow

A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social 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? 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. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

A New History of Humanity

The Dawn of Everything

Bastien Vaucher

Both tobacco and the 'black drink' [coffe] had originally been drugs ingested by shamans or other spiritual virtuosos in intense and highly concentrated doses so as to produce altered states of consciousness; now, instead, they were doled out in carefully measured portions to everyone assembled. What Jesuits reported in the [American] Northeast seems to apply here too: They believe that there is nothing so suitable as Tobacco to appease the passions; that is why they never attend a council without pipe or calumet in their mouths. The smoke, they say, gives them intelligence, and enables them to see clearly through the most intricate matters.

With all the new development in A.I. and the inherent fears it generates, I couldn’t help connect it with plant domestication. How the relationship between two species can lead to genetic mutations that creates a dependance, maybe bi-directional between them.

In crops, domestication is what happens when plants under cultivation lose features that allow them to reproduce in the wild. Among the most important is the facility to disperse seed without human assistance. […]

In domestic varieties, these aids to survival are lost. A genetic mutation takes place, switching off the mechanism for spontaneous seed dispersal and turning wheat from a hardy survivor into a hopeless dependant. […]

Is it wheat, they (historians) reminded us, that has domesticated people, just as much as people ever domesticated wheat.

If private property has an 'origin', it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself. The pertinent question to ask is not so much when this happened, as how it eventually came to order so many other aspects of human affairs.

What to a settler‘a eye seemed savage, untouched wilderness usually turns out to be landscapes actively managed by indigenous populations for thousand of years through controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, fertilizing and pruning, terracing estuarine plots to extend the habitat of particular wild flora, building clam gardens in intertidal zones to enhance the reproduction of shellfish, creating weirs to catch salmon, bass and sturgeon, and so on. Such procedures were often labour intensive, and regulated by indigenous laws governing who could access groves, swamps, root beds, grasslands and fishing grounds, and who was entitled to exploit what species at any given time of year. In parts of Australia, these indigenous techniques of land management were such that, according to one recent study, we should stop speaking of ‘foraging' altogether, and refer instead to a different sort of farming.

Meanwhile, as we've seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them - all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states.

Stephen Schenkenberg

We modern-day humans tend to exaggerate our differences. The results of such exaggerations are often catastrophic.

Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, it is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ‘equality before the law.’ Which is ultimately equality before the sovereign — that is, once again? Equality in common subjugation. Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit. 

One of the reasons that missionary and travel literature became so popular in Europe was precisely because it exposed its readers to this kind of criticism, along with providing a sense of social possibility: the knowledge that familiar ways were not the only ways, since - as these books showed - there were clearly societies in existence that did things very differently. We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native Americar sources and examples. Because it was true. 

We could multiply examples, but assume that by now the reader gets the broader point we are making. When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invari- ably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky - In a word, far less human than what was likely going on.

One gets the sense that indigenous life was, to put it very crudely, just a lot more interesting than life in a 'Western' town or city, especially insofar as the latter involved long hours of monotonous, repetitive, conceptually empty activity. The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.

Peter Schoppert

Chris Aldrich

This novel refutes a huge chunk of accepted anthropological theories, and explores new theories backed by recent archeological discoveries. 

It’s not a breeze and very much like a textbook at times, but each chapter presents new and interesting concepts that just make sense. I think this book is super important for people to read if they have any interest in inequality, humanity, and politics (lowercase p). 

Truman M Halladay

This novel refutes a huge chunk of accepted anthropological theories, and explores new theories backed by recent archeological discoveries. 

And it’s stellar. 

It’s not a breeze and very much like a textbook at times, but each chapter presents new and interesting concepts that just make sense. I think this book is super important for people to read if they have any interest in inequality, humanity, and politics (lowercase p). 

A must read? Probably. Gives good insights about how civilisations were evolved and how they could further develop

Alican Sungur

Thomas Steur 

I would like to remove a star for how long this is, but the length is necessary to formulate the irrefutable argument it makes.

Keven Wang

Hard to read at times. Last couple of chapters are pretty good.

Felipe Saldarriaga 

WOW i have to confess this was not an easy book for me, because every chapter hits you really deep, breaking historical myths and recognizing that most of the assumptions of humanity are biased at different points of research lead us to redefine most of our own beliefs.

I have to mention the moments of "academic slaps" to other contribuitors with solid basis.

David Graeber returns to the everything in 2020 but all his legacy lives forever.

Sloan, Kara

So many interesting examples. Sometimes get lost in the story of the example and forget what point is being made, but the author buttresses each one with a reminder. Some might find that repetitive but I found it helpful and so interesting!

Caitlyn Baldwin

Graeber and Wengrow provide an anthropological look at the history of earlier human civilizations that really make you reconsider the typical assigned constraints of "civilization". I think that too often we analyze the rise and fall of peoples with such a narrow lens of perception and this work really made me consider some things in a new light. I also especially loved the section talking about native tribes indigenous to the Ohio river valley region.

Ferran

Benjamin

Brooke

Kincaid MacDonald

Doug Belshaw

Nathan Knowler

Heiki Riesenkampf

Maurice FitzGerald

Johannes Ecker

Drew Spartz

Phil James

Roel Vandenhoeck

Mounir Bashour

Kolle

Kevin Spachuk

Niklas Pivic

Not to throw shade on Literal, but: have you tried The Storygraph? Sensational OCR, in my opinion.

Chris Aldrich &
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber

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Chris Aldrich &The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber

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Chris Aldrich &
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber