2021 TheDawnofEverythingANewHistoryo
- (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021) ⇒ David Graeber, and David Wengrow. (2021). “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN:9780374157357
Subject Headings: Human History, Anthropology, Early Human Society, Ancient Cities, Decentralized Politi.
Notes
Cited By
2022
- (Wikipedia, 2022) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything Retrieved:2022-1-22.
- The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. It was published in the United States on November 9, 2021, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Drawing attention to the diversity of early human societies, it critiques traditional narratives of history's linear development from primitivism to civilization. Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia. It relies on archaeological evidence to show that early societies were diverse and developed numerous political structures.
- The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. It was published in the United States on November 9, 2021, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
2021a
- https://theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/18/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity-by-david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-review-have-we-got-our-ancestors-wrong
- QUOTE: ... On the contrary, they maintain, prehistory was a time of diverse social experimentation, in which people lived in a variety of settings, from small travelling bands to large (perhaps seasonally occupied) cities and were wont to change their social identities depending on the time of year. ...
The histories they weave are fascinating, bringing to light extraordinary illustrative characters such as Kandiaronk, the brilliant Native American Huron-Wendat chief who confounded French Jesuits with his powerful debating skills. ...
... Still, the question the authors repeatedly ask, but never quite get round to answering is, how then did we become “stuck” in a system of hierarchies and conspicuous inequalities of power and consumption? Despite inferring and speculating at almost every turn, the two Davids become suddenly circumspect when confronting this central mystery that haunts their book. ...
- QUOTE: ... On the contrary, they maintain, prehistory was a time of diverse social experimentation, in which people lived in a variety of settings, from small travelling bands to large (perhaps seasonally occupied) cities and were wont to change their social identities depending on the time of year. ...
2021b
- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/arts/dawn-of-everything-graeber-wengrow.html
- QUOTE: ... Its immodest goal nothing less than upending everything we think we know about the origins and evolution of human societies. ...
... It aims to synthesize new archaeological discoveries of recent decades that haven’t made it out of specialist journals and into public consciousness. ...
... Recent archaeological discoveries, they write, show that early humans, far from being automatons blindly moving in evolutionary lock step in response to material pressures, self-consciously experimented with “a carnival parade of political forms.” It’s a more accurate story, they argue, but also “a more hopeful and more interesting” one. “We are all projects of collective self-creation,” they write. “What if, instead of telling the story about how our society 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?” ...
- QUOTE: ... Its immodest goal nothing less than upending everything we think we know about the origins and evolution of human societies. ...
Quotes
Book Overview
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.
Chapter 4
...
... When, for example, a study that is rigorous in every other respect begins from the unexamined assumption that there is 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 came at the price of human freedoms’ that participatory democracy is nature in small groups but cannot possibility scale up to anything like a city or a nation state.
We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths.
...
....
- ... people did live in radically conceptions of social reality and myths. ...
- ... three freedoms, three dominations, origins of social inequality, stuck in normalized relations of domination and violence, ...
References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 TheDawnofEverythingANewHistoryo | David Graeber David Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity |