The Dawn of Everything

Got the impression that the writers have been striving to present a sophisticated material that came off as hardly readable than focusing on educating the modern reader..Deeply disappointed..Some sections do not make any logical sense- clearly incoherent..

The title has nothing to do with the content.The book gives you the impression that you are reading a philosophical book that is not for someone who bought the book to know the history of everything. Purely academic and old English, the sections do not seem to be connected..Some info is quite unnecessary to mention.Boring to read..had to quit after reading the first 40 pages.I expected to read history not philosophy. It is I think written for philosophy and history academics essentially interested in doing further research in this area. I think , objectively, and comparatively American writers excel more in entertaining the reader along with presenting the required info.Save your money and buy a history book that is written for the modern reader and not the modern philosopher.As an avid reader, I should enjoy the process as I learn new info.However this book made my reading journey hard and quite uninteresting.

Origin myths the world over have a basic psychological effect: regardless of their scientific validity, they have the sly power of justifying existing states of affairs, while simultaneously contouring a perception of what the world might look like in the future. Modern capitalist society has built itself upon two variants of one such myth. As one story goes, life as primitive hunter-gatherers was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ until the invention of the state allowed us to flourish. The other story says that in their childlike state of nature, humans were happy and free, and that it was only with the advent of civilisation that ‘they all ran headlong to their chains’. These are two variants of the same myth because they both posit 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 Graeber and 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. Instead, what the available evidence shows is that the trajectory of human history has been a good deal more diverse and exciting and less boring than we tend to assume because, in an important sense, it has never been a trajectory. We never permanently lived in tiny hunter-gatherer bands. We also were never permanently egalitarian. If there is a defining trait of our prehistorical condition it is its bewildering capacity of shifting, almost constantly, across a diverse array of social systems of all kinds of political, economic, and religious nature. Graeber and Wengrow’s suggestion is that the only way to explain this kaleidoscopic variety of social forms is to assume that our ancestors were not actually that stupid, but were instead self-conscious political actors, capable of fashioning their own social arrangements depending on circumstances. More often than not, people would choose to switch seasonally between socio-political identities as to avoid the perils of lasting authoritarian power. And so, rather than asking ‘Why did inequality arise?’ the most interesting question to pose about human history becomes ‘Why did we get stuck with it?’ This is only one of many kindred claims advanced in this astounding new book.The book draws much of its value from its eclectic approach. David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at UCL. He is well-known for his work on early cultural and political transformations in Africa and Eurasia. David Graeber, who died suddenly in September 2020, was a professor of anthropology at LSE, widely regarded as the most brilliant of his generation. Together, they explore a suite of recent archaeological findings that prove anomalous to the standard narrative (for instance, the existence of ancient large-scale egalitarian cities), but that, until now, had only been privy to a handful of experts who never quite unravelled the implications. Archaeological discoveries are therein appraised from anthropological eyes. The result is a sweeping tour into the past that hops from continent to continent and from one social sphere to another to tell stories that, depending on the reader’s familiarity with the archaeological record, might come as revelations.We learn, for instance, that the uniformity in material culture across Eurasia in the Upper Palaeolithic meant that people lived in a large-scale imagined community spanning continents, putting to rest the idea that ‘primitives’ only spent their time in isolated bands. Counter-intuitively, the scale of single societies decreased over the course of human history as populations grew larger. From monumental sites such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or Hopewell in Ohio, we learn that people would seasonally come together from distant lands in what appear to have been large centres of cultural interactions for recreation and the exchange of knowledge. Journeying great distances while expecting to be welcomed into an extended community was a typical feature of our ancestors’ lives.The book then pivots to agriculture. The received view has it that the birth of agriculture meant the more or less automatic emergence of stratified societies. Yet, this assumption runs into problems once we consider a phenomenon like ‘play farming’ across Amazonia, where acephalous societies like the Nambikwara, though familiar with techniques of plant domestication, consciously decided not to make agriculture the basis for their economy and to opt for a more relaxed approach that switched flexibly between foraging and cultivation. (Agriculture generally emerged in the absence of easier alternatives.) Further, we learn that some of the first agricultural societies of the Middle East formed themselves as egalitarian and peaceful responses to the predatory foragers of the surrounding hills. It was mostly women, here, that propelled the growth of agricultural science. We also learn that complex works of irrigation in some such places were executed communally without chiefs, and even where structures of hierarchy existed, these works were accomplished despite authority, not because of it. The gradual spread of agriculture across the globe was far less unilinear than anyone had previously guessed.In what’s perhaps the best chapter of the book, the authors move on to examine cities. Nowadays, large-scale egalitarian cities, the mere idea of it, smacks of utopianism; but Graeber and Wengrow argue that it shouldn’t when we start thinking of cities as the coalescence, in a single physical space, of already existing extended imagined communities with their own egalitarian ethos and norms – first happening seasonally, then more stationarily, as conscious experiments in urban form. Sites like Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia and many others offer incontrovertible evidence of the past existence of such cities, where no sign of authoritarian rule can be found. (Generally, when these are found, they stand out in the form of palaces, temples, fortification, etc.) Other ancient cities like Cahokia in Mississippi or Shimao in China exhibit evidence of a temporal succession of different political orders, sometimes moving from authoritarian to egalitarian, which leaves the possibility of urban revolutions as a likely explanation for the change.The final chapters focus on the ‘state’. Or better, on how misleading it is to define societies like the Inka or the Aztecs as ‘incipient states’ because these were far more diverse than what this straitjacket term would make us think. From the Olmec and the Chavin societies in Mesoamerica to the Shilluk of South Sudan, The Dawn of Everything offers a taste of the variety of authoritarian structures throughout history. By the end of the book, we encounter the archaeological gem that is Minoan Crete – a ‘beautiful irritant for archaeology’ – where all evidence points to the existence of an ancient system of female political rule, most likely a theocracy run by a college of priestesses.There is much more. The leitmotif running through the chapters is that if we want to make sense of all these phenomena, we are obliged to put human collective intentionality back into the picture of human history, as a genuine explanatory variable. To assume, that is, that our ancestors were imaginative beings who were eminently capable of self-consciously creating their social arrangements. The authors by no means discount the importance of ecological determinants. Rather, they see their effort as moving the dial to a more sensible position within the agency–determinism continuum, which usually only takes one extreme. The key upshot is that this newfound view of our past equips us with an expanded sense of possibilities as to what we might do with ourselves in the future. Fatalistic sentiments about human nature melt away upon turning the pages.Staying true to Ostrom’s law – ‘whatever works in practice must work in theory’ – Graeber and Wengrow set out a new framework for interpreting the social reality brought to light by empirical findings. Firstly, they urge us to abandon terms like ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ societies, let alone the ‘origin of the state’ or ‘origin of social complexity’. These terms already presuppose the kind of teleological thinking challenged in the book. The same goes for ‘modes of production’: whether a society relies on farming or fishing is a poor criterion for classification because it tells us almost nothing about its social dynamics. Secondly, they lay out some new descriptive categories of their own. They show, for instance, that social domination can be broken down into three elements – control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power – and that permutations of these elements yield consistent patterns throughout history. While the modern nation state embodies all three, most hierarchical societies of the past had only one or two, and this allowed for the people who lived under them degrees of freedom that are barely imaginable for us today.Graeber and Wengrow reflect at length on this last point. More than a work on the history of inequality, The Dawn of Everything is a treatise on human freedom. In parsing the anthropological record, they identify three types of freedom – freedom to abandon one’s community (knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands), freedom to reshuffle the political system (often seasonally), and freedom to disobey authorities without consequences – that appear to have been simply assumed by our ancestors but are now largely lost (obviously, their conclusion is a far cry from Rousseau’s: there is nothing inevitable about this loss!). This analysis flips the question one should really be asking about the historical development of hierarchy: “The real puzzle is not when chiefs first appeared”, they suggest, “but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.”So much of what makes this book fascinating is the alien nature of what we encounter within, at least to contemporary eyes. Potlaches, headhunting and skull portraits, stranger kings, revolutions, shamanic art, vision quests… The Dawn of Everything reads like a work of sci-fi, except that what turns out to be fictional is our received view of human history. The writing is often funny, sometimes hilarious. At the same time, because hardly a paragraph goes by without bequeathing insight, this is a book that needs to be patiently taken in. It sits in a different class to all the other volumes on world history we are accustomed to reading.The Dawn of Everything intellectually dwarfs the likes of Pinker, Diamond, or Fukuyama (and Harari too). Whenever non-specialists try their hands at human history, they inevitably end up reproducing the same old myths we have grown up with. Consider Steven Pinker: for all his talk about scientific progress, his books might as well have been written at the times of Hobbes, in the 17th century, when none of the evidence unearthed recently was available. Graeber and Wengrow casually expose these popular authors’ startling incompetence at handling the anthropological record. Only a solid command of the latter – namely, of the full documented range of human possibilities – affords a credible interpretative lens over the distant past. For it supplies the researcher with a refined sense of the rhythms of human history.One of the experiences of delving into this book, at least in my case, was a gradual recognition of being in the presence of an intellectual oddity, something difficult to situate within the current landscape of social theory. By embracing once again the ‘grand narrative’, the book makes a clean break with post-structuralist and post-humanist trends widespread in contemporary academia. We know that Graeber, at least, liked to think himself as a ‘pre-humanist’, actively expecting to see humanity realise its full potential. One can certainly see this work as a contribution in that direction. One can also see The Dawn of Everything as belonging to the tradition of the Enlightenment (except that one of the other major claims in the book is that Enlightenment thought developed largely in response to indigenous intellectuals’ critiques of European society of the time). As for how it squares with current archaeological and anthropological theory, the book is of such a real sweep that I don’t think it admits easy comparisons.If comparisons must be made, they should be made with works of similar calibre in other fields, most credibly, I venture, with the works of Galileo or Darwin. Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what the first two did to astronomy and biology respectively. The book produces a similar decentring effect: in dethroning our self-appointed position at the pinnacle of social evolution, it deals a blow to the teleological thinking that so insidiously shape our understanding of history. With the exception that while works such as Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and On the Origin of Species hinted at the relative insignificance of humans in the face of the cosmos, The Dawn of Everything explores all the possibilities we have to act within it. And if Galileo and Darwin stirred turmoil of their own, this will do even more so for precisely this reason. Ultimately, a society that accepts the story presented here as its official origin story – a story that is taught in its schools, that seeps into its public consciousness – will have to be radically different than the society we are currently living in.

Truly a fascinating book. Offers a wonderful counter narrative to the writers such as Diamond, Yuvel Noah, Pinker about the origins of mankind etc using evidence not often cited from those readers. Defiantly worth a read.

A lengthy, interesting and well-researched exploration of the overlooked dynamism and diversity of our social, economic and political solutions to survival. It spans the period of our distant prehistory to around 1000 years ago and touches, to varying degrees, on socio-cultural forms on every continent. The anthropological and archaeological gloss is revealing and underscores the sheer variability in forms of human cooperation, coercion and corruption. At it’s core though the book is not primarily about the almost irresolvable mysteries of our past and the age-old tensions between personal freedom, social justice and power. Rather the author’s seem more preoccupied with wanting to make the case for the historical and ethical legitimacy of a variety of anarchism, evidence of which appear to have arisen in the last 13,000 years. In this way, the book borders on polemic with political intent. This is a fascinating and sometimes compelling thesis, which begs the question of how we have lost some of this dynamism and diversity and gotten ‘stuck’ within a particular, globalising, homogenising power structure that not only entrenches extremely asymmetrical social relations, but also decouples our survival solutions from environmental patterns and parameters. I like this preceding thought-provoking aspect of the book, but I feel that the authors miss something really important along the way, namely the cosmological dimension. Their materialist, atheism (which is fine) seems to however diminish their imagination in regards the organising force of cosmological (and ideological) beliefs in our pre/history. People do the strangest and most amazing things in the name of supernatural and metaphysical beliefs. David Abram’s explanations of animism for instance, point to an organising force in our prehistory which helps to elucidate some of the impetus behind stateless acts of collaboration. I feel that the book seems to want to avoid this dimension and thereby misses an important source of the persistence of power forms. The Egyptian case is only amongst the most physically and hyperbolically manifest examples of despotic power generated via a social, economic and political commitment to the significance of the afterlife. Assuaging the gods for our survival is surely the most basic rationale for these charismatic, excessive displays which are eventually ritualised into state bureaucracy. I would still recommend this as an alternative to the more popular linear renditions of the evolution of power provided by S. Pinker, Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari.

This book is not interested in assembling facts for the reader. Even if it were possible to extract facts from all of its loquacious paragraphs, one could not be sure that the author has not cherry-picked them to fit a polemical agenda.Page 9 of the Dawn of Everything says, "When we first embarked on this book, our intention was to seek new answers to questions about the origins of social inequality." So this is a book with an agenda. It is a highly verbose polemic as opposed to a concise and dispassionate examination of the facts regarding the dawn of human culture.In my new book, How the Sumerians Became Rich, on page 197, I introduce anthropologist David S. Sandeford's 2018 complex network model of organizational complexity and demographic scale that predicts and explains both the qualitative shift from egalitarian to hierarchical social organization and the quantitative relationship between population and organizational complexity. You can read more about this model in the Wikipedia article on State Formation. But then, on page 198, I present David Wengrow's dissenting point of view from his 2015 Jack Goody lecture in which he describes how the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in Eastern Europe never transitioned from an egalitarian society to a ranked society, "because they saw no need for religious, military, or merchant ranks." The Dawn of Everything on page 297 concludes its discussion of this peace loving culture by saying simply, "around the middle of the fourth millennium BC, most of them were basically abandoned. We still don't know why." The Dawn of Everything does not provide the reader with the information that my book provides on page 199 -- "the kurgans that replaced the traditional horizontal graves in the area now contain human remains of a fairly diversified skeletal type approximately ten centimetres taller on average than the previous population." The Dawn of Everything has no mention of Sandeford nor does it provide all the information in a dispassionate way so that the reader has all of the facts.Graeber and Wengrow never discuss the consequences for egalitarianism of the late 4th millennium BC spread of horses and bronze sword technology from the Caucasus region. Although the Transcaucasian or Kura-Araxes culture was known for its metallurgy and bronze weapons, the one mention of this destructive and invasive culture (hidden in note 82 on page 578) focuses instead upon their pottery, stews, and casseroles.On page 138 of my book, I write, "Marcella Frangipane has been reporting on her excavations of late fourth millennium Arslantepe, where the monumental buildings were destroyed and new groups of people, probably nomadic pastoralists of Transcaucasian origin, settled down and built wattle and daub huts in the ruins." "All the cities and elites of Syria and Turkey that had been cooperating with Uruk, that displayed economic centralization both of labor and goods during the fourth millennium, are destroyed at this time." Graeber and Wengrow spin this situation by claiming on page 313 that 'heroic societies' moved in to occupy 'abandoned Uruk colonies'. The Dawn of Everything has older 2006 and 2012 references to Frangipane, not the newer 2016 and 2017 references that are in How The Sumerians Became Rich.On pages 12 and 88, my book describes how, starting with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, humans in the Ancient Near East began to distinguish between artificially created domestic spaces and wild outdoor spaces. "Using standard mudbricks, a typical Neolithic house took about 2 weeks to build, using a crew of 5 people or less, after dedicating 1 week to making and drying 500 to 750 bricks." We get an idea of how important the clean and artificial appearance of these human-created spaces were to their owners from the effort that they were willing to invest in coating them with lime or gypsum plaster. They were willing to heat limestone at 800-900ºC for 2-4 days in order to form quicklime, which could be mixed with water to create a white paste that was then applied to coat the walls and floors of their houses. Combined probably with increased personal hygiene, these village-dwelling, home-owning people were no longer wild and uncivilized. This is not discussed at all in The Dawn of Everything, apparently because there is a recent school of anthropology that dismisses the distinction between wild spaces and anthropic spaces, or even the idea of progress, as some kind of judgmental Western-oriented way of thinking. The subtitle of Graeber and Wengrow's 2nd chapter speaks of 'the myth of progress'. That means that it would be judgmental and wrong to claim that the accumulated civilization of the Sumerians was more advanced than that of an Amazonian Indian tribe. You could not, however, tell that to all the neighbors who surrounded Sumer and who sought to emulate their orderly and prosperous way of life.Ironically, Westerners entranced by the authors' dream of equality can learn from the experiences of a Marxist country that believed in 1945 that it could eliminate inequality. "The socialist model aspired to achieve an industrial progress free of the darker aspects of exploitation, inequality, and imperialism that marred western modernity." [Making China Modern, 2019, Muhlhahn, p. 375] "In the 1970s and 1980s, [however,] reform and opening set off profound changes in Chinese society. Poverty slowly disappeared from most regions, 400 million peasants saw their living standards improve markedly for the first time in decades....While the party securely held sway, egalitarianism and collectivism slowly unraveled and became concepts of the past." [ibid, pp. 513-514] By tracing the policy decisions and innovative steps by which China abandoned ideology in favor of economic progress, Muhlhahn's book parallels my own book on the Sumerians.

Not finished yet - but I have really enjoyed discovering the intelligence and wisdom of our prehistoric ancestors over very many thousands of years - and of so-called ‘Primitive’ peoples more recently colonised.Best so far: Accounts from the huge archive of Jesuit Missionary records of their encounters with indigenous Americans when the French first colonised Nova Scotia, Quebec etc. - complaining that the awkward souls argued with greater independence of mind and clarity than the French people back home!I am really delighted to read so much about the rationality and good values of our ancestors and fellow humans - with some sadness that so many of us do not recognise the chains we have allowed to imprison our minds.