David Graeber and David Wengrow
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow is the product of a decade’s worth of extensive research on how new evidence in anthropology and archaeology inform our understanding of humanity’s past. The authors debunk many of the conventional narratives and the assumptions on which they are based.
Graeber and Wengrow dismantle previous theories, including the concept of the child-like, noble savage of popular imagination; the origins of private property; the inexorable force of agriculture in shaping a society; the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers; the definition of a city; the existence of hierarchies in large communities; the inevitability of a centralized administration in large cities; the late emergence of symbolic behavior; the beginnings of democratic institutions in Athens; and the linear and uniform progression from “primitive” to “civilized.”
Through a wealth of examples from ancient sites around the world, the authors demonstrate repeatedly that human beings were not passive recipients of forces beyond their control. They engaged in political debate and made collective decisions. They made conscious and deliberate choices, rejecting one mode of social organization and adopting another. Movement was never “linear” in that sense. People frequently shifted between different forms of social organization depending on their values, on the season, or because they wanted to distinguish themselves from their neighbors. The situation was fluid.
The Dawn of Everything fundamentally challenges our understanding of humanity’s past. It exposes the cultural bias of historians of the past and critiques previous narratives of the progress of human history. It is wide-ranging and expansive, provides a wealth of information, and is impressive in scope and scholarship. The Notes and Bibliography together amount to 150 pages. The style is conversational. But the sheer volume of the work, the digressions, the repetitions, and the extensive number of examples it provides make it a challenging read. It would have benefited from some serious editing.
The work is a formidable tome, intellectually fascinating for its challenge of our fundamental assumptions about our history. Its critique of previous narratives, assumptions, and methodology; its impressive and exhaustive evidence; the questions it poses; and the implications it raises for what it means to be a free, civilized, and cultured society are groundbreaking and profoundly thought-provoking.