malteengeler on Nostr: Graeber's and Wengrow's "The Dawn Of Everything" is an anthropological and ...

Graeber's and Wengrow's "The Dawn Of Everything" is an anthropological and archeological analysis of the question: How did humanity get stuck in a social status quo defined by violence and inequality? Their central task: Dismantling the myth that complex societies, cities or "civilisation" inevitably lead to the bureaucratic, top-down societies of the present. And they take this task on with enormous material ranging from the foraging societies of the last ice age to mesopotamia and the maya to indigenous societies in North America. What they gather is compelling evidence that our picture of the development of complex human societies is shaped by misconceptions and western arrogance. Humans have been able to actively shape their political and social life in countless ways. And among those arrangements have been city-like structures and complex vast communities that were not defined by domination, inequality and violence. The book is more than an historical account though. It carries a very hopeful message. To quote some of their later passages:



"[Understanding this] is critical to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages."



"[We use to assume that] ‘civilization’ and ‘complexity’ always come at the price of human freedoms; that participatory democracy is natural in small groups but cannot possibly scale up to anything like a city or a nation state. We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths."



"What is the purpose of all this new knowledge, if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become?"



The book has its lengths. It is in these lengths though where I found many insights about e.g. self-determined use of technology or how privacy and property intertwine. All in all, I loved the book. It offers hope and inspiration to anyone who is fighting for a reality that needs to look so very different from our present.