A Book Review: The Dawn of Everything ... Well At Least Human Things

The Book:

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Citation:

Graeber, David and D., Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

TL;DR – If you think the world is a garbage fire now, and you like anthropology and/or archeology, this is a thoughtful, well-researched, and even profound book written by experts in their fields with a wealth of evidence and experiential knowledge. I recommend it.

The Authors:

David Graeber was a Yale-educated American anthropologist and anarchist activist. He died in September 2020 and this book was published posthumously in 2021.

David Wengrow is a British archeologist and professor of Comparative Archeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

Summary:

When we think about the development of human civilization, we often fall back on familiar tropes. We learned early on in our education that our ancestors were intelligent primates who learned to use tools. We hunted and gathered for subsistence and lived in tribal communities made largely of extended family. We expanded into larger nomadic tribes under the rulership of priests and chiefs who helped to centralize political control and manage social organization. When we learned agriculture and animal domestication, we built settlements and cities ruled over by religious leaders and kings who instituted law and primitive bureaucracies. Wars were waged, territory won, and the world got bigger. Empires rose and fell to new empires, until at last we arrived at our current predicament, once referred to by Francis Fukuyama as “the end of history”.

This is an easy to grasp, relatively linear progression of human development. The problem is, of course, it’s completely fabricated based on old sexist/racist misunderstandings, and outdated political, social, and economic theories.

In The Dawn of Everything Graeber and Wengrow use evidence from contemporary discoveries in anthropology and archaeology to question our current thinking on human political and socio-economic development, and the development of the state and state bureaucracies. Beginning with the question of human inequality that emerges in the Enlightenment, they discuss how the work of philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau is purloined, at least in part, from criticism and debates about European political structures leveled by … wait for it … indigenous Americans. 

When we take into consideration that the indigenous peoples of the Americas explored a wide range of social and political organizations (including Democracy, though it was not called that) prior to their contact with Europeans, it’s even clearer to us that the narrative about a “state of nature” with its “noble savages” (Rousseau) never existed. The linear progression of human social, political, and economic development is not only wrong, it’s laughable.

The authors assert that considering homo sapiens have existed for at least 200,000 years with our capacity for abstract thought and imagination, it’s ludicrous to assume we haven’t experimented with hundreds, or even thousands, of different kinds of social organization.

For example, there’s ample evidence to show that prehistoric people in what we now call the Middle East began using agriculture employing advanced farming techniques, and demonstrating complex knowledge of astronomy and seasonal cycles. Then, for reasons still under speculation, appear to have made the choice to abandon this way of life in favor of nomadic hunting and gathering once again. 

Another example: In North America, there’s evidence of an expansive centralized power that once rose, connecting the western and eastern portions of the country with trade. Cities and towns formed and prospered. Then, just as suddenly, they were abandoned for freer forms of tribal organization. The political lessons of these changes were handed down, and live on through the myths of the cultures explored further in this book.

Through all the evidence they present from archeological and anthropological finds across the world, the authors attempt to answer questions of human inequality. Chief among these questions are: How and when did we get stuck in the current world order, which we are frequently told is the best possible outcome? And in the face of current environmental crises and political upheavals, how do we begin to envision something else?

Some Additional Thoughts:

I listened to this book on Audible, narrated by Mark Williams. It scratched every itch of the social science-related interests currently under my skin, and I recommend it highly. I will definitely seek out other books written by these authors in the future.

Absent from their discussion here is how capitalism in its current form works in tandem with the linear narrative of human political and social development to prevent meaningful change. The movement of capitalism and its delineations destabilizes social structures in order to create new markets and exploit newly encountered or developing cultures. Newness and difference are the lifeblood capitalism sucks.

I’m not saying that it was a necessary for Graeber and Wengrow to dive into a capitalist critique here. I’m aware that’s not the point of this book, and I am almost certain the authors are aware of and have explored questions about capitalism elsewhere. However, I think putting this work in dialogue with a deeper historical exploration of the rise of capitalism and current capitalist critiques could be very fruitful in answering the question of how we envision other ways of living in the world.