The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow

I may follow through with this. Daughter is listening to the audio book and I’ve got a hard copy. We are 2 hours distant, but texting is what we do.

The Dawn of Everything

Chapter 1 is brief, but meaty.
Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood

Refers continually to the concepts of pre-history as described by Rousseau and Hobbes.
I just had hands on an elementary book describing Rousseau today.
I’ve been shifting my books in the living room. I knew exactly where it was, and now, afterwards, I’ve lost track of it! I read some of it last year and recall arguing with both Rousseau and Hobbes while reading it. I don’t have a good background in this subject.

But these current authors point out how this Enlightenment conceptualization was a simplified cartoon in order to detect patterns. Afterward, it’s silly to continue with the simplification treating it like fact.

Swiftly, they discuss Stephen Pinker, the Yanomami people as described by Napoleon Chagnon, and mention a variety of individuals who chose to return to living with indigenous American groups after sampling both forms of society.
“Western propagandists speak endlessly about equality of opportunity… By far the most common reasons, however, had to do with the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities; qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings.”

A short section on Adam Smith and the assumption that trade is the only logical assumption that can follow from the evidence of precious objects transported widely. They offer three alternatives to the notion of trade, each more whimsical. Made me smile.

Chapter 2 Wicked Liberty

Not through the chapter yet, but the title refers to the Jesuit missionary reaction to attitudes of the native Americans towards authority. It bothered them that this society refused to acknowledge obedience to a higher power, civil or spiritual. The freedoms of the females also bothered them no end.

There are 72 volumes of writings from these missionaries describing NA society that were produced and circulated widely in Europe.

Graeber and Wengrow rely on these as well as Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled, written by Lahontan
Dialogues avec un sauvage names the savage Adario, but is presumed to be a real Wendat NA named Kondiaronk. All who met this man were dazzled by his brilliance. He is quoted as saying "A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason."

Examining the concept of personal possession of goods or land, and "baseline communism" (pg 47) the NA is bewildered by the lack of generosity to others and how ownership turns to power, personal and political.

Gregory Bateson is mentioned with his coining of the term "schismogenisis" meaning group self-identification by an anti-identification comparison of "the other." I'm not sure I buy into this theory yet.

I was concerned that the authors were setting up a new model of the Noble Savage" but am somewhat reassured. Still, these NA voices are all second hand, interpreted by Europeans.

Daughter is 7 hours in on the 24 hour audio. She suggested I try it, and I am. But still referring to the print book often.

I did find my book on Rousseau. It’s a slim book titled Advocate of Government by Consent and is meant to be a YA introduction.

Graeber/Wengrow believe that Rousseau was greatly influenced by the writings on NA philosophy.
The rest of chapter 2 considers the oddity of liberty and then equality as concepts growing and flourishing in a European milieu that had never experienced either within known history.

I switched to audio for chapter 3 Unfreezing the Ice Age. (Pg 78-119)

It went swiftly, but now I have to go back and read it to absorb the details. I can only listen effectively when I’m in the car, for some stupid reason.

Looking for evidence of equality/freedom/self-reflection/sociopolitical options in the pre-historic record.

Hello, hello! I found my book (along with another of his, Bullshit jobs), and I hope to get started tomorrow. Full disclosure: I am poised to like this, as I already appreciated Fragments of an anarchist anthropology.

And I'm so sick of how everything is, our motheaten theories and mean traditions and EVERYTHING.

I still have the print book, but switched to audio. These chapters are massive. Difficult to summarize. At chapter 5, I got the impression that their theories of pre-historic civil society are exercises in playfulness. Chapters 3 and 4 worked to broaden our knowledge and interpretations of various American tribes/groups/geographies. One in particular seemed to catch their attention. It’s political structure vacillated with the seasons, they claim. I’ll have to go back and try to locate that section.

I do have problems staying focused in audio version around the house. I do much better in the car, but I’m no longer driving much.

Daughter was here last week. She listened to 11 chapters before her audio copy had to be returned, so she read chapter 12 here, but we never did discuss it. Too much else going on.

I’m on chapter 6 and the South American remains are getting gruesome.

Sorry, I'm way behind, I have three library books I must dispatch ASAP. But never mind me, do your thing, and as I start commenting maybe it'll be a chance to refresh! Yeah, I wouldn't care to do this in audio (well, I just don't like audio in general, but especially for nonfiction where I keep needing to go back, cross-reference etc.)

It’s on pause for me. I’m in another state up on a roof.

>3 2wonderY:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk

Iroquois in Michigan and Canada. In 2001, he was named a Person of National Historic Significance by the Canadian government.

The Dawn of Everything was the first book I read on global history, a new approach that emphasizes the connectedness of peoples, rather than borders, cities and wars. According to Sebastian Conrad, "Until very recently, historians have looked at the past with the tools of the nineteenth century. But globalization has fundamentally altered our ways of knowing, and it is no longer possible to study nations in isolation or to understand world history as emanating from the West. This book reveals why the discipline of global history has emerged as the most dynamic and innovative field in history―one that takes the connectedness of the world as its point of departure, and that poses a fundamental challenge to the premises and methods of history as we know it."

After that, I've read 1491, Sapiens, and others which you can see by browsing my collections at lrecca.

>11 lrecca: Welcome to LibraryThing! I look forward to chatting about our mutual interests.

I took a class this past term, The History of the Anthropocene. In one of the discussions, I mentioned this book; and the professor pulled it out of his satchel.

I am plodding my way through this book, and I do not love it. The subtitle is "A New History of Humanity". So far, it's limited to a new history of anthropology: the book focuses much more on rejecting various theories of anthropology than on any coherent discussion of humanity. The limited discussion of the history of humanity is almost entirely used to refute various particular theories. The first half could be summed up with "nope". "Rousseau thought this. Nope. Hobbes thought this. Nope. Mauss argued this. Nope." It reminds me of a rule I tried with my kids: don't tell me what you don't want, tell me what you do want. This book goes on and on about all the theories that are wrong, and, so far at least, makes no effort to provide a theory that is right.

>13 rkstafford: Hello rkstafford. I must say right away that I am not an expert and that I do not have the tools to evaluate what is right or wrong in the specific analysis of Graeber/Wengrow. However, the authors' approach seems very stimulating to me: always cultivating doubt; seizing all the opportunities in potential errors; constantly exploring with new eyes and tools what we take for granted. Of course: formulating new hypotheses is important but the authors seem to demonstrate that we do not yet have (and perhaps will never have) sufficient elements to be able to say with certainty: things went like this, History is this. Every moment new evidence arises, new data is acquired where nothing was expected anymore. In these conditions, the claim to assert a truth can only be, in my opinion, presumption.

>8 LolaWalser: Hi LolaWalser, did you manage to read Graeber and Wengrow's book?

>11 lrecca: Hi, I really like the connection key to reading. Thanks.

Thanks for reviving the thread. I had to restart from the beginning but I hope to comment soon.

>14 claudio.marchisio: I agree with your assessment, but my conclusion is that we should stop wasting time and money doing or reading about anthropology.

>18 rkstafford: Indeed, why would we invest into learning about ourselves /s

>18 rkstafford: I advise you against reading a book by Brian Sutton-Smith: The Ambiguity of Play. The author doesn't analyze games or playing, but rather the rhetorics underlying various ways of describing play. His approach seems similar to that of Graeber and Wengrow: when we describe the world, we often take for granted values ​​that aren't always explicitly reflected in our discourse. These various authors don't offer us alternative visions, but they encourage us to pay close attention to what we read, describe, and study, so as not to be unwittingly victims of prejudice.

Interesting. Didn't know about this one. I'm a huge fan of Graeber.

>21 March-Hare: What else of his have you read?

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Bullshit Jobs, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys Bureaucracy, and Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Project. Really broke my heart when I heard he had passed so young.

>23 March-Hare: Wow! You are a fan!
I read Debt a decade ago and hadn’t put the two together till just now. He certainly helps one to look at things in a new way.

>19 SandraArdnas: I'm happy to invest in learning, where there is some prospect of learning, but the point of this book is that humans are too complex to learn anything about, so give up and read something else. Also, I assume you're being sarcastic, which is a bad discussion technique under any circumstances and particularly bad in a discussion board where communication loses the nuance of in-person back and forth.

>25 rkstafford: I was referring to your dismissal of an entire field of anthropology, based on one book YOU did not like. Otherwise, I wouldn't comment because I'm not familiar with the book, though judging by your criticism even of that, it is based on what you believe it should be about vs what it is actually about. How you jump from that to cancelling anthropology as a field is a mystery. Finally, if you're from the US, you're in desperate need of competent anthropological and sociological theorists stepping up. And Graeber certainly did his part to diagnose some crucial issues.

>26 SandraArdnas: This book did a compelling job of arguing that anthropology has nothing to teach us. It is a long, thorough debunking of the entire field. This book does not advance any theories, it demonstrates why every previous theory is wrong, and it doesn't leave much room for the possibility that new theories might be both useful and accurate. I found that frustrating, and my conclusion is that reading more anthropology is not going to do anything to enlighten or to entertain me. If there are other anthropology books out there that might do either, I am willing to read them, but this book makes a compelling argument that any theories advanced in those other books are wrong, so I'm not inclined to spend the time reading them.

>27 rkstafford: We are way off topic and I find your arguments so empty that I don't care anyway. Let me just say you somehow missed those you list as critiqued are not anthropologist to begin with, merely thinkers who had something to say about culture. But it's not like you'll be in a position to de-fund the field, so whatever.

>28 SandraArdnas: Read the book. This is precisely its point, and Graeber certainly includes those writers as anthropologists, although writing before the field was thought of as anthropology. To be clear, the book also dismisses every more recent anthropologist it discusses. That's my point: this book is a comprehensive argument that anthropology is pointless because human societies are too complex to be described by unifying theories. It reduces anthropology to something like trivia night in a bar - a bunch of interesting factoids, but nothing to pull them together to explain the world.

>29 rkstafford: It is still one book, which was my initial point and YOU are dismissing the field based on a single book you find pointless. I find your argument meaningless. The end. By all means, ignore anthropology.