The Dawn of Everything is radical. It is rich in depth of detail, innumerable in its archaeological aspects, and presents so many ideas outside of our modality of thinking it threatens to swallow your head whole.
Graeber and Wengrow’s work aims to sunder questions such as ‘how did inequality arise’, show such framings are anti-historical and guide us to better questions such as ‘how did we become stuck in this mode of inequality’.
Among its radical ideas and examples include:
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Hunter gatherers forming cities of hundreds of thousands,
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A logical progression from farming to inequity and cities,
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A logical progression from writing to inequity and cities,
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Domineering, greedy, unequal hunter gatherers,
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Societies of millions functioning without bureaucracy,
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Societies choosing to abandon farming in favour of hunter gatherer principles, and thriving,
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Political experimentation and imagination spanning back thousands of years before the Greeks, or Egyptians.
My strongest contention and ‘smell’ is the work on Kondiaronk being the direct cause for the French Enlightenment. This seems suspicious, too contrived, yet am I in no position to contest the incredible grasp of sources that the authors possess.
Like all the best works of non-fiction, The Dawn of Everything is deeply, deeply technical but moreso considers its sources with doubt and scepticism. It has a healthy appreciation of the unknowns and still has the bravery to present radical ideas. It is a tragedy that Graeber died so suddenly after the publication, and the planned following novels will be replete with Wengrow’s academia, but lacking Graber’s charisma.