The Dawn of Everything

Dream quests. Empires without war. Women leadership. A city centered around hallucinogenic journeys filled with weird architecture. An enlightenment of democratic settlements blossoming from the ruins of a centralized, aggressive kingdom throughout the current USA. Being able to travel across all of North America and find allied clans who must help you, even though you don't share the same language. People groups taking up farming, and then discarding it. The potential origins of private property. Axes of ideas that lead to entrenched arbitrary power, and the multiplicative danger that comes when multiple axes are involved.

The authors do cherry-pick examples from history to support their thesis that people throughout history lived in a wide variety of political structures, and that history is not stuck in a set evolutionary channel, because, well, that's what actually happened. History is much more complicated than most people think, and this means that the present can be different as well.

I finished the book wanting so much more about how societies can break free from solidified power structures, but that's no criticism of the book. It also has made me much more interested in learning anarchist theory, on various forms of voluntary organization. And, and, I really want to know how an anarchic grouping of people could (could they?) resist a more centralized attacker.

Read this! Your mind will be cracked open, over and over.

A tale of two David's: Graeber's final book, co-authored with Wengrow, is an epic volume of archaeology and anthropology that decentres and challenges accepted patterns of western thought that many social scientists present as facts. In particular, the authors take aim at books like Sapiens by showing how they proliferate accepted but unproven myths about human behaviour without following the evidence. As a book of critique and challenge, it is funny, thoughtful, and sharp. Some of the ideas, such as that the European idea of democracy may have originated from colonised Native American cultures, are radical but well argued.

Despite this, there are some flaws. A couple of chapters run far too long with too much repetition, and the scope of societies that are used to construct the arguments is limited. Also, there is a repeated insistence of humanist thought, dismissing animal or nonhuman relationships as unrelated to the story. This seems to reinforce another myth of exceptionalism and also ignores many of the beliefs and philosophies of the same cultures that are held up as examples in the book.

Despite these flaws, the challenges and ideas are well worth reading and considering in a frame of knowledge, and the writing (particularly Graeber's signature biting wit) is excellent.