9/18/2023 0 Comments Dawn of man reviewThe authors describe ancient and modern communities that self-consciously abandoned agricultural living, employed seasonal political regimes (switching back and forth between authoritarian and communal systems), and constructed urban infrastructure with egalitarian social programs. Subsequent chapters develop these initial claims with archaeological and anthropological evidence. The authors further argue that the standard narrative of social evolution, including the framing of history as modes of production and a progression from hunter-gatherer to farmer to commercial civilisation, originated partly as a way of silencing this Indigenous critique, and recasting human freedoms as naive or primitive features of social development. They illustrate this process through the historical example of the Wendat leader Kondiaronk, and his depiction in the best-selling works of the Baron Lahontan, who had spent ten years in the colonies of New France. They argue that the latter provided a powerful counter-model to European civilisation and a sustained critique of its hierarchy, patriarchy, punitive law, and profit-motivated behaviour, which entered European thinking in the 18th century through travellers accounts and missionary relations, to be widely imitated by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Rejecting the "origins of inequality" as a framework for understanding human history, the authors consider where this question originated, and find the answers in a series of encounters between European settlers and the Indigenous populations of North America. Moreover, they argue that the transition from foraging to agriculture was not a civilization trap that laid the ground for social inequality, and that throughout history, large-scale societies have often developed in the absence of ruling elites and top-down systems of management. The authors refute the Hobbesian and Rousseauian view on the origin of the social contract, stating that there is no single original form of human society. The authors open the book by suggesting that current popular views on the progress of western civilization, as presented by Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari, are not supported by anthropological or archaeological evidence, but owe more to philosophical dogmas inherited unthinkingly from the Age of Enlightenment. Both favorable and critical reviewers noted its challenge to existing paradigms in the study of human history. It was widely reviewed in the popular press and in leading academic journals, as well as in activist circles, with divided opinions being expressed across the board. The Dawn of Everything became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia. ĭescribing the diversity of early human societies, the book critiques traditional narratives of history's linear development from primitivism to civilization. It was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing (2022). Its American edition is 704 pages long, including a 63-page bibliography. Graeber and Wengrow finished the book around August 2020. It was first published in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2021 by Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist and activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow.
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