THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING - DAVID GRAEBER & DAVID WENGROW

This one is pretty bitter-sweet. Your boy really tearing up writing a review of the last “true” David Graeber book. The man did seem infatigable, logorrheic and graphomaniacal so, fingers crossed, we might get some more speeches or essays or other ephemera leaking out of the next few years. I’m nearly a completest with the Graeber stuff, as an anarchist anthropologist who specializes in the highlands of Madagascar as well as someone who is actually, in-person involved in protests/political change, he’s pretty narrow casted to my interests and I’m sure I’ll eventually work my way through the last couple of his books I haven’t read (it actually might just be one book, I’ll have to check), but I never got to meet him (tho, he was, apparently, considering visiting the CHOP before it fell) and it will always remain quite sad that will never get his take on the current situation again. All that being said, this book is quite a capstone. Like many of his books, it’s a sprawling monster. I came away with 3 pages of notes and half a dozen more books to read. It’s 500+ pages, with long footnotes, a very extensive bibliography and an area of focus that literally spans the entire existence of humanity. Actually, slightly longer than the history of humanity proper, there’s lots of discussion about pre- and co- existent sapiens, on every (non-Antarctica) continent, in pretty impressive detail. The thrust of the book is a rejoinder to a popular notion, followed up by a theory of the authors’ own. The rejoinder is to the idea, or myth rather, that people existed in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands for 10,000’s of years before eventually figuring out agriculture which leads to cities and hierarchy and all the rest. It’s the Pinker Argument (and the Hobbes/Rousseau/Diamond/Peterson/etc. argument) and it posits that domination and hierarchy and all that are a package deal with agriculture and social complexity. But these folks aren’t archaeologists or anthropologists, and aren’t keeping up with what people are actually learning about our ancestors, instead, they’re providing a “useful” myth that explains our situation. But Wengrow and Graeber are actually experts in this stuff and they’ve got the receipts. The book is basically 500+ pages of counterexamples to this narrative. There’s a ton of stuff about how the “agricultural revolution” is actually a 3k year process that involves all sorts of social arrangements, there’s lots of info about the Inca as well as the Cahokia, I enjoyed all the theories and explanations about ice-age burials (tho, as someone who is part of a religious group, the Moravians, who themselves have weird burial practices, practices that aren’t representative of the society as a whole, I’d caution reading a ton into that in particular. Like all speculation involving the deep past, at a certain point, a pretty close point, you’re guessing), there’s Minoan stuff and discussions of gendered labor and caring, the mysterious “Bird-Man” in North American Native artwork (personal interest of mine, I have a hunch Baby is a version of this archetype) drug regimes across history, the nature of kings, different ways to organize a horizontal society, all sorts of wonderful nuggets. I was particularly taken by the stuff about the North Amerindian critique of European culture and their effect on the enlightenment. Typically one is taught that the Europeans showed up and immediately killed everyone and took the land, and while that is, eventually, what happened, there was much more back and forth, especially in the first hundred or so years, with Europeans (mostly Jesuits) trying to understand, in order to convert, Natives while the Natives themselves were doing the same. There’s a great anecdote about Iroquois representatives travelling to Europe, and witnessing a tortuous execution and being horrified. Not from the torture, that was also part of Hudson valley life at the time, but the idea that they’d inflict it upon a member of their community, not an outsider (i.e. a war-captive). Prepare yourself to learn much more about Kondiaronk. Overall, I found this book, like most of the Graeber I’ve read, surprisingly hopeful. You might be able to tell by the list of books on this site that I’m not someone given to optimism, typically, I’m pretty allergic to it. Greaber and Wengrow manage to sound a hopeful note, that there really are other ways to live and be in the world, ways that have been tried and worked out, sometimes for thousands of years. It’s a nice rejoinder to the teleology and/or Whig history that infects both ML dialectics as well as the more mainstream, silly Pinker/Peterson/Diamond/Harari variety. I poured some Malagasy rum on the CHOP ground for him when he died and I miss him every time I think big-picture about the world. Infinite Possibilities