The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow | Book Club

Book was suggested by: Victor P.

Pages to read: 534
ISBN: 9780374157357 (Originally listed edition)
ISBN: 9780374721107 (Edition I am Using)

While reading, consider the below questions:
•What is the raison d’etre of the book? For what purpose did the author write the book?
•What are some limitations of the book?
•Does understanding human history matter?
•What are the origins of human social constructs?
•Why did researchers seek origins to human social constructs?
•How do the author approach human history?
•Are hierarchies needed?
•How do people cooperate with each other?
•What is the origin of the state?
•How is power derived?
•What does inequality mean?
•Is there anything fundamental about humans?
•How did the enlightenment thinkers get their ideas?
•How did societies develop agriculture? What are the diverse responses to agriculture?
•Can there be trade without a market economy?
•How can people from different cultures react to people from another culture?
•What is schismogenesis?

Your questions are important and will take priority. If you have questions about the book's content or related ideas, either let me know what your questions are or raise them during the discussion.

My review:
https://www.inquiryreviews.com/2022/05/review-of-dawn-of-everything-new.html

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Summary from Goodreads:
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.