The Dawn of Everything – Ch. 3: Unfreezing the Ice Age, In and Out of Chains

Renowned anthropologist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution — from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social 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 only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and 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.

Drawing on path-breaking 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% 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? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"?

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.

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Biweekly book discussion group, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by the anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow. Available in multiple formats and languages. We cover 1 chapter per meeting.

You are very welcome to attend if you didn’t do the reading; discussion preference will be given to those who did.

You can find the book here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YXXaVEwZ-cIc37Y0Z9ujEcK3_X2Jpmnh/view?usp=sharing

For this meeting, please read Chapter 3, “Unfreezing the Ice Age: In and out of chains: the protean possibilities of human politics", book pages 78-119.

You are very welcome to attend if you didn’t do the reading; discussion preference will be given to those who did.

Discussion of all 41 pages of this chapter. The chapter subheads are in quotation marks below.

Part I of today’s meeting (pp. 78-98): “Why the ‘sapient paradox’ is a red herring; as soon as we were human, we started doing human things — Why even very sophisticated researchers still find ways to cling to the idea that social inequality has an ‘origin’ — In which we observe how grand monuments, princely burials and other unexpected features of ice age societies have upended our assumptions of what hunter-gatherers are like, and consider what it might mean to say there was ‘social stratification’ some 30,000 years ago — In which we dispose of lingering assumptions that ‘primitive’ folk were somehow incapable of conscious reflection, and draw attention to the historical importance of eccentricity.”

Part II of today’s meeting (pp. 98-119): “What Claude Lévi-Strauss learned from the Nambikwara about the role of chiefs, and seasonal variations of social life — In which we return to prehistory, and consider evidence for both ‘extreme individuals’ and seasonal variations of social life in the ice age and beyond — Concerning ‘buffalo police’ (in which we rediscover the role of seasonality in human social and political life) — Why the real question is not ‘what are the origins of inequality?’ but ‘how did we get stuck?’ — What being sapiens really means.”

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