The Dawn of Everything – Ch 4: Free People, Origin of Cultures, Private Property

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.

For this meeting, please read Chapter Four, book pages 120-163.

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

Or purchase it here: https://www.amazon.ca/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/dp/0771049846/

Chapter Four, “Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property: (Not necessarily in that order).” Discussion of all 43 pages of this chapter. The chapter subheads are in quotation marks below.

Part I of today’s meeting (pp. 120-140): “In which we describe how the overall course of human history has meant that most people live their lives on an ever-smaller scale as populations get larger — In which we ask what, precisely, is equalized in ‘egalitarian’ societies? — In which we discuss Marshall Sahlins’s ‘original affluent society’ and reflect on what can happen when even very insightful people write about prehistory in the absence of actual evidence.”

Part II of today’s meeting (pp. 121-163): “In which we show how new discoveries concerning ancient hunter-gatherers in North America and Japan are turning social evolution on its head — How the myth that foragers live in a state of infantile simplicity is kept alive today (or, informal fallacies) — In which we dispose of one particularly silly argument that foragers who settle in territories that lend themselves well to foraging are somehow unusual — In which we finally return to the question of property, and inquire as to its relation to the sacred.”