The Dawn of Everything – Ch 9: The Indigenous Origins of Democracy in America

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.

This is a biweekly book discussion group on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. The book is available in multiple formats and languages. We cover one chapter per meeting.

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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For this meeting, please read Chapter 9: “Hiding in Plain Sight: The indigenous origins of social housing and democracy in the Americas.”

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

We will discuss all 30 pages of this chapter, book pages 328-258. (Book page numbers for meeting discussions refer to the first edition, Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Page numbers may vary in different editions and formats.)

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/

The chapter subheads are in quotation marks below.

Part I of today’s meeting (pp. 328-345): “In which we first consider an example of stranger-kings in the Maya lowlands, and their affiliation with Teotihuacan — How the people of Teotihuacan turned their backs on monument-building and human sacrifice, and instead embarked on a remarkable project of social housing” — Map: Teotihuacan: residential apartments surrounding major monuments in the central districts.

Part II of today’s meeting (pp. 346-358): “On the case of Tlaxcala, an indigenous republic that resisted the Aztec empire then came to join forces with Spanish invaders, and how its fateful decision emerged from democratic deliberations in an urban parliament (as opposed to the dazzling effects of European technology on ‘Indian minds’).”