The Dawn of Everything – Ch 10, Why the State Has No Origin (Part II)

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.

[Read the critical acclaim for the book here.]

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For this meeting, please read Chapter 10, “Why the State has No Origin: The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics.”

(Note: This session is now Chapter 10, Part II. The chapter is long, complicated, and pulls together so many themes that we’ve decided to divide it into two discussion sessions. Part I meeting was on May 24).

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 the second half of this chapter, book pages 399-440. (Book page numbers 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 session: “How caring labour, ritual killing and ‘tiny bubbles’ all came together in the origins of ancient Egypt — In which we reflect on the differences between what are usually called ‘early states,’ from China to Mesoamerica — In which we reconsider the Egyptian case in light of our three elementary principles of domination, and also revisit the problem of ‘dark ages’"

Part II of today's session: "In which we go in search of the real origins of bureaucracy, and find them on what appears to be a surprisingly small scale — In which, armed with new knowledge, we rethink some basic premises of social evolution — CODA: On civilization, empty walls and histories still to be written.”