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krpalmerIt’s been long enough since I first noticed a book named The Dawn of Everything that I don’t quite remember how it happened. However it did, once I’d looked at the descriptions of “a new history of humanity” from David Graeber, activist and public intellectual, and David Wengrow, professor of comparative archaeology, the book did appear interesting. More than that, when I checked my first option I found it was available through my city library’s ebook lending service. Enough other people must have heard about the book, though, that I saw it would first be available for me to borrow in several months. I tried to mentally brace myself and put a hold in, checking the lending application every so often with the impression the time until borrowing was going down a little faster than “every person in the queue keeps the book for the maximum possible time” might imply. At last, I had my chance to sign out the book. With the scope of time a history of humanity can cover, a few months’ wait to read it might not seem that long after all.
I suppose I’m at least as interested in “histories of ‘everything’ in one volume” as I am in any other sort of history. It wasn’t that many years ago that I found in the Internet Archive early editions of H.G. Wells’s The Outline of History, the first edition of which is now just a few years past its centennial, and thought it, with the application of “historical perspective,” both something for its time and interesting in this time. At the same time, I can get to supposing these “summaries” can’t substitute for academic study.
The Dawn of Everything had got my attention in part through promises it would challenge some casual assumptions about the history that preceded both writing and agriculture as we think of it, a span of time much larger than the years we have contemporary records for but raced through all the same for just that reason. I’ve seen the casual comments that since humans spent most of our existence in small groups, we just can’t really deal with any larger number of people and have resorted to schemes and dodges inadequate in the end. Graeber and Wengrow do mention this as a sort of updating of tales of lost paradises, and bring up recent research that there were larger settlements than “roving bands” that show no evidence of falling under the sway of those whose orders can’t be questioned. (With Graeber’s activism mentioned the book was said to begin as a search for “the roots of inequality,” but things wound up more complicated than that.)
I found the new perspectives invigorating, offering the biggest reconfiguration of my own casual assumptions since finding a used copy of Charles C. Mannn’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. (Mann’s book received a positive reference in The Dawn of Everything, although there’s a comment he was caught by assumptions some particular Central American societies had “kings.” Another “one-volume summary,” Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, might not have fared quite so well, even if I can admit to the thought Harari’s follow-up Homo Deus provoked a reaction or two from me of “big thoughts for average thinkers.”) At the same time, though, I did start wondering whether a “glass half full” reaction that there are possibilities in history beyond “live happily in a small band or miserably as an agricultural empire’s peasant” had to be weighed against a “glass half empty” impression the possibilities wound up buried by things as they developed for a very long time. Before very long, however, Graeber and Wengrow were bringing up that very topic themselves to counter it, and their extended argument wrapped back around to their suggestions European thinkers had begun to question the way things were through the early critiques of indigenous Americans.
If this book does provoke debate and counterarguments I suppose I might have to weigh them in turn, but it was thoroughly interesting. I’m at least hoping I’ll have the chance to get my own copy (in paperback if possible) and return to its wide-ranging insights.
I suppose I’m at least as interested in “histories of ‘everything’ in one volume” as I am in any other sort of history. It wasn’t that many years ago that I found in the Internet Archive early editions of H.G. Wells’s The Outline of History, the first edition of which is now just a few years past its centennial, and thought it, with the application of “historical perspective,” both something for its time and interesting in this time. At the same time, I can get to supposing these “summaries” can’t substitute for academic study.
The Dawn of Everything had got my attention in part through promises it would challenge some casual assumptions about the history that preceded both writing and agriculture as we think of it, a span of time much larger than the years we have contemporary records for but raced through all the same for just that reason. I’ve seen the casual comments that since humans spent most of our existence in small groups, we just can’t really deal with any larger number of people and have resorted to schemes and dodges inadequate in the end. Graeber and Wengrow do mention this as a sort of updating of tales of lost paradises, and bring up recent research that there were larger settlements than “roving bands” that show no evidence of falling under the sway of those whose orders can’t be questioned. (With Graeber’s activism mentioned the book was said to begin as a search for “the roots of inequality,” but things wound up more complicated than that.)
I found the new perspectives invigorating, offering the biggest reconfiguration of my own casual assumptions since finding a used copy of Charles C. Mannn’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. (Mann’s book received a positive reference in The Dawn of Everything, although there’s a comment he was caught by assumptions some particular Central American societies had “kings.” Another “one-volume summary,” Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, might not have fared quite so well, even if I can admit to the thought Harari’s follow-up Homo Deus provoked a reaction or two from me of “big thoughts for average thinkers.”) At the same time, though, I did start wondering whether a “glass half full” reaction that there are possibilities in history beyond “live happily in a small band or miserably as an agricultural empire’s peasant” had to be weighed against a “glass half empty” impression the possibilities wound up buried by things as they developed for a very long time. Before very long, however, Graeber and Wengrow were bringing up that very topic themselves to counter it, and their extended argument wrapped back around to their suggestions European thinkers had begun to question the way things were through the early critiques of indigenous Americans.
If this book does provoke debate and counterarguments I suppose I might have to weigh them in turn, but it was thoroughly interesting. I’m at least hoping I’ll have the chance to get my own copy (in paperback if possible) and return to its wide-ranging insights.