#dawnofeverything — Public Fediverse posts

Study of over 1,000 sites suggests inequality emerged long after agriculture
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2025-04-15/study-of-over-1000-sites-suggests-inequality-emerged-long-after-agriculture.html

> “Since Rousseau, it has been assumed that as agriculture developed, so did private property ownership and, as a result, increased inequality. We show that this isn’t the case, and that, instead, people remained virtually equal for more than a millennium after agriculture became widespread.”
#DawnOfEverything #anarchism

@anubis2814 If only it were so neat... but we really have zero evidence for this supposition, which comes from 19th century armchair social evolutionism. The #DawnOfEverything by Wengrow & Graeber offers a more up-to-date, empirical telling of prehistory influenced by #anarchism, if you're interested. They would say that the capacity for extreme violence is present in all societies – as is the capacity to avoid it.

... qualifications to enter bureaucracies are typically based on some form of knowledge that has virtually nothing to do with actual administration.

#DawnOfEverything : A New History of Humanity by #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow ; Ch 11.

@donar @Pierrette @xChaos

https://trojkatretiho.cz/viewtopic.php?p=1508#p1508

#tg845716998

Each day the adult men of a town would gather to spend much of the day arguing about politics, in a spirit of rational debate, in conversations punctuated by the smoking of tobacco and drinking of caffeinated beverages.

#DawnOfEverything : A New History of Humanity by #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow ; Ch 11.

@donar @xChaos

11 https://trojkatretiho.cz/viewtopic.php?p=1507#p1507

#tg845716998

Living in unbounded, eternal, largely imaginary groups is effectively what humans had been doing all along.

#DawnOfEverything : A New History of Humanity by #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow ; Ch 8.

9/9 https://trojkatretiho.cz/viewtopic.php?p=1334#p1334

@donar @xChaos

#tg845716998

Humans tend to live simultaneously with the 150-odd people they know personally, and inside imaginary structures shared by perhaps millions or even billions of other humans. Sometimes, as in the case of modern nations, these are imagined as being based on kin ties; sometimes they are not.

In this, at least, modern fora... MESSAGE CLIPPED

#DawnOfEverything : A New History of Humanity by #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow ; Ch 8.

FULL TEXT: 8/8 https://trojkatretiho.cz/viewtopic.php?p=1333#p1333

@donar @xChaos

#tg845716998

... the mere fact that much of the world’s population now live in cities may not determine how we live, to anything like the extent you might assume...

#DawnOfEverything : A New History of Humanity by #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow ; Ch 8.

7/7 https://trojkatretiho.cz/viewtopic.php?p=1332#p1332

@donar @xChaos

#tg845716998

Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, p... MESSAGE CLIPPED

#DawnOfEverything : A New History of Humanity by #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow ; Ch 8.

FULL TEXT: 6/6 https://trojkatretiho.cz/viewtopic.php?p=1331#p1331

@donar @xChaos

#tg845716998

This is not, then, a book about the origins of inequality. But it aims to answer many of the same questions in a different way. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion.

#DawnOfEverything : A New History of Humanity by #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow ; Ch 2.

#tg845716998

If... future... hinges on our capacity to create something different... then what... matters is whether we... rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place... We are projects of collective self-creation... What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such?

#DawnOfEverything : A New History of Humanity by #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow ; Ch 1.

@donar @xChaos

#tg845716998

"Falcons hobbesians i coloms rousseanians" una expressió molt encertada.
#graeberandwengrow
#DawnOfEverything

Reminds me of Graeber & Wengrow's observation that lack of funding for archeological digs has skewed ancient history to be, predictably, Western-centric.

As they point out in The Dawn of Everything: "There is no 'original' form of human society. Hafted tools have been found in South Africa 80,000BC but the gap btw then and widespread evidence of figurines, flutes, burials, etc 40,000 years later is called "the sapiens paradox." Recently, it seems funding for archeologic digs explains the gap. Panga ya Saidi in Kenya around 60kBC and cave art in Borneo and Sulawesi are recent finds." #Graeber #Wengrow #archeology #DawnOfEverything

Not me highlighting the whole book The Dawn of Everything but I'm a sucker for such interesting tidbits. Also, social possibility. I need to hear us discussing more of this.
#DawnOfEverything

@brocolie @rmattila74
That's also how I understood Graeber and Weingrow in their #DawnOfEverything : they (IIRC) note in several places that societal hierarchies per se aren't the problem, and may well be very successful adaptations to particular circumstances (like in their examples of preindustrial societies organising hierarchically for the hunting season, and non-hierarchically otherwise). The problem is in hierarchies that become permanent.

I think this too is a very good point. 3/

This sounds like an interesting event for anyone that liked #GraeberandWengrow 's #DawnOfEverything ...

https://humanists.uk/events/voltaire2023/

"We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the 'Old World' encountered the 'New', when Christopher Columbus 'discovered' America in 1492. But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock will demonstrate in The Voltaire Lecture 2023, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others – enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders – the reverse was true: they discovered Europe."

Whatever criticisms can be made of David Graeber's work, and of Graeber and Wengrow, much of the criticism is clearly in bad faith or just awful. #graeber #wengrow #DawnofEverything

@gimulnautti Most of the criticisms of #DawnofEverything (and #Debt) are strikingly similar to critiques of 1619 and, much earlier Zinn's History. They are often of the form "everyone in the field knew all this anyways, but it's also all wrong."

Brad @delong criticisms of #Graeber's work range from the simply wrong to the petty but ignore the bigger points. Delong is so upset at Graeber that he botches basic fact checks. But he is not alone in attempts to discredit both #Debt and #DawnOfEverything so much that people are discouraged from reading these accessible and revelatory books. It's really annoying to see ideological conformity pushed via supposedly scholarly book reviews.

A critique of Graeber and Wengrows #DawnOfEverything that has some content to it.
https://zenodo.org/record/5907061

The hostility of @delong and @ann_leckie to Graeber's #Debt and Graeber and Wengrow's #DawnofEverything is interesting because while both deLong and Leckie are excellent writers/thinkers, they are both ideologically enmeshed in convention (as we all are). Leckie's books are highly imaginative and perceptive, but her Ancillary Galaxy Far Away is a military empire with characters who, despite their humanity and gender agnosticism could be from Starship Troopers or Henry IV for that matter. 1/2