#graeberandwengrow — Public Fediverse posts

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Listening to the audio book of Goliath's Curse performed by the author Luke Kemp.

Luke is looking at similar historical and anthropological data to that looked at by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything.
But from a different perspective - societal collapse.

The cowboys and Injuns TV shows of my childhood take on a whole different perspective ...

#GoliathsCurse #LukeKemp #GraeberAndWengrow

Lidar reveals more evidence of
8,000 B.C farming in Michigan where small, egalitarian, non-heirarchical, seasonally mobile Menominee forbears "cultivated vast fields of corn and potentially other crops."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/science/archaeology-menomini-michigan.html
#archeology #TheDawnOfEverything #graeberandwengrow

@shekinahcancook

With #GraeberAndWengrow's book #TheDawnOfEverything having upset the idea of a one way process of becoming agrarian, I'm wondering if the spread of cats can be used as a proxy for the spread of grain growing as the dominant source of food.

If so then the northern Balkans were grain growers some 6000 years before ancient Greece got there.

@gutenberg_org

I like to read that when I hold the Foe to be the systems of government that resulted in that war and the many wars since, and now #ClimateChange.

#GraeberAndWengrow

#graeberandwengrow per mostrar una possible manera d'organització igualitària i cooperativa a les grans ciutats circulars ucraïneses del cinquè mil·lenni a.C. citen l'organització dels pobles circulars del País Basc, en què la vida social i econòmica es regula mitjançant fórmules de #cooperació sense necessitat de líders i #burocràcia.
Ja és coneguda la gran quantitat de #cooperatives empresarials que avui en dia funcionen a #Euskadi.

#hobbes està perdent la partida, homo homini lupus NON est.
#lectures #graeberandwengrow

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

Començo a llegir "El amanecer de todo" de #graeberandwengrow .
A la pàgina 24 ja s'han carregat el #Leviatan de #Hobbes i el #Discurs de #Rosseau, produint un esvoranc immens a la teoria política occidental.
Té el seu mèrit

@aral @Daojoan

Maybe.
If so then some #GeneticEngineering by the folk who brought you, "Masks don't work against Covid", and the #BarringtonDeclaration would be the best chance. #Elon would prob want to be involved too.

Whereas if it's our culture then things get to be about human relationships, worldviews and gooier stuff and #TheDawnOfEverything by #GraeberAndWengrow shows at least the possibility of adapting.

@wdlindsy
I'm betting on #2. But that doesn't necessarily mean we can build out from here - it is possible to build a self-destruct device.

What to do?
One step is to get more info about how else humans have organised, and see that common myths about our current situation are just myths.

#GraeberAndWengrow wrote #TheDawnOfEverything about exactly those other ways and the myths.

But it'll take much more than just that.

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."

@BarrenPlanet @angelteeth

"the sheer size and brutal power of the capitalist behemoth is bewildering"

It is - from one perspective. But there is another.

I know I'm odd, having for many years been immersed in history - not the dates and battles and kings and queens kind, but the how people thought and felt and looked at the world and won their livelihood kind of history.

So I was thinking about an old oral history study - 'Quarry Roughs' by Raphael Samuel - that is about how part of an Oxfordshire UK village, right up to the First World War, refused to get into wage labour, and instead carried on getting a living from growing and grazing on the remaining common land, poaching and collecting seasonal wild foods (literally 'hunting and gathering'), and doing casual work for cash in hand. Just the sort of mixture, in fact, that #graeberandwengrow see as typical of human life for thousands of years (as opposed to agriculture suddenly replacing hunter-gatherers). But this was in the very heart of British Imperialism at its absolute height.

So I've been wondering if capitalism really is that strong. Do we naturally take to its exchange relations, wage labour, etc, in our family life, with our friends and neighbours and local communities? Or is our 'natural' inclination to freely share and co-operate?

But apart from this businesses are everywhere, aren't they?
I agree – but ‘the private sector’ is not one thing. Mainly, it’s small businesses (around 95% of all UK businesses have less than 10 employees, and 75% have no employees at all); it’s also anti-capitalist but market-oriented organisations like co-operatives and social enterprises; and it’s civil society, much of which also trades. Oh, and comparatively few middle-sized, and even fewer enormous ‘shareholder value’ capitalist behemoths.

And here’s the thing: most small business is not really ‘capitalist’ at all – it is not very different from traders, artisans, musicians, etc, that worked in pre-capitalist economic systems. In the small business development/investment world, practitioners always try to distinguish ‘growth’ and ‘lifestyle’ businesses – they are looking for the actually rare ‘growth businesses’ that will repay their input. But most small businesses are in fact ‘lifestyle businesses’ – people that want to make a living doing something they love, and hopefully are good at, that serves and is pretty integrated in a local (or online) community, and has no desire to either grow too big or make vast fortunes. Such businesses would be sustainable in an economy where money actually had the ‘means of exchange’ function most people think it has. Many of these 'lifestyle businesses' are really rejecting capitalism - the discipline of wage-labour, the elevation of profit above enjoying your work, your life - just as surely as the 'Quarry Roughs' consciously rejected it.

Yes - there are a few thousand 'shareholder value' capitalist behemoths in the world, and they own many politicians - and they have in many places succeeded in marketising our social lives with their mass media and cloned high streets - and our own bodies with their 'you don't look right but this product will fix you' propaganda - but everywhere, many of us see through it, refuse it - and we have proven - and are proving ourselves strong too.

@onalifeglug

The thing about the Enlightenment - apart from the contention of #graeberandwengrow that it was partly inspired precisely by Europeans' encounters with indigenous peoples - is that it was primarily the expression of the ideology of nascent capitalism - not of democracy and human rights in themselves, but only insofar as they opposed the old order of feudalism (monarchy, aristocracy, church, etc).

The great European Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Voltaire, as well as the US Founding Fathers, accepted slavery. Locke was involved in drafting a state constitution which rejected universal suffrage - actually even white male 'universal' suffrage.

When enlightenment writers refer to democracy or free speech or human rights in general they don't mean everybody - what they really mean is the rights of a certain class and colour and sex - property-owning white men. Hence the American electoral college system was quite openly - explicitly - designed to prevent any power passing to the people in general.

And it's still easy to expose this partiality of Enlightenment 'liberal democracy', by asking why its supposed core values only extend to parliamentary elections, not to say the insides of firms and other organisations?

The fight for real democracy and human rights, both in government and other areas of life (the co-operative movement, etc) has been carried on for the last 250 years, by people like Fanon, largely AGAINST the defenders of Enlightenment ‘liberal democracy’.

"The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts"

#GraeberAndWengrow #TheDawnOfEverything

Link to the original article.

It may be harder work than what a #ScienceCommunicator / #Journalist from NPR, Forbes,vor CNN will present you with.

But I think it's more thrilling to hear straight from the researchers.

G & W? We've had women hunting - we're much more creative in terms of organising society than we've been told.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101

@Snoro
We are cultured beings.
We also have bullshit stories about why our current culture is the only rational one we can have.
Read #TheDawnOfEverything and got a glimpse of what humans can organise in way of society/culture. #GraeberAndWengrow

Are we plenty smart enough but have severely self-limiting beliefs around what we're capable of?
Could the question be, "How do we make an adaptive culture?"

Or maybe we're trapped in a #FatalCulturePattern and are doomed.
#ClimateChange

@breadandcircuses
So not a species problem but a cultural problem.
And even then it is not all members of a culture.
It looks exactly like a consequence of how we have organized ourselves politically.

For myth busting on that specifically read #TheDawnOfEverything by #GraeberAndWengrow

@bobthetraveler
It's interesting comparing the narrative evoked by " agriculture was being established and replacing mobile hunting and gathering. Human groups could settle and form small communities, domesticating animals and raising crops. The formation of communities allowed the construction of significant permanent structures ...", with narratives found in #GraeberAndWengrow 's book #TheDawnOfEverything .

They argue for varied and diverse approaches to and exits from agriculture.

@GreySkies @augieray
I posit that:
What you point at is a cultural failing, not a species failing.
Humans have organized themselves in cultures that have lasted millennia.
Our current culture is the problem.
There is nothing inevitable about our current social arrangement.
Our current social arrangement's are not optimal.

#GraeberAndWengrow show that the myths we have about our current arrangement are not to be relied on in their book #TheDawnOfEverything

@vy
#TheDawnOfEverything #GraeberAndWengrow #NarrativesOfOurPoliticalStructure

@arstechnica
2/2
#GraeberAndWengrow do the same for the "Why we have to be socially organized the way we are currently" myth in #TheDawnOfEveryThing book.

And now we have a woman scibe in our medieval history.

The Soviet Union is gone, women vote, slavery in the USA ended, non-property owners vote, we are not the property of kings.
All at various times just about unimaginable or imagined by very few.