The Dawn of Everything

Livre relié, 704 pages

Langue : English

Publié 8 novembre 2021 par Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN :: 978-0-374-15735-7
Goodreads:: 56269264

The renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with the 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

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 be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David 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, including the origins of farming, property, …

The renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with the 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

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 be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David 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, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking 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 percent 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.

8 éditions

Einar a publié une critique de The dawn of everything : a new history of humanity par David Graeber

Så forskjellige er vi ikke.

Aucune note

Dette var en interessant bok. Den var overraskende lettlest uten at jeg fant sitatvennlige avsnitt på annenhver side. Bokens store prosjekt er å skisse på en fortelling av vår fortid som skiller seg fra den vanlige eurosentriske fortellinga der man blikket man ser fortiden med er farget av det kapitalistiske samfunnet vi lever i og hva som er politisk mulig nå — og dermed gi en annen fortelling av hvem vi er (gjetter jeg).

Jeg har alt for lite bakgrunn i feltet til å bedømme om argumentene som legges fram er godt underbygde eller ikke. Det er vanskelig når man skriver om en tid som ligger så langt tilbake at man ikke har tilgang til hvordan de som levde da så på seg selv, man kan bare anta. De påpeker flere steder at andre forskere har tolket funn utifra sin egen samtid, sikkert med fare for å snuble i …

Dette var en interessant bok. Den var overraskende lettlest uten at jeg fant sitatvennlige avsnitt på annenhver side. Bokens store prosjekt er å skisse på en fortelling av vår fortid som skiller seg fra den vanlige eurosentriske fortellinga der man blikket man ser fortiden med er farget av det kapitalistiske samfunnet vi lever i og hva som er politisk mulig nå — og dermed gi en annen fortelling av hvem vi er (gjetter jeg).

Jeg har alt for lite bakgrunn i feltet til å bedømme om argumentene som legges fram er godt underbygde eller ikke. Det er vanskelig når man skriver om en tid som ligger så langt tilbake at man ikke har tilgang til hvordan de som levde da så på seg selv, man kan bare anta. De påpeker flere steder at andre forskere har tolket funn utifra sin egen samtid, sikkert med fare for å snuble i samme fella selv.

Noen saker jeg har lært i denne boka: * Folk før i tida var sånn omtrent som folk er nå. Folk før i tida var minst like opptatt av politikk og filosofi som vi er nå, men den kunne ta andre uttrykk. Mennesker i urtiden var mer opptatt av frihet enn likhet, men det andre var ofte en konsekvens av det første. * Jordbruksrevolusjonen for sånn omtrent 12 000 år siden var ingen revolusjon i det hele tatt. Det var en prosess som gikk ganske langsomt og som begynte med at man eksperimenterte med å så, men at man lenge levde som jegere/sankere. Det var ingenting som pekte fra det første sådde frøet til dagens industrijordbruk. * Mennesker har levd i mange forskjellige typer samfunn gjennom historien. Vi har både gått fra små samfunn til store samfunn, og fra store til små. Vi har både gått mot mer auktoritære samfunn og mot mer egalitære. Politiske strukturer har tidvis hatt mye makt, tidvis hatt begrenset makt. * Mange samfunn har vekslet mellom auktoritære og egalitære samfunn utifra årstid eller situasjon, likeså med om man lever som jegere/samlere eller jordbrukere. * Vi er på mange måter mindre frie nå enn hva vi var for både noen hundre og noen tuser år siden.

The Dawn of Everything utfordrer oss først å fremst til å drømme og diskutere hvordan vi vil at samfunnet vi lever i skal se ut, ettersom vi har dette i oss. Graeber og Wengrows blikk på fortiden, selv om også dette bilder er mangelfullt, sier i det minste: om de kunne, så kan vel vi — så forskjellige er vi ikke.

Finserra a publié une critique de The dawn of everything : a new history of humanity par David Graeber

Comprehensive and Challenging

5 étoiles

The archeological rigor and discovery explained in this book do indeed shed new light on our arrogant and foreordained conceptions of prehistory and the development and status of what has become known as "civilization." I have always found the notion of near-instantaneous "revolutions," whether agriculture, industrial, or computer, to be inherently questionable (and most often preceded by a blizzard of trial and error and half-steps and experimentation over centuries). I find it much easier to believe in an ebb, neap, and rip tide of different intellectual and cultural phenomena and traditions (moving into and back from the cultural shore that it changes) to be a more likely scenario. The new archeology would appear to support such a story.

If I have a misgiving about this book, it is the authors' sharp tongue for what amounts to enlightenment political philosophers who, while they may have had their views of the …

The archeological rigor and discovery explained in this book do indeed shed new light on our arrogant and foreordained conceptions of prehistory and the development and status of what has become known as "civilization." I have always found the notion of near-instantaneous "revolutions," whether agriculture, industrial, or computer, to be inherently questionable (and most often preceded by a blizzard of trial and error and half-steps and experimentation over centuries). I find it much easier to believe in an ebb, neap, and rip tide of different intellectual and cultural phenomena and traditions (moving into and back from the cultural shore that it changes) to be a more likely scenario. The new archeology would appear to support such a story.

If I have a misgiving about this book, it is the authors' sharp tongue for what amounts to enlightenment political philosophers who, while they may have had their views of the nature of man, were neither archeologists nor social scientists, and lacked the wealth of modern discoveries and tools available to these authors. So too, the work of prehistory scholars (such as Gordon Childe, Robert Redfield, Henri Frankfort, and many others) is dismissed readily, some sub silentio, for want of the more modern discoveries, when many of these older scholars took pains to point out the anomalies in what record they did have, which they could not resolve. Finally, this is a book about prehistory, not history. It spends scant time discussing the impact of writing on cultural development, and concedes in its silence on the point that it is mostly making informed judgements from a physical record, rather than reading how prior cultures and periods conceived of themselves. Notwithstanding these minor matters, this is a book not to be missed (as many others have concluded).