I’ve been putting off reading this 704-page book for a few years, believing it deserved time and attention I didn’t have. David Graeber, who died suddenly in 2020, was an anthropologist and activist, an anarchist philosopher who, through confronting social inequality in unrelenting, novel, and thoroughly-source and -reasoned manner carved his way into a central role in the field. I’ve always found Graeber to be able to reorient entire areas of society so they made sense—and nonsense—in novel ways. Debt: The First 5000 Years and The Utopia of Rules were major influences on my thinking, as a scholar, and as a human living in society. His books wrestled with foundational ideas about our social world so vast that it seemed surely everything had been said—until he said something new.
This was Graeber’s last work. Written with archaeologist David Wengrow and completed just a few weeks before Graeber’s death, it sets out to entirely reexamine the course of human history and the emergence of social inequality. Wengrow works primarily in the Middle East on Neolithic and emerging-state societies.
In the U.S., anthropology is traditionally made up of four subfields, or four lenses on humanity: archaeology, social or cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. The idea is that understanding these different facets of humanity creates a broad scientific perspective. Of course, anthropology is also inherently political and—aside from direct forays into colonialism and warfare—has often served to reify the status quo, even as it has also often challenged inequality and racism. In the U.S. in particular, Franz Boas set the field against racism early on, challenging the precepts and claims of race science, even while he benefited from colonialism and the subject position of Native people. It is a field with radical potential and a great many missteps.
In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Graeber and Wengrow draw on data from all of these subfields to challenge the just-so stories about how Western “civilization” and social inequality took hold, as well as fables about the evolution of societies—even well-researched and lauded ones like those promulgated by Jared Diamond. For the authors, social inequality—defined not as possession of more trinkets than others but as the ability to translate wealth into real power—was by no means inevitable. They reject the inevitability of the emergence of states with vast power over their subjects, arguing that human history—while often marked by inequalities based on gender and age—largely involved a great deal more deliberately chosen social freedom than we accept today, including the freedom to leave, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to reconstruct society in new ways. These were not accidents or an earlier stage of evolution, the authors argue, but deliberately chosen, defended, cherished, protected positions common to human ancestors.
This was a challenging and fascinating book for me. As an anthropologist, attorney, and tribally enrolled person, my grounding in Native law has often led me to rigorously adhere to a particular story about pre-colonial Indigenous statehood and sovereignty, because these are the core “sacred stories” that underpin tribal continued sovereignty in the U.S., to the extent it is recognized by the U.S. I find myself drawing away from any argument that our ancestors did not govern themselves and exercise statehood, power, jurisdiction, because those are the magic boundaries that protect us from simply being run over roughshod by colonial forces. Yet what a greater liberating philosophy is promised by the acknowledgement that nothing like Westphalian nation-states was ever universal, inescapable, or certain! States are fictions we created, but, once unleashed, can they ever be reigned in without the most vulnerable of us being crushed?
Densely researched, challenging, and passionate, this book would be interesting to many different audiences–devotees of human history, activists, social scientists and philosophers.
I will likely re-read this book. In deciding to move it off my book pile, I listened to the audiobook (all 20+ hours) on a long road trip and probably missed quite a bit to the distractions of the road as well as the inability to flip to the biography.