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scohen_'s review against another edition
5.0
The first nonfiction I’ve really been able to read since my thesis and no matter how long it took I’m proud of my humble return. This bibliography is perhaps the most impressively diverse in origin and subject matter that I’ve ever seen and it made me want to cry? What a commitment to knowledge and knowing.
To have lost Graeber is to lose one of the most inventive thinkers of our time. Always pushing limits without being too presumptuous. It’s heady but also remarkably simple. Culture has and will always be complex and messy and beautiful. What we call history is mostly a storytelling strategy to support contemporary socio-political paradigms.
We’re most able to create worlds that could be otherwise when in engaging in the true essence of our human-ness: moments of PLAY <3
Sorry to be feral I miss college
To have lost Graeber is to lose one of the most inventive thinkers of our time. Always pushing limits without being too presumptuous. It’s heady but also remarkably simple. Culture has and will always be complex and messy and beautiful. What we call history is mostly a storytelling strategy to support contemporary socio-political paradigms.
We’re most able to create worlds that could be otherwise when in engaging in the true essence of our human-ness: moments of PLAY <3
Sorry to be feral I miss college
wietse111's review against another edition
5.0
Een vrij nieuw boek, maar nu al een klassieker. Graeber en Wengrowth combineren krachten als antropoloog en archeoloog om de vroege geschiedenis te herevalueren. Het is een heel sterk pleidooi om mensen van lang geleden te zien als mensen met een vrije wil. Geschiedenis is geen rechte lijn waarin de moderne natiestaat het logische eindpunt is, maar gaat alle kanten op. Je had jager verzamelaar steden en nomadische semi-boeren. Mensen gingen van jagen naar landbouw maar ook van landbouw naar verzamelen. Van steden naar nomadisch leven en terug. De maatschappelijke orde is niet onvermijdelijk. Fascinerend om m’n impliciete beeld van de geschiedenis zo overtuigend uit te dagen.
edustoryramos24's review against another edition
3.0
A very interesting book compromised by delirious and contradictory ambitions.
The authors use abundant, and sometimes repetitive, information on relatively recent anthropological and archeological research to take issue with:
(i) the post 17th Century "consensus" around Jean-Jacques Rousseau´s "noble savage" (who, as they insist in case you didn´t already know, was neither noble nor savage) and Thomas Hobbes´s gloomy Leviathan view to the effect that, due to our base instincts, mankind can only be harnessed by autocracies of some form;
(ii) Mircea Eliade´s thesis, long consensual, that "primitive" cultures lived in a circular time of permanent present rooted in a mythical past, mindset that the Old Testament, Greek philosophy and finally the Enlightenmet gradually disrupted, replacing it by the historical linear view we have now, to (for Eliade) catastrophic effect, and
(iii) Karl Jasper´s Axial Era´s thesis to the effect that sometime between the 8th and 2nd Centuries BCE, in the Americas and where now China, Greece and India are, in a remarkable instance of synchronicity, speculative thought emerged (Plato, Budha, Confucius) that emancipated mankind from mythos to logos and religion from imanence to transcendence.
Turns out, they claim, so called "primitive" peoples were fully capable of sophisticated sophistry, as required, for example, from Native Amercian cheftains holding meetings to prepare ad-hoc alliances for war or big scale hunting campaigns.
Also, there were no "Agricultural" or "Neolithical" revolutions, as for many centuries many cultures lived side by side and interacted with each other retaining one or the other technologies and modes of production, and also no correlation between those and the scale and breadth of intercultural interactions, the dimenstion of the communities involved, wether or not they were nomads or sedentary/urban, or the emergence of monarchy, autarcy, or bureaucracy, as some prehistoric cultures were egalitarians, others not, some matriarchal, some patriarchal, some Pacific Northwest tribes cheap like Calvinists centuries before Max Weber etc etc. And there´s no sequence to any of this, as prehistoric (and pre-Columbian) cultures often amoved mong all of these options without any strong correlation between them.
Which is OK, except it doesn´t necessarily contradict Jaspers or Eliade, (although it does outmode Rousseau and Hobbes a bit, but that´s not news). And anyway, the fact remains that 20K years ago no one was a farmer, 1000 years ago most people were, about 90 years ago more people worked in industry than agriculture and nowadays most of mankind lives in cities and is online. Of course, none of this was inevitable, but, of course, all of this happened.
The authors repeatedly criticise Rouseau, his intellectual heritage and the French revolution "consensus", but insist mankind has gotten things terribly wrong these days and archeology and anthropology indicate other, more egalitarian and free societal models are possible (although they rightly point out that freedom and equality are two culturally contingent ideas). In this liberté/fraternité framework, they conclude with the baffling statement (in light of what they spent the previous 500 pages explaining): "civilization" and "complexitiy" always come at the price of human freedoms.
In case you don´t know, the policital systems we have today haven´t been here since forever and very probably will not stay here forever and, climate change aside, mankind is in a better place, materially speaking, now than ever. Plus, the unprecedented levels of physical and mental freedom many, maybe most, of us have today were enabled precisely by "civilization" and "complexitiy".
Do read this book, just don´t take it´s political pretentions seriously
The authors use abundant, and sometimes repetitive, information on relatively recent anthropological and archeological research to take issue with:
(i) the post 17th Century "consensus" around Jean-Jacques Rousseau´s "noble savage" (who, as they insist in case you didn´t already know, was neither noble nor savage) and Thomas Hobbes´s gloomy Leviathan view to the effect that, due to our base instincts, mankind can only be harnessed by autocracies of some form;
(ii) Mircea Eliade´s thesis, long consensual, that "primitive" cultures lived in a circular time of permanent present rooted in a mythical past, mindset that the Old Testament, Greek philosophy and finally the Enlightenmet gradually disrupted, replacing it by the historical linear view we have now, to (for Eliade) catastrophic effect, and
(iii) Karl Jasper´s Axial Era´s thesis to the effect that sometime between the 8th and 2nd Centuries BCE, in the Americas and where now China, Greece and India are, in a remarkable instance of synchronicity, speculative thought emerged (Plato, Budha, Confucius) that emancipated mankind from mythos to logos and religion from imanence to transcendence.
Turns out, they claim, so called "primitive" peoples were fully capable of sophisticated sophistry, as required, for example, from Native Amercian cheftains holding meetings to prepare ad-hoc alliances for war or big scale hunting campaigns.
Also, there were no "Agricultural" or "Neolithical" revolutions, as for many centuries many cultures lived side by side and interacted with each other retaining one or the other technologies and modes of production, and also no correlation between those and the scale and breadth of intercultural interactions, the dimenstion of the communities involved, wether or not they were nomads or sedentary/urban, or the emergence of monarchy, autarcy, or bureaucracy, as some prehistoric cultures were egalitarians, others not, some matriarchal, some patriarchal, some Pacific Northwest tribes cheap like Calvinists centuries before Max Weber etc etc. And there´s no sequence to any of this, as prehistoric (and pre-Columbian) cultures often amoved mong all of these options without any strong correlation between them.
Which is OK, except it doesn´t necessarily contradict Jaspers or Eliade, (although it does outmode Rousseau and Hobbes a bit, but that´s not news). And anyway, the fact remains that 20K years ago no one was a farmer, 1000 years ago most people were, about 90 years ago more people worked in industry than agriculture and nowadays most of mankind lives in cities and is online. Of course, none of this was inevitable, but, of course, all of this happened.
The authors repeatedly criticise Rouseau, his intellectual heritage and the French revolution "consensus", but insist mankind has gotten things terribly wrong these days and archeology and anthropology indicate other, more egalitarian and free societal models are possible (although they rightly point out that freedom and equality are two culturally contingent ideas). In this liberté/fraternité framework, they conclude with the baffling statement (in light of what they spent the previous 500 pages explaining): "civilization" and "complexitiy" always come at the price of human freedoms.
In case you don´t know, the policital systems we have today haven´t been here since forever and very probably will not stay here forever and, climate change aside, mankind is in a better place, materially speaking, now than ever. Plus, the unprecedented levels of physical and mental freedom many, maybe most, of us have today were enabled precisely by "civilization" and "complexitiy".
Do read this book, just don´t take it´s political pretentions seriously
charleshb's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
A fantastic book. Illuminating, it will make you look at and think about the origins of human civilization quite differently. That shift can be a springboard to thinking differently about our future. We've not yet reached the end of history. A better world is possible.