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bombycillacedrorum 's review for:
The Dawn of Everything
by David Wengrow, David Graeber
Really solid 4, maybe a 4.5. Hard to make it a full 5 just because the opening 100 pages or so are a rehash of Hobbes vs. Rousseau with some background of why Enlightenment philosophers even started talking about this stuff (spoiler alert: it was possibly/probably because Eurasia now knew North and South America existed and had people who lived very differently from them), which is necessary to then thoroughly take apart but which is a bit of a slog for me to read through.
Anyway, this is a great read for anyone interested in huge picture history/anthropology of Homo sapiens-type stuff, as it really made me think a lot about assumptions of how society is organized. Even if it turns out some of their assumptions may be wrong or people don't fully agree with their ultimate conclusions about the extreme flexibility of humanity (I don't know enough to really critique), there are so MANY interesting tidbits from societies around the world and through time, from the fact that the richly furnished "kinglike" Paleolithic burials we've found mostly involve differently abled people to the apparent social housing projects of Teotihuacan to the matriarchy (?) of Bronze Age Crete to the fall of Cahokia and what that may mean for people's ability to consciously reject and walk away from totalizing governmental systems.
I think this does a pretty good job as well of not making our ancestors or making Indigenous people either sinners or saints, either noble savages or deranged lunatics, but making them people, with agency, who thought consciously about what they were doing and how they were arranging their societies.
Anyway, this is a great read for anyone interested in huge picture history/anthropology of Homo sapiens-type stuff, as it really made me think a lot about assumptions of how society is organized. Even if it turns out some of their assumptions may be wrong or people don't fully agree with their ultimate conclusions about the extreme flexibility of humanity (I don't know enough to really critique), there are so MANY interesting tidbits from societies around the world and through time, from the fact that the richly furnished "kinglike" Paleolithic burials we've found mostly involve differently abled people to the apparent social housing projects of Teotihuacan to the matriarchy (?) of Bronze Age Crete to the fall of Cahokia and what that may mean for people's ability to consciously reject and walk away from totalizing governmental systems.
I think this does a pretty good job as well of not making our ancestors or making Indigenous people either sinners or saints, either noble savages or deranged lunatics, but making them people, with agency, who thought consciously about what they were doing and how they were arranging their societies.