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hrgisahero 's review for:
The Dawn of Everything
by David Wengrow, David Graeber
Let me be clear, I do think there are occasional issues with the analysis in this book, it is not perfect - Graeber & Wengrow push beautifully back against ideas of inevitable progress and the ways that many people cast ideas back into history based on the state our current world has reached. However, they at times, I think, fall into this trap themselves with speculative reimagining instead of sitting in the discomfort of “we can’t know with our current evidence”.
This caveat aside, it is such an important read for anyone looking at historical politics and anthropology, at least if you’re getting started. They push back on arbitrary and harmful assumptions by people like Jared Diamond and Yuval Hariri, the latter of whom seems to have essentially written fiction in his books and been celebrated for his ideas based on wild speculation and heavily cherry-picked evidence. I think world history generally does suffer from a teleological fallacy and overspeculation, and I thought the decentering of an Aristotelian constitutional cycle and other such ideas is an important contribution. Further, though, I think it is most needed in that it reminds us of the complexity and diversity of the human experience and history, and that much is possible if we are willing to imagine. I think they whaled on schismogenesis a little too much but it’s strikes me as a very real and plausible idea - we do seek to create in-groups and out-groups all the time, and it happens on larger scales. And the idea of play, while maybe a bit infantilizing in certain discussion (why is one type of war just war and another a play war - depending on how deeply you go down, all wars could be argued as a kind of staged or arbitrary action) is a good reminder of unstructured human nature. I enjoyed the categorizing of three rules of freedom, a good way of setting up the general argument. Overall, everyone should set aside Hariri and just read this instead.
This caveat aside, it is such an important read for anyone looking at historical politics and anthropology, at least if you’re getting started. They push back on arbitrary and harmful assumptions by people like Jared Diamond and Yuval Hariri, the latter of whom seems to have essentially written fiction in his books and been celebrated for his ideas based on wild speculation and heavily cherry-picked evidence. I think world history generally does suffer from a teleological fallacy and overspeculation, and I thought the decentering of an Aristotelian constitutional cycle and other such ideas is an important contribution. Further, though, I think it is most needed in that it reminds us of the complexity and diversity of the human experience and history, and that much is possible if we are willing to imagine. I think they whaled on schismogenesis a little too much but it’s strikes me as a very real and plausible idea - we do seek to create in-groups and out-groups all the time, and it happens on larger scales. And the idea of play, while maybe a bit infantilizing in certain discussion (why is one type of war just war and another a play war - depending on how deeply you go down, all wars could be argued as a kind of staged or arbitrary action) is a good reminder of unstructured human nature. I enjoyed the categorizing of three rules of freedom, a good way of setting up the general argument. Overall, everyone should set aside Hariri and just read this instead.