Au commencement était...

Like a lot of good books this one gets boiled down in the last pages:

We began this book with a quote which refers to the Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society's history when its frames of reference undergo a shift, a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols when the lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred and, therefore, real change is possible.

...our scientific means of understanding the past ...has been advancing with dizzying speed. Scientists in 2020 are ...encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar but now understood in entirely different ways.

In developing the scientific means to know our own past, we have exposed the mythical substructure of our social science. What once appeared unassailable axioms, the stable points around which our self-knowledge is organized, is scattering like mice. What is the purpose of all this new knowledge if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become? If not, in other words, to rediscover the meaning of our third basic freedom. The freedom to create new and different forms of social reality.

The commentary for this book is ridiculous: “revolutionary”, “intellectual feast”, “genuinely ground breaking”, “a marvel of a book”—seriously? But, really, this book is incredible.

To start with, I cannot grasp how they wrote these 700 pages of unending extremely researched examples and arguments, articulated in an extremely convincing but also almost fun way. This is a life’s work.

What this book is doing is presenting a lot of examples with multiple references and explanations of multiple social structures of the past. It—very convincingly—answers questions on the origin of inequality, on the origin and possibility of democratic cities, on the fluctuation of social norms. Kandiaronk and the Wendat of North America have definitely become my favourite.

But, mostly, what this book wants to say is that across history we can really see humanity experimenting with so many different social structures; so what happened and we’re stuck with the same one for a while now?

I definitely recommend this book to everyone—including all my friends who cannot see democracy working on a large scale because of the large scale!

A favourite excerpt:
“This is why the English word ‘free’ is actually derived from a root meaning ‘friend’. Slaves could not have friends because they could not make commitments to others, since they were entirely under someone else’s power and their only obligation was to do exactly what their master said. If a Roman legionary was captured in battle and enslaved, then managed to escape and return home, he had to go through an elaborate process of restoring all his social relationships, including remarrying his wife, since the act of enslaving him was considered to have severed all previous relationships. The West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson has referred to this as a condition of ‘social death’.”

This book suffers from two things in terms of its writing and structure. First, there's Graeber's desire to compress as much information into one space as humanly possible, even to the detriment of his own argument and the discussion he wants to push people to have. The second is that it seems, if I'm reading into both authors' writing styles correctly, Wengrow's desire to flesh out those concepts with more detail to further support them. (I say that because I've checked a few of his articles, and he has a tendency to develop even more focused detail than Graeber.)

I could be wrong about who was doing what, but regardless? The end result is a book that is a slog to get through and frequently leaves me forgetting half of what I've read, going back to skim it and remind myself about what they were discussing, and then trying to figure out what most of it has to do with the point being made. Which, yeah, the topics discussed do relate. But it's such a winding detour through excruciating detail that it makes it hard to focus on the overall picture that they're trying to get us to see.

So much of this would've benefitted from focused case studies rather than intertwining and switching between each of them. It also would've dealt better with more clear (instead of verbose and annoyingly lengthy) section titles that could serve as functional reminders rather than quippy sayings.

Overwhelmingly, I wasn't amused with most of this. Despite the obvious amount of time this had to have taken in order to gather all the resources and research, the writing feels rushed and confused. It doesn't feel nearly as solid as it really could've been.

This book gives an extremely refreshing perspective of the history of human societies, including (but importantly not culminating in) our own.

The book is extremely interesting for its thorough presentation of a wide array of human societies along. It rejects the notion often taken by many, that societies throughout the world and throughout history, are merely evolutionary stages culminating in our own. Instead, they make an effort of showing just how remarkably diverse, unpredictable and complex societies through history seem to have been already back in the Central European Paleolithic at the end of the last Ice Age - rather than living in some child-like, innocent state of nature, they show, people seem to have formed large, continent-spanning spheres of kinship and hospitality, and to have displayed a quite surprising flexibility in their societal arrangements, seemingly effortlessly alternating between libertarian and strongly hierarchical arrangements with the change of the seasons.

The main thesis of the book is that our societal arrangements, rather than being driven by material determinism, is driven by conscious decisions made by people with a high level of political knowledge and experience, even dating back to the oldest of times. That humans seem to have developed and abolished both wars, autocracy and other similar phenomena, multiple times thoughout (pre-)history and throughout the world.

Some of these insights were genuinely surprising to me, having grown up with classical views of history. Some hiding in plain sight, such as how we tend to view some eras in history as important, and brush off others as "dark ages" or mere intermissions between the good stuff, and how this reflects more about our own view of what is important than anything else. How we tend to see e.g. the advent of agriculture as a kind of point of no return which changed the way Humans arranged themselves forever, while in reality, agriculture had multiple false starts, seemed to be a mere side hustle for humanity for millennia, and how some societies were even actively abandoning it in favor of foraging, seemingly not liking the feeling of confinement and dedication to one particular source of food, that comes with e.g. grain farming.

Or how we tend to tell the story of how the increased complexity of urban life must automatically give rise to more authoritarian forms of society in order to avoide chaos and collapse, while the archeological data - at least in the authores' interpretation - seem to point in the opposite direction: That centuries or even millennia seemed to pass between the appearance of the first city states, and the first signs of large scale centralized power, and how institutions like monarchy seems to have arisen, not as a necessary result of this urben lifestyle, but rather in small groups of oppositional people surrounding these city states, and then later having spread into the city states themselves.

Another really interesting claim of theirs is the influence of native american intellectuals (I love how they insist on using dignified language like that about people who are too often written off as "chieftains", "medicine men" and other infantilizing language) on the european ideas of Enlightenment. As the writer put it, "the present day European would probably recognize more of their world view in that of the 17th century Wendat than of the 16th century French, with their complete rejection of ideas such as personal freedom and equality". This was another one of those shifts of perspective that shouldn't be almost dizzying, but certainly was - but which seems very hard to reject once it's sunk in.

The emphasis on the rejection of materialist historical determinism can be a bit of a hard pill to swallow for a classick Marxist like myself. It certainly challenges the classical Marxian narrative of how Human societies have moved from "primitive communism" over evolutionary stages through slave society, feudalism, to modern day capitalism as a result of soulless, almost mechanical forces of History. But I think it is a good kind of challenge: It reminds us the dialectic nature of Historical Materialism which Marx and Engels emphasized, but many of their followers tend to forget: That humans shape their own history and make their own choices, but do not get to choose the circumstances and conditions in which those choices have to be made. It does not deny the influence of material conditions on the greater strides of history, but demands that we take a more complex, less simplistic view on the relation between humans and their surroundings. It is the kind of challenge to Marxist philosophy that Einstein was to Newton, not the kind of challenge that the Church was to Darwin.

¿Cómo se explica que la gran mayoría de los seres humanos estamos obligados a cumplir órdenes toda la puta vida, salvo cuatro privilegiados que lo son por nacimiento? ¿Cómo hemos llegado hasta aquí? ¿Hay una “ley de hierro” de las sociedades que nos obliga? Graeber y Wengrow, examinando los descubrimientos arqueológicos de las últimas décadas y repasando la antropología moderna, sostienen la tesis contraria: la Humanidad resistió muchos milenios esta organización social tan injusta, y no solamente en sociedades “primitivas” de cazadores-recolectores, sino también en ciudades de cierto tamaño que dependían de la agricultura y el comercio. El patriarcado y la desigualdad social no son el resultado de un proceso inevitable.
Al igual que el tratado de Graeber sobre el origen del dinero, tardaré en olvidar este libro y sus tesis. Qué diferencia con los bestsellers de no-ficción al uso, estilo Pinker, y con las mierdecillas para el día del padre como el del dúo cómico Arsuaga & Millás que leí hace poco.
Lo único negativo es su extensión, es tan prolijo en ejemplos y explicaciones que se convierte en un tocho enorme. Entiendo por qué lo hace (afirmaciones fuera de lo corriente necesitan pruebas contundentes) pero a veces resulta agotador.

UPDATE (March 2024): I'm going to amend the review I posted here about 18 months ago. That was very negative, and although I still don't like the book very much, there is more I want to say about it.

So, I've just finished reading "The Dawn of Everything" a second time. Many people whom I respect seem to think it's great, but I have a different opinion.

My biggest problem with this book is that it promises something that it never delivers. The authors begin by considering certain questions, leading us to believe they can answer them for us. They start with this: What is the origin of inequality in human societies? Soon, however, they dismiss that issue, saying it's basically meaningless and pointless to ask. Then they address the beginnings of agriculture, and show convincingly that many common beliefs about this are wrong. They explore the concept of civilization, discussing different meanings and different iterations that can be traced through history and even prehistory.

This is all useful and generally interesting (even if the presentation is often needlessly prolix). But then, more than halfway through the book, they finally get around to asking what they say is the key question: Where did it all go wrong, and how did we get to where we are today? After several tens of thousands of words more, they conclude by saying it's complicated, and more research is needed. That's honest, I suppose, and would be the proper scientific statement to make if it's where their work so far has taken them.

BUT — they could and should have told us that at the beginning of the book!! Instead they make us slog through hundreds of pages, plow through chapter after poorly-written chapter, enduring all the tedium until the ultimate letdown. The whole thing has been a tease.

ORIGINAL REVIEW (September 2022): These guys have a few interesting ideas they could have told us about in maybe 50 or 60 pages. But instead we get 500 pages of unreadable word vomit. Save your money and your time.

It's feels weird to describe a 700 page book as the very beginning of a conversation, but this is, and I think the authors meant for it to be. I haven’t read anything in a long time that stirred so many questions up in my mind and also gave me such hope for humanity's future. I'm also frustrated because so many of the questions I now have don't yet have answers. (Also, I realize I need to read up on feminist anthropologists' theories about the origins of patriarchy--which is at the heart of this book even if it isn't explored in depth--and that will be a big project.)

The book is repetitive and intimidatingly long. I am open to rebuttals of its points, and I am not knowledgeable enough to know if the authors' interpretations are correct (though they seem well-argued to me). But I loved reading this book, and I really hope Graeber and Wengrow are right.

Good lord this is a massive book (don't let the page count fool you).
In terms of writing style:
- everything is written clearly, there are no unexplained references to political or scientific figures, no over-use of scientific wording or reliance on other works to explain concepts (the importance of this cannot be overstated)
- sentences kind of flow together too much, I found myself highlighting dozens of pages at once, because that's quite literally how long it took to state something sometimes
- there was an overuse of question -> long unpacking of question -> answer posed as question -> unpacking of answer posed as question -> proof of answer. I get that the question needed to be asked in an appealing way, to get people like me to keep reading, but for backtracking this is going to be painful as shit.
On the content:
- detailed to death, especially as an amateur it got very overwhelming at some points, especially as there are sometimes pages of what I felt like completely unnecessary context
- an actually fresh view of history is given, not just a slightly different reiteration of "common-sense" projected backwards in time
- on top of my previous point, it's also optimistic in spirit
In terms of information
- if you're going into this to have the "Origin of Everything" question answered with some brand new scientific breakthrough you will be sorely disappointed. Most of questions that I had are not answered, but rendered useless in this new view of history the authors show
- it's up to date and references very recent (and very old) research
- there's a lot of information given out in general, as I've explained it's very detailed, so you do kind of get a decent overview of history as well, although if that's what you're after there's better books