‘The Dawn of Everything’ Aims to Rewrite the Story of our Shared Past – The New York Times
Reviewing the book in The Nation, the historian Daniel Immerwahr called Graeber a wildly creative thinker who was better known for being interesting than right and asked if the book s confident leaps and hypotheses can be trusted.
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And Immerwahr deemed at least one claim that colonial American settlers captured by Indigenous people almost invariably chose to stay with them ballistically false, claiming that the authors single cited source (a 1977 dissertation) actually argues the opposite.
Wengrow countered that it was Immerwahr who was reading the source wrong. And he noted that he and Graeber had taken care to publish the book s core arguments in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals or deliver them as some of the most prestigious invited lectures in the field.
I remember thinking at the time, why do we have to put ourselves through this? Wengrow said of the process. We re reasonably established in our fields. But it was David who was adamant that it was terribly important.
James C. Scott, an eminent political scientist at Yale whose 2017 book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States also ranged across fields to challenge the standard narrative, said some of Graeber and Wengrow s arguments, like his own, would inevitably be thrown out as other scholars engaged with them.
But he said the two men had delivered a fatal blow to the already-weakened idea that settling down in agricultural states was what humans had been waiting to do all along.
But the most striking part of The Dawn of Everything, Scott said, is an early chapter on what the authors call the Indigenous critique. The European Enlightenment, they argue, rather than being a gift of wisdom bestowed on the rest of the world, grew out of a dialogue with Indigenous people of the New World, whose trenchant assessments of the shortcomings of European society influenced emerging ideas of freedom.
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via www.nytimes.com
Well, I’m going to try to read the book. I’m sympathetic to the anarchism but not the Marxism. As to the claim that those who escaped the Puritans preferred to stay with the Indians — well, of course they would, if they had any sense. And ditto for moving from hunter-gatherers to primitive agriculture. Here’s news for those of you who have never worked on a farm: It sucks. Except for the meals. They were pretty good. It’s the exact opposite of being an h/g. Instead of chilling, then hunting, then singing or whatever, it’s just work, work, work all the time. I’d choose being an h/g any day of the week.