The Read: David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
A bit of a shift here from my usual format. I’m going to take advantage of having an actual published review of The Dawn of Everything now available for folks to read at The American Scientist and just link to it here.
I’m going to open this thread to comments from anybody who is inclined to tell me what I got wrong or right in this assessment. I’ve been tracking reviews of the book and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a significant book that has inspired such a range of reactions—and what’s interesting is that a lot of the reviews actually seem to agree on some of the substance of their reading of the book but disagree evaluatively about how they feel about that substance.
For example, looking at the exchange between Wengrow and Anthony Appiah in the New York Review of Books, following Appiah’s criticisms of the book in his initial review is interesting. I would sort of agree with Appiah that Graeber and Wengrow often pick an alternative scholarly interpretation of many archaeological and historical cases and lift it up as authoritative, but I’m not bothered by that the way that Appiah apparently is, because the narratives that Graeber and Wengrow are seeking to unsettle, displace or challenge have been doing the same for decades (or centuries). I take that to be a basic purpose of the book: to observe that there are interpretations that are taken as defaults that rest on empirically thin ice (or that are really just conjectures made quite a long time ago that have mysteriously acquired the status of empirical findings) and that there are alternative studies and arguments that deserve to be taken seriously but aren’t because they unsettle some powerful assumptions about how we got from 200,000 years ago to the present. Appiah gets around at the end of his response to Wengrow’s letter to acknowledging that this is a major contribution and accomplishment on their part, but for me that’s the lede rather than the grudging admission. I think the end result is somewhat similar in Appiah’s final comments or in my own review—that many specialists in many fields now should take the opportunity to “refresh the room”, to reconsider long-standing assumptions.
Anyway, the floor is open for responses or thoughts about the book or about my review of it.
No comment here, but thanks for opening 8x7 up for us lurkers.
Nice review. As an archaeologist, one of the frustrating thing about Dawn of Everything is that they claim novelty for ideas that are well-accepted and published. They want to "overturn" tired old narratives. But those narratives were addressed by earlier publications that they decline to cite. (examples: the notion that cities preceded states in early history; the idea that some states could be more collective or democratic, rather than all early states as autocratic). They also use a variety of shoddy scholarly practices, including empty citations and improper use of reasoning by analogy. I was intrigued by your idea that they could have scrapped chapter 2; that is the topic that has gotten the most attention in public discussions.