Slow Read Book Club: Chapter 1, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber, David Wengrow

Chipping away at my anxiety over my tsundoku, the accumulated and unread pile of books in my anti-library...

I am a voracious reader of fiction books for pleasure. I escape with crime thrillers every day, but I can’t say the same for non-fiction. They are designated for work and deep focus. I require a slow approach to reading academic books, digesting ideas, and critically dissecting social theories. I went into academia because I love living in the mind and playing with concepts and theories.

I write and host an anthropology book club to build a space that has withered in the academic system. Let’s start with one thick work that we are currently reading at the club: Graeber and Wengrow’s, attempt to re-write human pre-history by doing a historiography of history writing.

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How to read

I’ve read David Graeber’s¹ work to know that he rambles. He writes as he speaks (which means the text is accessible) but this also means the flow tends to jump around from concept to concept. It becomes difficult to track the overall book structure, especially when you stop for an extended period. This style of writing may confuse you about your position as a reader in their thought process. However, it does have chapter summaries at the end and I suggest to read it before starting the chapter if you can. It is difficult to box their thoughts and arguments in a standalone chapter but it’s the quickest way to structure the series.

Main criticism

Like the previous popular anthropology books I’ve read², one major criticism I have is the way my discipline uses the comparative method. There seem to be random equivalences occurring between the past and present, between people, things, and behaviour units without full explanation. This communicates the impression that everything is mere speculation, not science. I understand the constraints of the popular format but next time, include a footnote about the methods, especially on reconstructing the past with the present and some of the unwritten frameworks that archaeologists hold.

Chapter One

The book starts off with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Protestant philosopher and writer. Why? Though they don’t explicitly write this, Rousseau’s writings and propositions become the bedrock of the Age of Enlightenment. His essay on equality spurred the development of what we now recognise as:

• modern ideas in governance

• the separation of church and state

• the social progress from the state of nature to the state of inequality as a result of the division of labour and the rule of law and private property.

The authors built their book’s argument by questioning inequality. ‘What does eliminating equality even mean? Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity?’ Although these resonate with our current crop of challenges, they raise Rousseau’s position to unearth the implications of his argument today:

• Linear progression of society. Graeber and Wengrow question the linear view of human history and progress, particularly the hunter-gatherer to the sedentary trope, that is, from the framework of simplicity to complexity.

  • They ask, ‘…Has ‘Western civilization’ really made life better for everyone?’ For instance, ‘including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.’

• State of equality in the past. If we question the inequalities of today, it is inevitable that we romanticise a past that the authors question as equally wrong. It is not difficult to think that Rousseau was also in a similar state of mind at that time looking back at a mythical Garden of Eden, a state of nature espoused by natural law theorists in the seventeenth century, that assign simple societies as ‘exemplars of primordial times’.

  • The authors ask a good question, how come Rousseau and his contemporaries become so aware or keen to write about inequality in the seventeenth century that the Academie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon conducted an essay writing contest, asking, ‘what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?’

  • The authors asked why was inequality important then. They then answered it by presenting an implicit context during the time of Rousseau: they were exposed to foreign lands and groups and thereby saw a reflection of seventeenth-century European society (and different ways of life)

  • Graeber and Wengrow highlight that Rosseau submitted his essay by positioning himself as a critic of the French social system, and eventually published this piece as the Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind in 1754. Rousseau’s influence has come to be what the authors point to as a failing that we are still paying for today.

• One fatal Rousseau consequence that Graeber and Wengrow unmask is that the attribution of what we understand now as individual freedom actually came from First Nation Indians in New French (Canada) and Northeast America with which French colonisers and pillagers came into contact. They call this the indigenous critique of Western civilisation. A bold move and one that is actually plausible and not unlikely.

Key Takeaways

There are numerous mindblowing surprises as I read the first chapter.

1. The goal here is to find the correct questions in which to pose the interpretation of archaeological data and thereby re-interpret human pre-history: the most important of which is, why can't we start from complexity to complexity rather than the simplicity-to-complexity framework? That is, why do we have to think that early populations were simply governed by power or ritual and not by adventure or risk or making complex decision-making about social life? I ask, is this an outcome of our scientific method? or simply training (i.e. Rousseau’s terrible influence?)

2. The role of other cultures, the indigenous narrative, helps us to reframe our ideas of a complexity-to-complexity paradigm for our history and prehistory. This will eliminate our Garden of Eden baggage that has characterised mainstream thought. They explain this more in a rather remarkable yet long chapter two.   

1. I want to give credit to David Wengrow’s role in providing the archaeological data and materials to their arguments. Although I have not read much of his work, you can discern his writing in between the ramblings of the other David. I am pretty sure that he played a major role in Graeber’s development of his arguments from their long working relationship and vice versa.

2. I’m specifically referring to Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy which like this book, also suffer from severe random comparison about incommensurate units. Let’s say, Graeber and Wengrow, like any good anthropologists, don’t want to equate contemporary foraging groups with prehistoric groups. And yet, they haphazardly compare them with prehistoric archaeological data! Without a chapter explaining their comparison method, this analysis style does not benefit the general reader.