![]() It’s easy to latch on to an exceptional event that serves our preconceptions, which is precisely what the Davids argue that we’ve done. What about the rest of humanity’s 200,000? But even that only happened in the last 10,000 years or so. This greatly disrupted other ways of being, and reshaped landscapes until the new ecologies practically compelled other groups’ participation in agrarian practices. Crosby called “ecological imperialism”, in which their cultivated plants and animals overran other ecosystems. When farming did take hold, though, there were opportunities for some communities to engage in what Alfred W. These challenges were exacerbated by the Ice Age, in which peoples dedicated to farming practices were hit hardest by changing environmental conditions. Early agrarian practices were also often taken on reluctantly, out of economies of deprivation that compelled early humans to give up lives less tethered to the long term investment of animal and plant farming. This ties into an argument the Davids made in Chapter 5, when noting that treating culture as something that spreads among passive recipients doesn’t reflect the role of rejection (as in, refusing to do what one’s neighbors do) in the work of cultural identity formation. As archaeological research expanded, though, the discovery of concurrent sites of domestication revealed a far greater diversity of cultural arrangements around the practice. This doesn’t accord with a great many agrarian societies past and present, but at first there were clear correlations found between sites with animal and plant domestication and those with other markers of “modern” civilization, including propertied economic systems, centralized administration, and writing. One of the first myths the Davids dispel in Chapter 7 is the assumption that agriculture inherently yields the creation of private property. But can they also reveal anything about the ideological landscape that contributes to the real human-agency crisis we face today? The Dawn of Everything: Chapters 7 & 8 These ancient deep-dives have a great deal to teach us about the fluidity of human history and contemporary research biases. Today, we’re taking these questions into Chapter 7: The Ecology of Freedom and Chapter 8: Imaginary Cities. So have we not seen significant upheavals? Are we truly stuck? Or do we simply lack sufficient personal agency to combat some of our era’s greatest problems, like the petroleum industry, the war machines, and economic policies concentrating wealth? A whole war opened up in Eastern Europe, around which Western fortunes and financial power centers are shifting. ![]() Government mobilization in pandemic to help major corporations make record-breaking profits while the rest of us struggled showed us that massive system changes were possible: just, very rarely in favor of individual citizens. Online technologies allow us to see the buffoonery of the most affluent and wealthy much faster, too. One immediate methodological flaw leaps out: the uneven time scales under consideration when we talk about millennia of so-called “prehistory”, and contrast its dynamic range with life in the last few centuries under industrial capitalism.īut another makes itself apparent most every time we look at the news. And the present-day crisis the Davids chose? The idea that we are now “stuck”, while our ancestors were not. They also argue, as in Chapters 5 & 6, that how we define ideas like culture and the rise of agriculture tells us more about contemporary priorities than the lives of early humans.īut I find myself challenging a key premise of the text, the further we deep-dive into it: namely, the very pop-sci driven idea that revisiting human history is only relevant if it can answer a crisis in the present. The authors argue that our paleolithic and neolithic ancestors were far more creative and proactive than we often acknowledge in our histories. I’m a huge fan of deep-diving into history to grapple better with the present, whether in fiction or humanist essays, but last week we were dealing with a lot of living history, especially in the US, so this series on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanityseemed a poor choice to rival the clickbait sensationalism of a certain indictment and its fallout.Īnd yet, there was something about the tumult of those proceedings that I suspect matters a great deal to how we grapple with the arguments of David Graeber and David Wengrow (the “Davids”) in this work of anthropological historiography. ![]() If we broaden our historical lens, can we change how we think about large-group human relationships today? Reading Time: 11 minutes In Chapters 7 and 8, we look at the selective ways that researchers have categorized early human ecologies, especially in large group settings.
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