The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber (anthropologist) and David Wengrow (archaeologist)4 min read

Introduction

Since there are memes being passed around Facebook about the book “The Dawn of Everything” vs “Sapiens”, here are my comments from my read of this book a few years ago. I have not read Sapiens yet, so I will not comment on that, although it seems I need to sooner than later.

I. My Comments on the Dawn of Everything

I know a lot of people worship the ground that the late great David Graeber walks on, but the worship of any intellectual is always bad because it creates an emotional blind spot and unwillingness to accept and consider critique, which is what I fear a lot of people will have with this book. That being said…

When I approached reading the book, I was worried about a significant bias with the work and I was not disappointed. The work has issues with a significant bias, an unwillingness to answer questions that conflict with the world view they are writing from, organizational issues, and other issues too. From early on in the book there are issues with how they classify of monumental architecture. Then there are issues with how they talk about flowing into and out of egalitarian and hierarchical social structures, and representing other scholars’ work.

It is really important when you read this book to understand that the work has significant ideological bias so you can read everything with grain a salt and critically question what they are talking about. However, even with the significant problems that this book has, I did take 100 pages worth of notes from the book for some writing I am working on.

II. Break Down of the Significant Issues with the Book by “This is Politics”

I knew there were issues with the book as I was reading it, but I could not put my finger on what exactly the problems were but, fortunately, this anthropologist went through the process of explaining all of the problems I had with the book in a 5 part video series:

1. 10. David Graeber & David Wengrow “The Dawn of Everything” critique: The Wisdom of Kandiaronk (Sep 2021)
2. 10.1 Do “Egalitarian Societies” Exist? David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” (This is Politics, Oct 2021)
3. 10.2 The Dawn of Everything: How Graeber & Wengrow’s book sets us up to fail at politics (This is Politics, Dec 2021)
4. 10.3 The Ingredients of Hierarchy: Graeber & Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, Chapter 3 (This is Politics, Feb 2022)
5. 10.4 What Causes Seasonal Political Structures? Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything Ch. 3

Here is a quote from one the 3 videos that exemplifies some of the issues that are present within this book and how they contextualize (or not) their narrative, and it is in the style that the book writes in:

“No society demonstrates the power of political consciousness more than the members of the McDonalds tribe who shift from hierarchy to equality every week and even every day!  

Workers and managers and franchise owners and corporate executives all form a chain of command of extreme political inequality.  The low ranking workers have to obey dictates on how to dress and how to act and what they can and can’t say, and if they disobey, they are at the mercy of their manages who can eject from the tribe and leave them to fend for themselves, facing eviction from their homes and starvation.  But then, every weekend and at the end of every shift, outside of the grounds of the holy MacDonald’s monumental architecture, even the godlike CEO chief has no power over the lowliest janitor. If they see each other at the grocery store or going for a walk in the hills, they greet each other as equal citizens.

What’s happening here is that McDonald workers understand different political possibilities, and they’re assembling and dismantling hierarchies for games and grand theatre, and expedience, on a weekly and even daily basis.”

10.4 What Causes Seasonal Political Structures? Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything Ch. 3