First of two parts
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Company in 2021, joins other popular history books which garnered global attention with sweeping versions of the whole human story. The review by Jared Spears was in YES Magazine, Winter 2022.
“In 1611, Father Pierre Biard, a French missionary assigned to colonial Canada, wrote home to complain about the locals. Apparently, the Indigenous Mi’kmaq didn’t think much of what they’d seen of European civilization:
‘“They consider themselves better than the French … they say, ‘you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other … you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.’
‘“They are saying these and like things continually.’
“Readers brought up on a certain kind of history may find this account somewhat surprising. To say the least, it is uncommon to read of Native Americans as social theorists probing into European settlers’ psyches. The Dawn of Everything, the new book from which this passage comes, offers many such charged moments. In it, archeologist David Wengrow and the late David Graeber, an anthropologist, public thinker, and activist, confront deep assumptions about how human society developed from its humble origins. By turning the conventional history inside out, the book manages to pose startling questions.
“The Dawn of Everything joins other popular history books which garnered global attention with sweeping versions of the whole human story, including Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005), Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011), and Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (2018). In The Dawn of Everything, each of these big-picture accounts of human history comes in for ample critique. The issue, according to Graeber and Wengrow, is that they rely on and reinforce a flawed framing. Once upon a time, humans lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came farming, then private property, the rise of cities, and ‘the emergence of civilization.’ In this meta-narrative of deep human time, societies require ever-more complex hierarchy, abstract administration, and state institutions as they scale, shedding primitive freedoms and fairness along the way. In the authors’ view, this narrow myth of progress functions in pernicious ways, mostly cropping up ‘when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess.’
“The Dawn of Everything aims to produce new answers to those perennial lamentations. To do so, the authors strive toward a new synthesis of evidence emerging across archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines. They steer clear of traps that have ensnared similar endeavors, like the quest for the origins of inequality that either presupposes a ‘fall from primordial innocence’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jared Diamond), or holds that life pre-civilization was ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ (Thomas Hobbes and Steven Pinker). Rejecting what they describe as essentially a theological debate, Graeber and Wengrow set out to tell a new story of social development, one capable of undoing the myth of the savage and restoring our ancestors to their full humanity.
“The authors plot in detail how the ‘myth of progress’ inherited in the West emerged as a defensive, Eurocentric response to Indigenous critiques.
“Upon contact with Europeans, Native American groups like the Iroquois and Wendat had well-established democratic institutions, and individuals’ material needs were generally guaranteed among their communities. In the face of such radically different social arrangements, apologists for European systems rationalized their own structures by belittling Native Americans’ accomplishments as ‘savagery.’ Whether based on production modes (such as hunting-gathering, farming, or complex urban specialization) or governmental arrangement (tribes, chiefdoms, and states), the resulting narrow models of social development remain more or less baked into history textbooks, right down to the present day.
Continued at thevoice.us/adjustment-proposed-in-view-of-native-american-peoples