Binding: Hardcover
Description: Instant NEW YORK Times Bestseller A dramatically new understanding of human history challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state democracy and inequality and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike either free and equal innocents or thuggish and warlike. Civilization we are told could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or alternatively by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today including the origins of farming property cities democracy slavery and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter - gatherers what were they doing all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone and more full of playful hopeful possibilities than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range animated by curiosity moral vision and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black - and - White Illustrations
Title: The Dawn Of Everything A New History Of Humanity
Author(s): Wengrow David
Publisher: Farrar Straus And Giroux
Barcode: 9780374157357
Pages: 704 Pages
Language: English
Publication Date: 11/9/2021
Category: Social & Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography