BOOKS+FILMS+AUDIO
Illustrations by Frances Murphy
A Bigger Picture Gives Our Ancestors Their Full Humanity Jared Spears
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity David Graeber and david wengrow Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
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 also 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 huntergatherers. 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 yes ! winter
2022 ::
yesmagazine . org
63
