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 c...
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? what was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"? 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.
david graeber is a professor of anthropology at the london school of economics. his many books include the utopia of rules, the democracy project and the bestselling debt: the first 5,000 years. a frequent guest on the bbc, he writes for, among others, the guardian, strike!, the baffler and new left review. he lives in london.
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now, we should be clear here: social theory, always, necessarily, involves a bit of simplification. for instance, almost any human action might be said to have a political aspect, an economic aspect, a psycho-sexual aspect and so forth. social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there's just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. as a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of karl marx, sigmund frued or claude levi-strauss being only particular salient cases in point. one must simplify the world to discover something new... (查看原文)
2赞2022-03-16 06:47:14
—— 引自第75页
if human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ how did we end up in one single mode? how did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? how did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? if we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing? (查看原文)
第一章总结： 作者的目的是重新书写人类历史，改写目前通行但错误的叙述和叙述逻辑，改写盛行的以不平等 (inequality) 为开端发问的人类历史思考与叙述方式。 目前大历史的主流叙述其实都在一个错误的设问下展开，即探寻不平等的起源是什么 (what is the origin of inequality)...
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还没人写过短评呢
还没人写过短评呢