The dawn of everything a new history of humanity
A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution -- from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality -- and revealing new possibilities for human emancipatio...
| Main Authors: | Graeber, David (Author), Wengrow, D. (Author) |
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| Format: | Downloads eBook Books eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2021.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
Go to Downloadable eBook Here. |
| Summary: |
A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution -- from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social 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 |
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| Physical Description: |
1 online resource |
| Format: |
Requires OverDrive Read (file size: N/A KB) or Adobe Digital Editions (file size: 4201 KB) or Kobo app or compatible Kobo device (file size: N/A KB) or Amazon Kindle (file size: N/A KB). |
| ISBN: |
9780374721107 |
| Author Notes: |
He earned his BA in anthropology from State University of New York at Purchase in 1984. He earned his masters and doctorate from the University of Chicago. He did ethnographic research in central Madagascar which he used for his PhD thesis (1997). He was a prolific author. His books included Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (2013), The Utopia of Rules (2015), Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), and in fall 2021, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow. David Graeber died on September 2, 2020 at the age of 59. (Bowker Author Biography) |