More grousing over Dawn of Everything..
The two authors belabor the concept that people in antiquity spent every moment of their lives, seemingly “self consciously” thinking about each and every action that they did in their lives always with the analysis of weather society would be self-consciously egalitarian, or I suppose given what they say in other places “experimentating” with social organization, even playfully exploring things like chattel slavery..
@GhostOnTheHalfShell I listened to the audiobook. Loved the snarkiness of it. Very appealing to my ignorant-ish layman self. Learned bunches.
Oh absolutely there is a great deal to learn. I have some problems with some of their targets, where they completely misrepresented the people they dismissed
David Graeber and Wengrow.
I should emphasize here, the book is filled with remarkable volumes of information… but is greatly diminished by the ax they grind.
Ah, thought you were saying someone complaining about them. Lol
I pretty much agree with them. A majority of previous anthropologic work I've read, admittedly only in english, treats other cultures like they were children that hadn't reached western levels of sophisticated understanding or brain development yet. They do harp.
Yes, it’s very true. Where I get excessively irritated is the idea that anthropology is a discipline uniform takes this idea.
As I said, my own experience in the mid 80s taking anthropology coursework in the UC system is very contradictory to the way the two authors imply.
It is as though they are setting themselves up as the unique bastion of some special interpretation when it is very clear that reality was much more diverse
Graeber is an agressive personality and his style is to let you know he doesn't suffer fools. I get why he's irritating. He's been around pushing this approach for decades along with coaching revolutionaries. Your departments might have incorporated some of his influence. This book was suppose to allow the average person to get a grounding in other, maybe more appropo to the present world, ways of doing things. I'm quite sure he didn't care if it pissed off the whole academic community. Probably intended it to. 😸💚
I’m a bit less generous about it. The UC Berkeley department is one of the top anthropology departments in the world. The professors there were not stodgy institutionalists.
So I will continue chafe at the idea that somehow only Graeber carried this torch. The reason why I am very salty about him is because of his and Wengrow’s blatant misrepresentation of what cultural anthropologist said about the factors that lead to society to be egalitarian or hierarchical.
Or “playful” with food, collection or farming.. as if you know they were like toddlers playing with the bowl of spaghetti that they had grown throwing it against the wall or something of that nature.
The two authors are patently offensive suggesting that anthropology thought of cultural change over time as being a teleological.
The book was written after 2000.. when I was taking anthropology classes in the mid 80s, in the UC system reputation of teleological cultural evolution was the norm
I continue to read this book through gritted teeth often, because so much of it clearly has a specific agenda, and they labor words like self-conscious or playful or experimentation or we don’t know what egalitarian is. Nobody has a good definition of it… even though egalitarianism is very simply defined as inverted dominance hierarchy.
That is to say that the rank and file hold dominion and no subgroup dominates the entire community
We often have to suffer to pry info out of academia. At least he can form a sentence. 😉
@GhostOnTheHalfShell I'm generally a fan of Graeber, this one is on my to read list. Sounds like I need to steel myself against this "playful" narrative while reading. It does seem unlikely that early societies spent a lot of time naval gazing.
They do sort of carry on about like :”we don’t really know how these societies were organized. It’s very clear that they were constantly experimenting with social order” to which any rational person might be a bit exasperated with the idea a community sat down one day and said “hey why don’t we play around with chattel slavery?
Yet, there’s such a treasure trove of information and other thought in the book that I still highly recommend it
The some degree, I understand what they are trying to push, but somebody like myself who took enough undergraduate anthropology coursework to get a degree in the topic of it feels forced. My view of the book was greatly soured very early on because I happen to be reading “hierarchy in the forest.” by Boehm and so their early dismissal of the consensus body of work that that author was writing about stuck in my craw.
This isn’t to say that the book isn’t worthwhile to read..
Just a lot less comfortable to read.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell Yes, still planning on reading it at some point, appreciate the further clarification.
