The Dawn of Everything

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  1. (original)late

    (original)late Banned

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    "The phrase “the dawn of everything” first struck David Wengrow, one of the authors of The Dawn of Everything, as marvelously absurd. Everything. Everything! It was too gigantic, too rich, too loonily sublime. Penguin, the book’s august publisher, would hate it.

    Citing this existing research, and more from a range of social scientists, Wengrow and Graeber argue that the life of hunter-gatherers before widespread farming was nothing like “the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory,” which hold that early humans lived in small bands in which they acted almost entirely on instinct, either brutish (as in Hobbes) or egalitarian and innocent (as in Rousseau). In contrast, the Dawn authors represent prehistoric societies as “a carnival parade of political forms,” a profusion of rambunctious social experiments, where everything from kinship codes to burial rites to gender relations to warfare were forever being conceived, reconceived, satirized, scrapped, and reformed. In an act of intellectual effrontery that recalls Karl Marx, Wengrow and Graeber use this insight to overthrow all existing dogma about humankind—to reimagine, in short, everything.

    The hardest punch thrown by The Dawn is its implicit rejection of Margaret Thatcher’s infamous assertion that “there is no alternative” to feral capitalism, a claim still abbreviated in Britain as “TINA.” Laying waste to TINA, The Dawn opens a kaleidoscope of human possibilities, suggesting that today’s neoliberal arrangements might one day be remembered as not an epoch but a fad."

    Got a copy coming from interlibrary loan..



    https://www.wired.com/story/david-wengr ... ket-newtab
     

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