num_pages: 692
description: A dramatically new understanding of human history challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolutionfrom the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state democracy and inequalityand revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.For generations our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlikeeither 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 whats 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.
language: English
title: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux