The Dawn of Everything

Summary

Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow take apart the standard story of social evolution as one that “has almost nothing to do with the facts”. Early peoples, they argue, moved between different social orders, sometimes with the seasons. So the question becomes “how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality”.

Rationale

We write that dominant dispositions make existing arrangements “feel natural or inevitable”. Here is the long historical case that they aren’t: people kept imagining other arrangements, and living in them.