The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

there are essentially two projects at play here. one succeeds, the other is unconvincing.

project 1: demonstrate that the human past (and present) is a record of radical variability. people have in fact almost always organised themselves in ways that are unthinkable in our parochial and unreflective contemporary world. and it has nothing to do with progress. the authors spotlight the inappropriate use of other societies as shallow metaphors and superficial lessons for today's societies in influential popular and academic narratives. this is a very important project as it demonstrates how contingent and provisional our current social arrangements are. we are all trying so hard to control our lives and will be made into fools when social relations inevitably shift in unexpected ways in spite of every effort to reify them. by sifting through the archaeological and anthropological record in a both sufficiently thoughtful and aggressive way, this project succeeds.

project 2: demonstrate that an ‘anarchic' form of social organisation is possible and perhaps desirable. this project is more latent, less explicit, but it seems to be where each argument wants to go. here, the authors fall prey to many of the lapses they have identified in other works. there are too many problems to cover without looking uncharitable. the top few for me are: (a) an apparent disregard of how power manifests ‘structurationally' (imo) in interpersonal relations and everyday phenomenon, not just in broad strokes of social organisation. given that most people like being in a society i.e., they don't want everyone else to just fuck off and leave them alone as the book sometimes implies, this is an important mode of analysis. it is unfortunately glossed over in favour of the notion that societies as a collective can choose new paths together through a mystery box process that somehow generates equitable results beloved by all despite a smorgasbord of power dynamics. (b) the dismissal of material agency. i fully agree that environmental determinism is dumb af, but i also think we exercise our will on the world around us based on the materials we can access and the pathways they avail to us. e.g., the climate is doing very poorly but we can't just dream up electric vehicles, we actually need to obtain the damn nickel. and so, where nickel is and what properties it has will determine the options we can bring to the table. nickel's material reality doesn't automatically imply a form of social relations or power structure, but it does imply a constrained starting point for our negotiations with one another. (c) it's fair enough to reject the ontological turn - no one knows what it means and probably societies ‘reason' in more similar ways than we imagine. but we cannot flatten the myriad of knowledge, ethical and aesthetic configurations of different societies (ironically accepted as diverse in their political configurations) and assume they would all make a “common sense” choice to move towards a small ‘f' sort of freedom marked by citizen assemblies and just uprooting the family if the king is being annoying. this conception of the individual seems like a recent invention and despite my personal attraction to the idea of a life shooting the shit, ultimately my communitarian ass would probably not want to live in that society.

overall, because project 1 is so fundamental to social change and yet so hard to parse in the monolithic discursive climate of our world, this book on the whole is a wild success.