Anything Grows: Some Remarks On "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Abstract

The article is a detailed review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The author maps out a problematic context of world history as it is being written nowadays. So called Anthropocene basically means the impossibility of world history written exclusively from a human point of view. Now, world history is to be written from the perspective of a NonHuman Other (be it carbon footprint, microbes, technology, and so on). Moreover, this Other is regularly elaborated within the framework of big data. Graeber and Wengrow contest this trend, but, at the same time, endorse it by other means. NonHuman Other, chosen by the authors, is the human race itself in its “indigenous” state. Data, accumulated by archeology and anthropology, allows them to refute and ridicule the narrative of “Agricultural revolution” which suggested a sudden shift from hunters’ and foragers’ way of life to first farmers with their sedentary existence conducive to highly hierarchized societies and centralization. But Graeber and Wengrow overlook the fact that any narrative always functions as a skeletal generalization, and it is the reason why their arguments sometimes reveal misunderstanding of stylistic and strategic peculiarities of different types or genres of parascientific writing (including punditry). Graeber and Wengrow do not substitute any other narrative for “Agricultural revolution”, they content themselves with undermining it by a plethora of anthropological data presenting a multitude of outliers communities. Striving to dismantle the basics of Rousseauist myth (implying abundance of indigenous life and “fall” into civilization), the authors actually rehabilitate it, at least partially. So native Americans supposedly lived in a much freer and richer society that we do. At the end of the day, the culprit of the fall into a civilized state is declared to be a tripartite power taken almost for granted.