the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity (david graeber & david wengrow)

It would be foolhardy to attempt to parse a book which sets out to do what the title suggests. To respond to it with anything less than a fifty page dissertation feels somewhat blasphemous. As such, perhaps the best way of approaching this brief review is to be as personal and subjective as possible. A few years ago, Guillermo Amato and I travelled to Michoacan to work on a documentary about the influence of Thomas More on the Purepecha, an indigenous people from that region, whose language and customs live on. What became increasingly apparent is that More’s book, Utopia, was itself indebted to accounts of the new world which were filtering back to Europe. More frames Utopia as a rendition of the account of a sailor from Amerigo Vespuccio’s expedition to the new world, so in many ways what we realised was nothing more than a statement of the obvious. However, whilst Utopia is perhaps one of the most read theoretical texts from the 16th century, few seem to analyse its origins.

Graeber and Wengrow only mention More in passing. But the whole slant of their investigation echoes, in infinitely more detail, our own journey. The book opens with the stated aim of both offering the perspective of the indigenous people’s of their European visitors, and also investigating the nature of these indigenous societies, not merely at this point in history, but over the course of 5000 years. The authors specialised in anthropology and archeology and they employ these skills and many more to their investigations. The result of these, as the title suggests, disrupts our Eurocentric, post-Enlightenment consciousness, questioning everything about the society we have constructed and inhabit in a western orientated world. (The very use of words such as ‘western’, ‘indigenous’, even ‘society’ become problematic through their lens, but for now they will have to suffice.)

Of course, there has always been the doubt as to the viability and desirability of this society, all the more so now that we know to what extent it would appear to be an inadvertently suicidal one. The authors tend to steer clear of environmental thinking, preferring to investigate notions of equality and political and social structures, although what I think Marx might call the fetishisation of the object (and property) is strongly critiqued by their research. Just as importantly, perhaps, is the notion that this is in fact an optimistic book. It is one which declares: there are other, better ways of organising society; of being free; of consciousness.

My grandparents’ generation, still in the shadow of colonialism, was profoundly ignorant about the world beyond its ken. It was a generation that emerged from great poverty, and put this down to the fruits of industrialisation. Those societies that had alternative methods of contemplating ideas of possession or satisfaction were barely acknowledged. I am not sure if anything has changed all that much. This book is a superb tool in the rethinking of the course of human history: where we might go as a species, where hope, in spite of all the doom that haunts the planet, might be found.