A False Dawn? A Review of The Dawn of Everything
As its title suggests, The Dawn of Everything is an ambitious book. The authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, (one whom passed away while the book was in press) survey the whole past life of biologically modern humans in an effort to broaden the ambit of modern social thought. They aim to thereby open up the possibility of a more progressive future for humankind. The book is therefore at once a critique of Western thought, a manifesto, a work of social theory, an academic polemic and many other things. It is also often written with an arch humor. Thus chapter headings consciously echo those of the nineteenth century novel.
David Graeber and David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything
Reviewed by Sumit Guha
But The Dawn
of Everything has a serious purpose. It presents itself as a critical
alternative to contemporary ‘big history’ as found in, for example, in the work
of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and others. It is therefore, also a trenchant
critique of the standard issue “Western Civ” undergraduate survey textbooks of
the 1960s or 1970s. This critique is a running thread through the entire work.
The book thereby performs a valuable task in transmitting important new ideas
to a mass audience while countering glib generalizations about human social
organization, ‘hard-wired’ attitudes to sex, etc. current in the media and in
pop psychology. Historians, archeologists and anthropologists have been
developing these critiques for several decades.
But they have worked too often as ‘lone scholars sniping from the walls/ Of
learned periodicals…’ (W.H. Auden). I am fairly certain that their works have
never been on the New York Times’ best-sellers list as The
Dawn currently is. That by itself is a valuable contribution to public
understanding. It is an important pinprick to overblown cliometric models and
‘Just So Stories’ about the Rise
of the West that have sold millions and won Nobel
prizes in their day.
But despite a
breeziness that makes for easy reading, The Dawn is not an easy book to review
even with the aid of colleagues[1] (who bear no
responsibility for anything in this review!) The difficulty stems not only from
its length: 500 pages of text and 200 of references (in the hard copy). It also
contains several different books and genres intermingled within it. I will try
to untangle these themes and analyze them in sequence....
https://notevenpast.org/a-false-dawn/
Sumit Guha: Tribe and State in Asia through Twenty-Five Centuries
Every literate person today will encounter the word “tribe” in many settings. What does this word mean? When and how did its use begin? Is it a good label for any contemporary social organization? Is it relevant for policymakers to think with? Academics have often critiqued its use, but that has not suppressed its ubiquity. Why?
This book offers answers to all the above. In order to keep it manageable,
these questions are investigated only for the span of Asia that runs from
Siberia to Sri Lanka and Suez to the Sea of Japan, and over the past 2,500
years. It thus starts at the beginning of the Iron Age and looks at both
unwritten cultures dominant in the past and the hypertextual world of today.
Its four chapters successively analyze the Asian uses of tribe-like categories,
European deployment of the term in the age of imperialism, the environments
where it flourishes and those it makes and the diversity of tribes across Asia
today. The book will be of great interest to historians, journalists,
policymakers, and to anyone studying the history of Asia.
SUMIT GUHA is Frances
Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas
at Austin and author of Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia,
Past and Present and Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200-1991.
Sumit Guha
lectures on Asia, Europe and America in the Making of 'Caste'
Sumit Guha -
Glimpsed in the Archive & Known no More: One Indian Slave’s Tale
