David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020.
David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of three books, including What Makes Civilization?. Wengrow conducts archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle East.
A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution--from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of the state, political violence, and social inequality--and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of the state? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.
The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.
Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
##书中有些criticism我真是想举双手双脚赞成。大部头,而且信息比较密集,适合每天读个一两章。
评分 评分##最简单来说这本书是想挑战关于文明进程的“公认知识”,也即沿着线性路径进行的人类故事。我对历史学和人类学所知甚少(上过两门课并不比几本书带给我的更多),不知道它们怎么具体讨论这个话题,但就我到目前为止接触过的而言,这个话题并不很新鲜——对于线性历史或文明进程,社会学、历史哲学都有讨论。 所以我想应当不用这种视角来看这本书。Lauren Leve说格雷伯在电话里是这样的:“这将会把事情弄得一团糟!人们会疯掉的,但这都是事实!” 实际上我并不清楚说这本书由“好奇心、道德远见和对直接行动的力量的信念所激发”合不合适,但它真的说了很多*可能性*,它在这种情况下足够合时宜——这个黄色的壳子这么说话:“既然过去我们拥有过那么多可能性,现在为什么不行?!”
评分##这本书的中心思想其实很简单,而且反复阐述强调,生怕你错过了:人类的社会并不是以前所以为的从原始而平等的小型部落线性发展成大型而充满不平等的"高等文明"。相反,作者认为在发展过程中,很多文明都有反复、波动,曾经有意识地去尝试各种不同的社会组织方式,有时候会刻意选择从高度分层的社会变成相对平等、参与性强的社会(譬如Teotihuacanos),所以全书最中心的观点是不平等并不是我们的宿命。观点不算振聋发聩,但也有道理,内容丰富但有些拉杂,实际上我没有完全被作者说服,有时候甚至觉得有点挑拣证据为观点服务,但是我欣赏他们打破主流观点的梳理和阐述,以及对文明史多样性的强调。总之是本值得读的好书,然而我一共听了17个小时还是有点太长了,其实如果有个缩减版也就够了。
评分##3.5 Took me a long time to finish it but I did. It was eye opening how wrong some established theories in the field of anthropology are. But overall the book was boring as hell. I’m just not that concerned with the subject matter.
评分 评分##购买链接:https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?ft=t&id=669350274940
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