Book Review: “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow
The Origins of Inequality
And now for something completely different. I sometimes reach out of my comfort zone and take on books that might not, on the surface, appeal to me much. I consider this to be part of an attempt to read above my pay grade and expand my mind to some degree. I also am trying to get closer to my father (who reads these reviews and is sometimes baffled by all of the slipstream and weird fiction that I usually write about) and have been trying to pick out the odd book from publishers that might appeal to him. That’s what brought me to the late David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. I have to say that my expectations were dashed upon opening the covers. I was expecting a history of prehistory and an explanation of how civilization was formed (something the authors of this book appear to concede that we still don’t know all of the answers to). Instead, this is a book that’s about the origins of inequality and seeks to pinpoint at what point in human history civilization got stuck in a pattern of oppression, endless war, and suffering. This is a bold and ambitious work: it runs more than 700 pages (the last 200 or so taken up by footnotes and an index). I was expecting a wizard to appear when I was finished and be given a badge of honour of some sort for having completed the whole thing. Alas, no. Still, if this book interests you, I would recommend calling in sick to work or school for the good part of a week — because that’s about the length of time it’ll take you to get through it unless you binge-read. Doing just that, in this case, might make your head spin because this is a very esoteric and academic work. Graber and Wengrow are not aiming for the back of the bleachers here. They’re writing for an audience of their peers.
Because this is a dense and challenging work, I’m not sure if I’m qualified enough to offer much of a summary. However, if pressed, it would go something like this: the authors suggest that notions of how inequality came to dominate our global society stem from a myth perpetuated by the likes of eighteenth-century thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The myth that Rousseau perpetuated was that society had a fall from grace from a Garden of Eden-like existence when humanity subsided as hunters and gatherers. Rousseau argued that inequality came into being when humanity made the shift to an agriculturally-based society since this introduced the concept of property and ownership of that property — and some people got the short end of the stick when it came to possessing property if they did at all (e.g. slaves did not own property). Graeber and Wengrow sift through recent anthropological and archeological evidence from the dawn of civilization to the present day to suggest that Rousseau was talking out of his rear end, for there are new examples of societies well into the agricultural age — including those of North American Indigenous communities — that were relatively peaceful and democratic to some degree. They contend that inequality may have been the result of “the Enlightenment” in Western society and the division of labour into “cultural areas,” among other things. And that’s the gist of what I understand about this book.
To be honest, I have to wonder if I should be reviewing this book at all because I will admit that I’m not in the target audience for this work. I’m not an anthropologist or an archaeologist, so I can’t tell you if I think the authors’ arguments are sound or not. I can say that the book is thorough. I don’t think there’s a single stone that’s left uncovered that the two Davids don’t admit to avoiding uncovering (to keep the book relatively, by their standard, “short”). There’s a lot of information to sift through, and I understand that it took both writers a full decade to research and write this tome while they were busy doing other things as well. So I’m working on the assumption that the book’s logic has been thought over and reasoned for a long period. I don’t know if it has been peer-reviewed, per se, but the book certainly feels accurate. To note, the authors do tend to hold up experts in their respective fields who had been previously overlooked or ridiculed and tear down conventional assumptions. Thus, I’m cautiously hopeful that the authors were not being irreverent or anarchistic for the sake of it here.
While I realize that this is a book suited for academic audiences largely — and not to get too prescriptive — the book suffers from a lack of illustrations. There are six or seven maps, and that’s it. No photos of the archeological evidence that is talked about in this read. This is a book that’s crying out for more than just a written description of the way the world works. In a sense, this could have been written and produced with a much more commercial audience in mind. The length of the book is somewhat prohibitive to this end, too: I think that if you cut this book in half, you would have a much more palpable text for the common man. Still, for specific audiences, I’m sure that some will find The Dawn of Everything to be an excellent source of information on the nature of inequality, and I’m sure the book will inspire a great deal of debate amongst those who read it — presumably in a university setting. To that end, I suppose I feel like I accomplished something by reading and reviewing this title: I’ve probably expanded my mind to some degree. This is an important subject, and one that if it managed to earn a relatively wide readership (assuming they could handle the specialized language) could change society. The Dawn of Everything is an interesting book and is an impressive examination of a very pressing concern.
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was published by Picador on April 4, 2023.
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