According to Graeber and Wengrow, that picture comes in two different forms, which amount to the same thing. The Dawn of Everything, now out in paperback, argues that if there is creative myth-making, it has been most often carried out by outsiders – economists, psychologists and historians who have ignored modern scholarship and used old studies to rehash an inaccurate picture of human development. The difficulty in acquiring empirical evidence that is common to both fields is the cause, say critics, of too much imaginative interpretation. And co-author Wengrow is a well-respected archaeologist.īoth disciplines have been subject to academic sniffiness, dismissed as “easy” options, with one foot in the sciences and the other in the humanities. By contrast Graeber, who died two years ago, was thought by many to be one of the leading anthropologists of his generation. In their bestselling books Collapse, Sapiens and The Better Angels of Our Nature, those authors drew heavily on archaeological and anthropological findings, although none of them are archaeologists or anthropologists. All of that, they argue, is based on outdated information. Its co-authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, took aim at the established story that has been repeated by brand writers such as Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari and Steven Pinker – the one that says that for most of prehistory, we lived in small egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers, and it was only with the agricultural revolution about 12,000 years ago that we adopted larger forms of social organisation leading to complex, hierarchical communities. Last year a book called The Dawn of Everything announced that most of what we think we know about human history is wrong.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |