The Dawn of Everything

Citation

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chapter Summary

This is a long trade book (692 pages in the hardcover, according to the Google Books record) in twelve chapters, which argues against the familiar story that humanity moved from small egalitarian bands through farming and cities to hierarchy and the state. The publisher's description says the authors trace how that story first took shape in the eighteenth century, as a conservative reaction to critiques of European society by Indigenous observers and intellectuals, and then use archaeology and anthropology to ask what people were actually doing during the long periods the story treats as simple. David Graeber died in 2020, and the book was finished weeks before his death.

Chapters 1–2: Farewell to Humanity's Childhood, Or, Why This Is Not a Book About the Origins of Inequality; Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress

The first chapter sets out the target: the "Simple Story" of stages of social evolution and the habit of asking when inequality began. The second chapter takes up the Indigenous critique of European society. Charles Johnson's review in Reason summarizes it as the claim that theories of social evolution developed in response to this critique, with the Wendat statesman Kandiaronk and Louis-Armand de Lahontan's early eighteenth-century dialogues as the central example.

Chapters 3–4: Unfreezing the Ice Age: In and Out of Chains: The Protean Possibilities of Human Politics; Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property (Not Necessarily in That Order)

These chapters turn to the Ice Age and the early Holocene. Johnson's review of the book's archaeological chapters says they use evidence such as elaborate burials, monuments and trade centers to argue that hunter-gatherers were not uniformly small and egalitarian, and they draw on the idea of "seasonal duality," in which societies shifted between social arrangements through the year. The titles show that they also discuss freedom, culture formation and the origins of private property.

Chapters 5–6: Many Seasons Ago: Why Canadian Foragers Kept Slaves and Their Californian Neighbours Didn't; or, the Problem with 'Modes of Production'; Gardens of Adonis: The Revolution That Never Happened: How Neolithic Peoples Avoided Agriculture

Chapter 5 compares foraging societies of the Pacific Northwest and California to question tidy classification by mode of production; in the review's summary, neighboring peoples in similar environments developed radically different institutions. Chapter 6 argues that there was no sudden agricultural revolution: Johnson's review notes early farming settlements such as Çatalhöyük described as relatively free of ranks and hierarchies, and the title says Neolithic peoples avoided agriculture.

Chapters 7–8: The Ecology of Freedom: How Farming First Hopped, Stumbled and Bluffed Its Way Around the World; Imaginary Cities: Eurasia's First Urbanites in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Ukraine and China, and How They Built Cities Without Kings

Chapter 7 follows the slow, uneven spread of farming across the world. Chapter 8 argues that early cities did not automatically produce kings and bureaucracies; the review mentions the Indus city of Mohenjo-daro, interpreted as having no evident palaces or rulers, and cities that alternated between periods of rulers and of popular repudiation.

Chapters 9–10: Hiding in Plain Sight: The Indigenous Origins of Public Housing and Democracy in the Americas; Why the State Has No Origin: The Humble Beginnings of Sovereignty, Bureaucracy, and Politics

Chapter 9 looks at political institutions in the Americas. Johnson identifies the longest chapter as the one on state formation, which this appears to be. It rejects a single origin of the state and distinguishes three paths to domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy) and charismatic competition, with the Natchez Great Sun as an example of a ruler whose power was effective only in his physical presence.

Chapters 11–12: Full Circle: On the Historical Foundations of the Indigenous Critique; Conclusion: The Dawn of Everything

The last chapters return to the Indigenous critique with which the book began and draw the argument together. In the review's reading, the book's central question shifts from equality to fluidity: how people came to treat hierarchy as a fixed feature of the human condition, instead of a temporary arrangement.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–4: The Challenge to the Standard Story

• The Simple Story: the stage-by-stage account of social evolution that the authors set out to dismantle.
• Indigenous critique: the argument that Indigenous commentary on European society shaped Enlightenment ideas and later theories of progress.
• Seasonal duality: social arrangements that change with the seasons, used to interpret Ice Age societies.

Chapters 5–9: Farming, Cities and Politics

• Modes of production: the concept the authors criticize in the chapter on foragers who kept slaves.
• Cities without kings: the claim that large settlements do not necessarily mean centralized rule.
• Freedom: a recurring term in the chapter titles ("Wicked Liberty," "The Ecology of Freedom") and in the publisher's reference to new possibilities for human emancipation.

Chapters 10–12: The State

• Origin of the state: the idea of a single origin, which the authors reject.
• Three forms of domination: sovereignty, control of information and charisma.
• Eminence as temporary: the closing question of why hierarchy came to seem inescapable.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A bold, readable argument. Reviewers describe it as lively and lucid; Johnson calls it never ponderous and a worthy capstone to Graeber's work. The publisher's page quotes praise from, among others, James C. Scott, Noam Chomsky and Rebecca Solnit.
• Draws on a wide range of evidence. The chapters range from the Ice Age to Çatalhöyük, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Americas, so a reader meets many archaeological cases in one book.
• Joins archaeology and anthropology. The publisher says the argument draws on research in both fields, and the chapter titles show it asking political and economic questions about property, freedom and the state, which suits the course's topic.

Limitations

• Contested evidence and conclusions. Johnson notes that the authors hedge their claims, but that the hedges sometimes disappear when earlier conjectures are used to support later conclusions, and says the book is at its weakest when the authors are most polemical, for instance in their replies to Steven Pinker on prehistoric violence.
• Narrow time frame. Jane Bassett, reviewing in International Socialism, objects to the explicit decision not to explore early modern humans before about 30,000 years ago, and argues that the book does not account for the rise of class society. She also cites other critics' judgment that the authors' use of evidence is often not reliable.
• Length and density. At nearly 700 pages the book is demanding, and Bassett says it is hard to get a sense of chronology from it.
• Not a textbook. It is a single argument by two authors; students need other sources to see the debates it contests.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within this course list, The Dawn of Everything is the recent, argumentative synthesis that revisits the questions the older classics raised. Marcel Mauss's The Gift is a foundational analysis of gift exchange, and Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific is a foundational ethnography of Trobriand exchange, kinship and authority; both are classics the authors' argument about economy and society can be read against. E. E. Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer is a classic study of political order without a central government and is a natural companion to Chapter 10's discussion of the state.

For textbook coverage, Wilk and Cliggett's Economies and Cultures organizes economic anthropology around competing assumptions about human nature, and Hann and Hart's Economic Anthropology is a concise introduction to the subfield's history; either gives a foundation for judging Chapters 5 and 6 on modes of production.

How to Use This Book

The book is for general readers and for undergraduates with a little anthropology or history. No specialist knowledge is assumed.

A practical plan:

• Core argument: Chapters 1, 2, 10 and 12 give the claim, the Indigenous critique and the account of the state.
• Case studies: Chapters 3–9 are a series of archaeological and ethnographic cases; read the ones closest to the course topic and skim the rest.
• With critics: read at least one critical review alongside the book, such as those by Johnson in Reason and Bassett in International Socialism, which come from different positions, so as to see how the evidence is contested.

Keep a list of the claims that rest on specific sites or sources, and check a few against the notes and the literature. Pair Chapter 10 with The Nuer, and Chapter 5 with The Gift or Argonauts of the Western Pacific.