[paulusthe]

For what it's worth, sapiens was generally hated by academic anthropologists but Dawn of everything is generally hated by everyone else. Graeber was always expressly advocating for one specific (anarchist) viewpoint in his work, and that book suffers mightily for it.

Don't take anything in that book as true, because I've read lots of academics losing their minds over how much he glossed over or just ignored contrary evidence.

[StopTheWorld]

> Dawn of everything ... one specific (anarchist) viewpoint in his work

Anarchism means without a ruler, and there is scarce if any evidence that migratory hunter-gather bands at the dawn of history had rulers in one class expropriating surplus from another class. We can look for historical, or pre-historical evidence, but we can also observe the few remaining migratory hunter-gather bands remaining in the Amazon and such that have not been killed off by mining companies.

Modern authors don't impose an anarchist viewpoint on such groups, this is how they lived, and still live.

[Shorel]

Dawn of everything is exquisitely quoted, everything has a source and a sound argument, like if Graeber really expected these people to go after him.

Now, about the 'anarchism', I don't feel that at all. He simply is having a non euro-western centric viewpoint, and that's precisely the underlying theme of the book. Most of the time he chooses to highlight a source that has largely been ignored by the academics, for not being European or maintaining the status quo. So he is actually the only one not ignoring contrary evidence.

If the other anthropologists want a good refutation, I welcome their books with their own explanations and analysis of these anthropological findings.

[shanusmagnus]

I'm not the author, but obligatory "not sure why this is being down-voted." I've been wondering about Graeber for a while, since his work seems suspiciously close to "messages certain people desperately want to hear" and I have strong priors against those accounts, regardless of which "side" they come from.

Would love to hear perspective on this. The book would be a serious investment.

[marojejian]

below is a review I wrote of the book. despite my criticism, I'm glad I read it. But for a lot of people the ROI won't be good.

" I rated this one star, but understand the context, that I am very sympathetic to both the mission and perspective of the authors. I wanted to love this, and want them to be right. In general their key points are interesting ones to consider. The modern state is not inevitable. Past people were as smart and creative as we are, and likely experimented with a vastly greater range of societies than we are familiar with. We could learn a lot from them, and should consider trying more experiments ourselves. As they assert, few others are attempting to broadly reconsider recent evidence in the way they do.

But despite that, there is so much wrong with their execution. They started with their conclusion, and fit everything to that. Despite being massively long, the book is very short on actual evidence. It is very long on speculation, horrible logic, and frustrating repetition.

My suggestion is to gain exposure to the ideas, by reading few solid reviews of it. Then just keep those ideas in mind, and follow other more specific evidence cases, by more responsible scholars.

this episode of Tides of History podcast has some good coverage: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-the-state/id12... "