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Reading Wednesday
Jan. 26th, 2022 07:12 am Currently reading: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Well, this is fun. Last week I was very obsessed with the Indigenous Critique of the Enlightenment (if anyone has some more sources from contemporary Indigenous writers, plz shoot them my way!). This week, I have been very obsessed with Neolithic art and architecture and what they can tell us about early civilizations. To the point where I redid large parts of my lesson on early Western art history. I'm sure my second semester art students will be very appreciative of this.
The chapters I read this week mainly have to do with the messy transitions to and out of agriculture and the beginning of cities, and the archeological evidence that suggests that, contrary to popular believe, civilizations don't go neatly from hunter-gatherer to agrarian, and surplus production and urbanization does not inevitably lead to social hierarchy. Obviously this holds some particularly interesting implications not just for our understanding of early humans, but for social organization in the present.
I'm also fascinated by the authors' assertion that hunter-gatherer groups are not primarily organized by biological kinship. It makes intuitive sense, because you'd get a lot of inbreeding if that were the case, but it's also an attack on the framing of the family as the basic unit of social organization. Examining, say, the historical roots of the Anishinaabe clan system, it suggests quite a lot of geographical mobility and cultural sharing that directly contradicts the modern framing about early civilizations being non-hierarchical because they were small and homogeneous.
Anyway I am really enjoying it. I only know anything at all about ancient history because of chance. In high school and uni, we covered a bit through art history, and I took one class on ancient civilizations in high school, not out of any particular interest but because of the teacher running it. I never pursued any in-depth study of it after that, which is really a pity because it is so fascinating.
I didn't get through the chapter last night because there was one reference that sent me on an internet digression on whether Enkidu was a Neanderthal. The advantage of reading a 700-page tome on an e-reader is that I can physically lift it to read it, but the disadvantage is that I can easily fall down a rabbit hole of looking up references.
The chapters I read this week mainly have to do with the messy transitions to and out of agriculture and the beginning of cities, and the archeological evidence that suggests that, contrary to popular believe, civilizations don't go neatly from hunter-gatherer to agrarian, and surplus production and urbanization does not inevitably lead to social hierarchy. Obviously this holds some particularly interesting implications not just for our understanding of early humans, but for social organization in the present.
I'm also fascinated by the authors' assertion that hunter-gatherer groups are not primarily organized by biological kinship. It makes intuitive sense, because you'd get a lot of inbreeding if that were the case, but it's also an attack on the framing of the family as the basic unit of social organization. Examining, say, the historical roots of the Anishinaabe clan system, it suggests quite a lot of geographical mobility and cultural sharing that directly contradicts the modern framing about early civilizations being non-hierarchical because they were small and homogeneous.
Anyway I am really enjoying it. I only know anything at all about ancient history because of chance. In high school and uni, we covered a bit through art history, and I took one class on ancient civilizations in high school, not out of any particular interest but because of the teacher running it. I never pursued any in-depth study of it after that, which is really a pity because it is so fascinating.
I didn't get through the chapter last night because there was one reference that sent me on an internet digression on whether Enkidu was a Neanderthal. The advantage of reading a 700-page tome on an e-reader is that I can physically lift it to read it, but the disadvantage is that I can easily fall down a rabbit hole of looking up references.
