Seriously though, Graeber's greatest strength is he spent his life going out to these cultures and working with them, which satisfies the "whiteboy saves the savages" trope but he really spoke from experience, if you want to listen to a whiteboy in particular.

The fact that he questioned entrenched narratives...... less of a strength. Yeah it's great but oh my god he cannot write a single paragraph without ranting about those Fools back at the Institution.

In that sense, the collaboration really helped. Debt is a lot more adversarial than The Dawn of Everything.

I did hear a nasty rumor that Graeber and Wengrow besmirched the reputation of earlier anthropologists who they actually agreed with, just to take credit. I never managed to look up the earlier anthropologist though what's his name... Boehm so can't confirm.

https://masto.ai/users/GhostOnTheHalfShell/statuses/116443910422177108

Rather than being caught up, complaining about the ideological propaganda of hierarchy, the framework has an explanation of why it structured that way.

"To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

(1/4)

I just started reading The Dawn of Everything, by the late David Graeber, and David Wengrow.