Two pioneers of science, the anthropologist David Gräber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, reinterpret human history: nothing about it is predetermined, the course of things was – and is – changeable at any time. Her plea is for courageous action against state authority and power structures. For the sake of a better future. 1st place on the Spiegel bestseller list!
Teotihuacán in Mexico: one
Society without authoritarian
domination? (Image: GettyImages, Photogilio)
One would almost like to say that the work “Beginnings” is less a book than a large-scale project – a kind of general revision of human history. On the basis of intensive research into sources, the scientists Graeber and Wengrow show that the way in which, for example, indigenous societies organized themselves is much more complex than previously assumed. Many historical societies, for example those in the Ukrainian metropolis of Talianki (4100–3300 BC) or those in Mesoamerican Teotihuacán (100 BC–600 AD), already lived out alternatives thousands of years ago. The organizational structures of such communities emerged partly in the form of bold social experiments.
The fact that knowledge about this was buried for a long time meant that “the past seemed more boring than it needed to be,” according to the authors. No traces of palaces, monumental government buildings or fortifications were found in Talianki. According to Graeber and Wengrow, the residents of the city of Teotihuacán also made a conscious decision against an authoritarian form of rule: “All the evidence suggests that at the peak of its power, Teotihuacán found a way to govern itself without a ruler, as was the case with the much earlier ones cities of prehistoric Ukraine, Uruk-period Mesopotamia and Bronze Age Pakistan.”
Anthropologist Graeber himself – star of his profession and who died unexpectedly in 2020 at the age of 59 – lived in Madagascar for almost two years in an indigenous community that had practiced direct democracy for ages.
What do Graeber and Wenkow conclude from their findings? One of her insights is that the traditional historical image of a society that is constantly advancing in a linear manner has almost nothing to do with the facts. From a historical and cultural-anthropological point of view, state authority and state power, inequality and a lack of freedom were neither without alternatives nor are they fixed in the future. Graeber and Wengrow’s book is an intellectually broad appeal to rethink. (PDF document)
David Graeber / David Wengrow
beginnings. A new history of mankind
Stuttgart 2022
hardcover
672 pages
28.00 euros (Germany),
28.80 euros (A)
www.klett-cotta.de