The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity By - David Graeber, David Wengrow [Thomas]
By: David Graeber, David Wengrow
Narrated by: Mark Williams
Length: 19 hrs and 30 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Categories: History, World
General
Complete name : The Dawn of Everything By - David Graeber, David Wengrow [Thomas].mp3
Format : MPEG Audio
File size : 660 MiB
Duration : 24 h 2 min
Overall bit rate mode : Constant
Overall bit rate : 64.0 kb/s
Audio
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Duration : 24 h 2 min
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 64.0 kb/s
Channel(s) : 1 channel
Sampling rate : 44.1 kHz
Frame rate : 38.281 FPS (1152 SPF)
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 660 MiB (100%)
Publisher's Summary
A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution - from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state", political violence, and social inequality - and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the 18th century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.
The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
©2021 David Graeber and David Wengrow (P)2021 Macmillan Audio
