Thought this was an interesting and well reasoned critque of some aspects of the Dawn of Everything, particularly how Graeber’s conclusions could lead one to take a misinformed wrong path toward changing modern society that may give poor results.
Thought this was an interesting and well reasoned critque of some aspects of the Dawn of Everything, particularly how Graeber’s conclusions could lead one to take a misinformed wrong path toward changing modern society that may give poor results.
I think G&W use “experimentation” is only applied to an entire group of people. Of course individual members are often victims of the circumstances, but except in rare marginal situations like early Viking settlers on Island being driven to extinction by changing climatic conditions, groups of people have collective choice over their location and mode of subsistence.
Thus saying that peoples’ social relations are a result of material conditions is usually not even half the picture.
But for me the bigger take-away from The Dawn of Everything is that interelations between groups of people, both in place and time and usually in opposition to each other, seem to have such a strong impact on how they chose to structure their social interactions. G&W argue that this is something scientists often miss because they focus on one group in isolation. Furthermore, they argue that there a certain level of confusing cause and effect: when a group of people is conciously moving into marginal lands (for example to escape domination by another group of people) that forces them to swich to a different mode of subsistence, then the ultimate cause of the resulting change is not the material confitions.