The Dawn of Everything

The book entered The New York Times best-seller list at No. 2 for the week of November 28, 2021,[5] while its German translation entered Der Spiegel Bestseller list at No.1.[6] It was named a Sunday Times, Observer and BBC History Book of the Year.[7] Writing for The Hindu, G. Sampath noted that two strands run through the book: "the consolidation of a corpus of archaeological evidence, and a history of ideas." Inspired by "the rediscovery of an unknown past," he asks, "can humanity imagine a future that’s more worthy of itself?"[8]

Positive reviews of the book praised Graeber and Wengrow for their ambition and re-examination of traditional narratives on early human societies. Gideon Lewis-Kraus said in The New Yorker that the book “aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past”.[9] In The Atlantic, William Deresiewicz described the book as “brilliant” and “inspiring”, stating that it ”upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change.”[10] The anthropologist, Giulio Ongaro, stated in Jacobin and Tribune that “Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what [Galileo and Darwin] did to astronomy and biology respectively”.[11][12] Reviewers in the Ecologist expressed the view that "Graeber and Wengrow seem caught in a time warp and fail to engage with the enormous body of new scholarship on human evolution" while, at the same time, calling the book a "howling wind of fresh air".[13] In Bookforum, Michael Robbins called the book both “maddening” and “wonderful.”[14] Historian of science, Emily Kern, writing in the Boston Review, called the book “erudite” and “funny”, suggesting that “once you start thinking like Graeber and Wengrow, it's difficult to stop.“[15]

Writing in the Chicago Review, historian Brad Bolman and archaeologist Hannah Moots suggest that what makes the book so important is “its attempt to make accessible a vast array of recent anthropological and archaeological evidence; to read it against the grain; and to synthesize those findings into a novel story about what exactly happened in our long past,” drawing comparisons with the work of V. Gordon Childe.[16] CJ Sheu said the book is “simply put a masterpiece” which “succeeds on all counts”,[17] while Peter Isackson in Fair Observer described the book as “nothing less than a compelling invitation to reframe and radically rethink our shared understanding of humanity’s history and prehistory.” He described it as both a “fascinating introduction to the global state of the entire discipline of archaeology” and “a major work of anthropological reflection.”[18] Eliza Delay, writing for Resilience called the book “a revelation” and a “sweeping revision of how we see ourselves.”[19]

While describing it as a "work of dizzying ambition”, historian Daniel Immerwahr wondered whether a book that “hypothesizes confidently in the face of scant or confusing evidence, can be trusted.” [20] The historian David A. Bell, responding solely to Graeber and Wengrow's argument about the Indigenous origins of Enlightenment thought, accused the authors of coming "perilously close to scholarly malpractice."[21] By contrast, historian and philosopher Justin E. H. Smith suggested "Graeber and Wengrow are to be credited for helping to relegitimise this necessary component of historical anthropology, which for better or worse is born out of the history of the missions and early modern global commerce."[22] The historian Walter Scheidel claimed to have exposed “a wide range of serious flaws in what is otherwise a timely and stimulating book”. In response to the book’s suggestion that where one sets “the dial between freedom and determinism is largely ... a matter of taste”, Scheidel wrote “that it is something else entirely, namely one of the greatest intellectual challenges of all”.[23] The historian Dominic Alexander wrote that “despite the undoubted wealth of fascinating and important material” the evidence used in the book is often “questionable and fragile”. He cites the example of what he calls the book’s “tendentious” treatment of early Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilization in which “evidence that these were highly stratified class societies is mostly ignored.”[24]Andrew Anthony accused the authors of "cherrypicking" but also said the authors persuasively replace "the idea of humanity being forced along through evolutionary stages with a picture of prehistoric communities making their own conscious decisions of how to live".[25] Anthropologist Richard Handler claimed that the book’s endnotes “often reveal that a particularly startling interpretation of archaeological evidence depends on one or two sources taken from vast bodies of literature” while also claiming that the stories told “are stories we need and want to hear.”[26] Historian Ryne Clos claimed that the book partly relies on "a specious, exaggerated interpretation of the historical evidence" but that it is also "incredibly informative".[27]

In contrast, archaeologist Mike Pitts, reviewing for British Archaeology described the book as "glorious" and suggested that its joint authorship by an anthropologist and an archaeologist "gives the book a depth and rigour rarely seen in the genre".[28] Reviewing for Scientific American, John Horgan described the book as “both a dense, 692-page scholarly inquiry into the origins of civilization and an exhilarating vision of human possibility,” suggesting that the authors “are justified” in accusing Steven Pinker of “ignoring data contradicting his Hobbesian outlook.”[29] Anthropologist Durba Chattaraj claimed that the book includes "elisions, slippages, and too-exaggerated leaps” when referring to archaeology from India, but stating that its authors are “extremely rigorous and meticulous scholars”, and that reading the book from India "expands our worlds and allows us to step outside of a particular postcolonial predicament."[30] Anthropologist Matthew Porges, writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books suggested the book is "provocative, if not necessarily comprehensive", and that its “great value is that it provides a much better point of departure for future explorations of what was actually happening in the past”.[31] Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argued in The New York Review of Books that there is a “discordance between what the book says and what its sources say," while also stating that the book, which is “chockablock with archaeological and ethnographic minutiae, is an oddly gripping read”.[32] NYRB subsequently published an extended exchange between Wengrow and Appiah under the title "The Roots of Inequality" in which Wengrow expanded on the book's use of archaeological sources, while Appiah concluded that "Graeber and Wengrow’s argument against historical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable."[33]

In Anthropology Today, Arjun Appadurai accused the book of “swerving to avoid a host of counter-examples and counter-arguments” while also describing the book's "fable" as “compelling”.[34] David Wengrow responded in the same issue.[35] Anthropology Today later published a letter to the editor, in which political ecologist Jens Friis Lund writes "Appadurai never discloses where and how exactly Graeber and Wengrow go wrong," calling the book a "monumental empirical effort" and "exemplar of interdisciplinary engagement."[36] In a subsequent issue, Anthropology Today published a full review of the book by social anthropologist Luiz Costa, who suggested it contains "a range of examples of societies drawing on their own past experiences, or those of neighbouring peoples, to shape future ways of life - not in a voluntaristic sense, but within specific social patterns, considering historical events, in tune with available values and structural possibilities." Costa compares The Dawn of Everything to classic works by Claude Lévi-Strauss in terms of its scope and importance.[37]

Writing for the New York Journal of Books, another anthropologist, James H. McDonald, noted the omission of classic work by anthropologist Edmund Leach (1954) on the gumlau and gumsa systems of socio-political organization found among the mountain Kachin, but also noted that The Dawn of Everything “may well prove to be the most important book of the decade, for it explodes deeply held myths about the inevitability of our social lives dominated by the state”.[38] Historian David Priestland argued in The Guardian that Peter Kropotkin had more powerfully addressed the sorts of questions that a persuasive case for modern-day anarchism should address, but lauded the authors' historical "myth-busting" and called it "an exhilarating read".[39]

Anthropologist Chris Knight called The Dawn of Everything "incoherent and wrong" for beginning "far too late" and "systematically side-stepping the cultural flowering that began in Africa tens of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe”.[40] Anthropologist James Suzman in the Literary Review claimed that the book doesn't “engage with the vast historical and academic literature on recent African ... small scale hunter-gatherers”, but also maintained that the book "consistently thought-provoking" in "forcing us to re-examine some of the cosy assumptions about our deep past".[41]

Writing for Black Perspectives Kevin Suemnicht noted that the book develops ideas proposed by Orlando Patterson to account for the loss of human freedoms, and argued that the book confirms the “Fanonian positions within the Black Radical Tradition that this world-system is inherently anti-Black”.[42] In Antiquity, archaeologist Rachael Kiddey suggested that the book arose from “playful conversations between two eminently qualified friends” and also that it contributes to “feminist revisions of the development of knowledge.”[43]

The book's impact and legacy has also been discussed. Writing for Artforum, Simon Wu called The Dawn of Everything a “bracing rewrite of human history”, suggesting that while its “premise is exhilarating” its “implications are only beginning to be considered”.[44] Bryan Appleyard in his review for The Sunday Times called the book "pacey and potentially revolutionary."[45] Sébastien Doubinsky called the book "an important work, both as a summary of recent discoveries in the fields of archaeology and anthropology and as an eye-opener on the structures of dominant narratives".[46] Nicolas Villarreal described the book as “a series of brilliant interventions” while criticising the authors for not appreciating that ideology and politics are “the source of our profound unfreedom." While arguing that "the freedom to choose one’s own society as the authors pose it, is a fiction,” he also describes their ideas as "forever indispensable" in the search for social change.[47] Reviewing for Science, Erle Ellis described The Dawn of Everything as "a great book that will stimulate discussions, change minds, and drive new lines of research".[48]

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