This sounds like an interesting event for anyone that liked #GraeberandWengrow 's #DawnOfEverything ...

https://humanists.uk/events/voltaire2023/

@morecowbell @amydiehl

key sentence in BBC Future article by A. Saini: “How did patriarchy actually begin?” IMO is:
"...though, there is nothing in our nature that says we can't live differently. A society made by humans can also be remade by humans. "

and as further reading I HIGHLY recommend again:

The #DawnofEverything
A New History of Humanity
Author: #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow

https://www.wired.com/story/david-wengrow-dawn-of-everything/

@DieterLukas
key sentence IMO is: "...though, there is nothing in our nature that says we can't live differently. A society made by humans can also be remade by humans. "

and as further reading I recommend again:

The #DawnofEverything
A New History of Humanity
Author: #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow

https://www.wired.com/story/david-wengrow-dawn-of-everything/

I disagree with #Graeber and/or #Wengrow's idea that asking where inequality comes from necessarily implies the existence of a past era of equality. Like... even if the first time one cell divided into two, the second was somehow subordinate to the first, *that would be an answer to the question*
#DawnOfEverything #TheDawnOfEverything

#5yrsago Machine learning models keep getting spoofed by adversarial attacks and it’s not clear if this can ever be fixed https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-a-hallucination-problem-thats-proving-tough-to-fix/

#5yrsago RIP #JohnSulston, open science hero and father of the Human Genome Project https://phys.org/news/2018-03-john-sulston-decoded-human-genome.html

#1yrago The cruelty isn't the point: The point is power https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

#1yrago The #DawnOfEverything: An essential reminder that we are in charge of our own destiny https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/08/three-freedoms/#anti-fatalism

11/

Well, #adhd did it again. Right now my Interest List is:

- #muvco
- assemble mixer pcb that came back last week
- read #midi files
- two voices
- think about low-part-count implementation idea for #polysynth #synthdiy
- work on #geometricalgebra problem sets (from good-so-far book: https://geometricalgebra.org/)
- take birthday present manim course (https://www.manim.community/, but more than basics)
- read Empire of the #Ants and #DawnOfEverything

That on top of a real job and a #honeydew

Ich höre gerade "The Dawn of Everything" von den Davids Graeber und Wengrow und das erste Kapitel hat mir schon ein breites Grinsen ins Gesicht gezaubert.

https://www.genialokal.de/Suche/?q%5B%5D=dawn&q%5B%5D=of&q%5B%5D=everything

Wer sich für Ursprünge der menschlichen gesellschaftlichen Ordnung interessiert und warum Jared Diamond und Konsorten größtenteils Unrecht haben, dem sei es ans Herz gelegt. Sehr spannende Lektüre. #dawnofeverything #mensch #menschheitsgeschichte

Just finished my third listen-through of #DawnOfEverything and I can't help but think that so many of the stories and descriptions of social systems would adapt really well to #ttrpg and #solorpg s like #ironsworn. Like I would love to play a game set in the first intermediate period in Egypt ❤️‍🔥

And what books Graeber had left in him! Just weeks prior to his death, Graber finished #DawnOfEverything, his ten-year collaboration with David Wengrow. It's a nose-to-tail reconsideration of everything we know about the civilizations of prehistory, and what they tell us about the essential nature of humanity:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/08/three-freedoms/#anti-fatalism

2/

"Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade.’ Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects — very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment — being moved around over enormous distances. Often these were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would later find being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world. Surely this must prove capitalism in some form or another has always existed?

The logic is perfectly circular. If precious objects were moving long distances, this is evidence of ‘trade’ and, if trade occurred, it must have taken some sort of commercial form; therefore, the fact that, say, 3,000 years ago Baltic amber found its way to the Mediterranean, or shells from Mexico were transported to Ohio, is proof that we are in the presence of some embryonic form of market economy. Markets are universal. Therefore, there must have been a market. Therefore, markets are universal. And so on.
All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument. It’s almost as if these writers are afraid to suggest anything that seems original, or, if they do, feel obliged to use vaguely scientific-sounding language ( ‘trans-regional interaction spheres’, ‘multi-scalar networks of exchange’) to avoid having to speculate about what precisely those things might be. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy.

The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, Bronislaw Malinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes how in the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Island off Papua New Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in outrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most important ones has its own name, and history of former owners) — only to hold it briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from another island. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen.
Is this ‘trade’? Perhaps, but it would bend to breaking point our ordinary understanding of what that word means. There is, in fact, a substantial ethnographic literature on how such long-distance exchange operates in societies without markets. Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialties — one is famous for its feather-work, another provides salt, in a third all women are potters — to acquire things they cannot produce themselves; sometimes one group will specialize in the very business of moving people and things around. But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time; and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade.’
Let’s list just a few, all drawn from North American material, to give the reader a taste of what might really be going on when people speak of ‘long-distance interaction spheres’ in the human past:

Dreams or vision quests: among Iroquoian-speaking peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was considered extremely important literally to realize one’s dreams. Many European observers marveled at how Indians would be willing to travel for days to bring back some object, trophy, crystal or even an animal like a dog they had dreamed of acquiring. Anyone who dreamed about a neighbor or relative’s possession (a kettle, ornament, mask and so on) could normally demand it; as a result, such objects would often gradually travel some way from town to town. On the Great Plains, decisions to travel long distances in search of rare or exotic items could form part of vision quests.

Traveling healers and entertainers: in 1528, when a shipwrecked Spaniard named Alvar Nuriez Cabeza de Vaca made his way from Florida across what is now Texas to Mexico, he found he could pass easily between villages (even villages at war with one another) by offering his services as a magician and curer. Curers in much of North America were also entertainers, and would often develop significant entourages; those who felt their lives had been saved by the performance would, typically, offer up all their material processions to be divided among the troupe. By such means, precious objects could easily travel long distances.

Women’s gambling: women in many indigenous North American societies were inveterate gamblers; the women of adjacent villages would often meet to play dice or a game played with a bowl and plum stone, and would typically bet their shells beads or other objects of personal adornment as the stakes. One archeologist versed in the ethnographic literature, Warren DeBoer, estimates that many of the shells and other exotic discovered in sites halfway across the continent had got there by being endlessly wagered, and lost, in inter-village games of this sort, over very long periods of time.

We could multiply examples, but assume that by now the reader gets the broader point we are making. When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky — in a word, far less human than what was likely going on."

#DavidGraeber #DavidWengrow #DawnOfEverything #Money #Exchange Anarchy is a revolution of our imagination!

". . . [P]eople’s tendency to define themselves against one another. Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement but, after an hour, ending up taking positions so intransigent that they find themselves on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide — even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under ordinary circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other’s points. They start out as moderate social democrats of slightly different flavors; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman. We know this kind of thing can happen in arguments. Bateson suggested such processes can become institutionalized on a cultural level as well. How, he asked, do boys and girls in Papua New Guinea come to behave differently, despite the fact that no one ever explicitly instructs them about how boys and girls are supposed to behave? It’s not just by imitating their elders; it’s also because boys and girls each learn to find the behaviour of the opposite sex distasteful and try to be as little like them as possible. What start as minor learned differences become exaggerated until women come to think of themselves as, and then increasingly actually become, everything that men are not. And, of course, men do the same thing towards women.

Bateson was interested in the psychological processes within societies, but there’s every reason to believe something similar happens between societies as well. People come to define themselves against their neighbours. Urbanites thus become urbane, as barbarians become more barbarous. If ‘national character’ can really be said to exist, it can only be as a result of such schismogenic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on. If nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another."

#DavidGraeber #DavidWengorw #DawnOfEverything #schismogenisis

#DavidGraeber #DavidWengorw #DemocracyNow #DawnOfEverything
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JDO28CPAPuM

About the Wyandotte people (traditional: Waⁿdát): "Prisoner sacrifice was not merely about reinforcing the solidarity of the group but also proclaimed the internal sanctity of the #family and the domestic realms as spaces of the female governance where #violence, politics and rule by command did not belong. Wendat households, in other words, were defined in exactly opposite terms to the Roman familia." from #DawnOfEverything by #Graeber and #Wengrow.
⸺
#community #organizing #patriarchy #safety

Despite how much folks focus on the paradigm breaking and myth breaking aspects of #DawnOfEverything, I think the theory of political domination (replacing a theory of state) and to a lesser extent their theory of political freedom needs more emphasis and exploration.

#DavidGraeber

Despite how much folks focus on the paradigm breaking and myth breaking aspects of #DawnOfEverything, I think the theory of political domination (replacing a theory of state) and to a lesser extent their theory of political freedom needs more emphasis and exploration.

#DavidGraeber

@TomKooning this piece reminded me about some of the aspects mentioned in #DawnOfEverything by #graeber and #Wengrow.

@MandyMay #DawnOfEverything I thought the ideas and research were really interesting and eye opening…

"What if #cities existed before #agriculture and our #HunterGatherer ancestors enjoyed a far more complex existence than we thought? And if they did, then what are the implications for modern political theory - which justifies #inequality on the basis that we live in a higher, more sophisticated form of society that was always inevitable?"

#NovaraMedia talks with #DavidWengrow, co-author with the late #DavidGraeber of #DawnOfEverything

#books #prehistory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-EN0YIBIg

So earlier this year, I was able to get my dad to read #DawnOfEverything. It's the first time I was able to get him to read anarchist material (he wasn't able to get into Debt). He minored in anthropology in college, so he was amazed how much had changed.

In 1703, Kandiaronk, Chief of the Native American Wendat people, laid down this argument against the Western world, and I can't help think that this man, despite rejecting Christianity at the time, was closer to the Bible's teaching regarding money than we have ever been.

#nativeamerican #indigenouspeople #wendat #dawnofeverything #history #money #theology #christianity