@naught101 @babelcarp@social.tchncs.de 💯 it’s truly a banquet. I remember being in college reading #JaneJacobs’ book on how trade and cities predated agriculture and asking my anthropologist major acquaintance who ridiculed the idea, and being shocked at… I don’t know what I was shocked by, at least a little bit by the blasphemy of ridiculing the goddess Jane Jacobs, but I think more that people subscribed to this very pat schema of development that hadn’t changed since Marx popularized it in his pseudoscientific works, the bands → tribes → chiefdoms → states thing.

Graeber and Wengrow just, brick by brick, they drop bricks on the heads of these ninnies 🧱 and I am so there. The reality that we’ve known about but hidden in specialist journals is so much more vivacious and inspiring, I’m every day grateful to their work of synthesis. Even without Graeber I am confident a generation of laypeople and scholars will refuse to accept the bland generalizations of the past, having tasted the spice of integrating subfields and fields.

The only downside is like, I’m watching The Great Courses lectures by Edwin Barnhart on Mesoamerica and South America peoples (separate courses ❤️) for example from about ten years ago, I fume at his surprise at Chico Norte’s thousands of years of non-violence, at his willingness to just acknowledge its strangeness and then … just … move on with the lecture 😂 or visiting the Field Museum’s section on the ancient Americas and looking for any indication that the curators appreciate how unique Teotihuacan was compared to their neighbors and to other city states with the standard kings package (there was just one plaque that tried to acknowledge this, inviting the visitor to compare the leader-exalting art of the Maya and the Moche versus the anonymizing art of Tenotihuacan 🤯). The story is far from over! I want the rest of my life to be a continuation of the intellectual banquet Graeber and Wengrow have given us a taste of! Viva #Kondiaronk!

(Ah I realize I’m almost done with the book (ebook, so I don’t have a tactile sense of completion; I didn’t get a sense of how long it was till I saw a photo recently of it’s physical form 😆), thanks for the prompt, finishing it now 😁)