@nan és terrible com de xunga és aquesta societat i a quantes persones s'emporta per davant.

Em ve al cap una pregunta que trobo molt interessant:
Les persones (en el sentit més col·lectiu de la paraula) som dolentes de neixement o ens hi tornem? #Hobbes o #Rosseau ? Podem xerrar-ho demà, eh, que és llarg 😅 @bonobo

@sociology @anthropology

#sociology So I'm reading an early edition of Gellner's #Nations and #Nationalism. I had read an excerpt- his main case for nationhood and nationalism being heavily #modernist, rooted in the #industrial age, and the most controversial claim I think he makes- that a nation's #history
and a lot of what constitutes its #culture are, well not "fabricated" but a reconstruction.

As Anderson talks about in Imagined Communities, the very nature of a nation is it is a binding agent between a group where no one person can ever meet everyone in the outlined group. A lot of unifying culture can be understood as very particular, but through writing, cultural showcases, and the like, made to say they were in time immemorial a widespread unifying practice.

What I'm getting to is reading #Graeber and #Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, how it invites us to think about what prehistory and the dawn of history were like, and the nature of a nation's origins.

Graeber through all his works was about using his deep knowledge of living communities as a way to propose alternative ways of living, alternative explanations, and create a critique of assumptions. In #Debt he goes on an attack of the believed barter period that predates societies that adopted money.

In Dawn the question is whether the thinkers of classic social thinkers are working off an ahistorical or lightly empirical view of "the state of nature" and how so much social theory derives from thinkers that predate modern archeology and anthropology.

I saw some academics be dismissive of Graeber and Wengrow. They do come into political philosophy with an interpretation but it's a difficult task to bridge knowledge of what Hobbes and Rosseau and others allege, and those thinkers themselves. I do think Graeber always issued important challenges to his readers and the larger community that studies bureaucracy, or kingship, or modern work, or value.

The challenge is thus: when we are discussing, writing, shooting the breeze at a cafe or a late night establishment, how do we relate the ongoing task of assembling primary sources, archeological sites, and the everlasting process of rediscovering scholars who were left out of our education or reading list? In some cases, are we really basing "knowledge" on a series of assumptions going back decades or centuries in social thinking?

#sociology #socialtheory #anthropology #theory #rosseau #hobbes #nature #origins