5 ms·

My review: the main story and ideas of the book are great, and the many small stories of the book are great too. I have read many of Graeber's books, and it is

by 317070 4y ago

My review: the main story and ideas of the book are great, and the many small stories of the book are great too. I have read many of Graeber's books, and it is full of novel ideas. But, the book could have used a bit more editing. As the arc is coming to an end, many new examples are hastily introduced that don't seem to lead anywhere. The book has a great first half, but the second half is lacking. I feel like it has all the raw material of a masterpiece, but it is missing the polishing, possibly due to Graeber's unfortunate early passing. There is an often heard comment that they provide too few data. I find that of little importance. I value novel perspectives on history a lot more. I kind of agree with Graeber that the focus on data succombs to paradox that if you focus on what you can measure, you will automatically look at history with today's eyes, as today is metric-focused.

moloch-hai 4y ago
One of the authors dying during editing can reasonably be expected to have some effect.
- jml7c5 4y ago
  There's no need for italics; the parent post already acknowledges Graeber's death.
sdenton4 4y ago
My understanding was that they published a pile of papers to establish the skeleton of the narrative before it made it into the book. David Wengrow's publication history has a number of papers which rhyme with things in the book, like this one: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1519520/1 https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1519520/1 --- History also has a strong bias towards the status quo. If a new theory is proposed which explains the available evidence with equal ability, the pre-existing idea will typically remain the accepted version of the story. The net effect is that we're prone to get stuck with versions of history originally proposed by phrenologists and worse... When common sense fills in the blanks in the story, you might get stuck with some very bad version of common sense, completely alien to the historical people it's being applied to. We really should approach history with a bit of the spirit of Rashomon. When we look at it with a too narrow lens, we wind up underestimating the breadth of what's possible.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
We know that we don't know virtually anything about ancient history, but yet we still believe that our completely flawed (and often made up) theories must be "challenged" by an insurmountable amount of indisputable evidence. It is not necessary. I'm reading the book right now, I'm not an English native speaker so I'm being a bit slow, but I've watched several videos about it (that's how I knew about the book, thanks YouTube) and the first thing that got me excited was that, for the first time since I remember, this theory is not patronizing towards ancient civilizations. All our building blocks are based on the concept "they couldn't possibly be capable of", while it is now evident that not only they could, but they did. The second thing I liked about Wengrow was that he acknowledges that questions such as "was there an advanced civilization before the Sumerians?" are legitimate questions, historians and archeologists should embrace that mentality and answer the questions, not try to disprove wild theories proposed by amateurs and sometimes plain crooks. It doesn't necessarily follow that it was the aliens of course, but, AFAICR, at school they taught me that "it was impossible", not that we don't know, but that humans were, in layman terms, "too stupid to even think about it" and in the end the unanswered questions, the fact that people see that the evidence do not add up, lead to the success of people like Graham Hancock, instead of leading people to trusting the hard work on the field of historians and archeologists. It's a vicious circle that I hope this book will break.

by 317070 4y ago

moloch-hai 4y ago

One of the authors dying during editing can reasonably be expected to have some effect.

jml7c5 4y ago
There's no need for italics; the parent post already acknowledges Graeber's death.

sdenton4 4y ago

My understanding was that they published a pile of papers to establish the skeleton of the narrative before it made it into the book. David Wengrow's publication history has a number of papers which rhyme with things in the book, like this one: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1519520/1 https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1519520/1 --- History also has a strong bias towards the status quo. If a new theory is proposed which explains the available evidence with equal ability, the pre-existing idea will typically remain the accepted version of the story. The net effect is that we're prone to get stuck with versions of history originally proposed by phrenologists and worse... When common sense fills in the blanks in the story, you might get stuck with some very bad version of common sense, completely alien to the historical people it's being applied to. We really should approach history with a bit of the spirit of Rashomon. When we look at it with a too narrow lens, we wind up underestimating the breadth of what's possible.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

We know that we don't know virtually anything about ancient history, but yet we still believe that our completely flawed (and often made up) theories must be "challenged" by an insurmountable amount of indisputable evidence. It is not necessary. I'm reading the book right now, I'm not an English native speaker so I'm being a bit slow, but I've watched several videos about it (that's how I knew about the book, thanks YouTube) and the first thing that got me excited was that, for the first time since I remember, this theory is not patronizing towards ancient civilizations. All our building blocks are based on the concept "they couldn't possibly be capable of", while it is now evident that not only they could, but they did. The second thing I liked about Wengrow was that he acknowledges that questions such as "was there an advanced civilization before the Sumerians?" are legitimate questions, historians and archeologists should embrace that mentality and answer the questions, not try to disprove wild theories proposed by amateurs and sometimes plain crooks. It doesn't necessarily follow that it was the aliens of course, but, AFAICR, at school they taught me that "it was impossible", not that we don't know, but that humans were, in layman terms, "too stupid to even think about it" and in the end the unanswered questions, the fact that people see that the evidence do not add up, lead to the success of people like Graham Hancock, instead of leading people to trusting the hard work on the field of historians and archeologists. It's a vicious circle that I hope this book will break.