Dawn dismantles the social science edifice that makes it possible to think that the question “What are the origins of inequality?”…
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
A Middle Eastern indigenous critique?
…I ask how Dawn might help us to think of the Americas and the Middle East together. What is to…
Indigenous refusals and near others
Refusal is shorthand for saying, “We’ve seen this before and we don’t want it; and not only don’t we want…
History is full of people with ideas
According to Graeber and Wengrow, European elites did not embrace naturalism and empiricism in their accounts of human history to…
Play astronauts and actual refugees
What does humankind’s ancient history have to do with our current existential predicaments? With millions of new refugees seeking to…
Searching for better questions (while building a better world)
In Graeber and Wengrow’s book, as in my teaching practices, the questions are difficult not because they need to prove…
In the Garden
Does Adam and Eve’s disobedience indelibly inscribe this freedom, and freedom as such, into our habits of thought—for what disobedience…
The dawn of everything good?
The authors’ message is a hopeful one: that humans aren’t predetermined by our ecological conditions or by teleological or evolutionary…
Back to basics, or how to tell a new origin story
The implications of Dawn for the study of religion are vast. We could consider the evidence that Graeber and Wengrow…
A prolegomenon to some future history
[I]t was pretty obvious that in this first piece of writing, we’d get about as far as trying to jettison…