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BenI'm fascinated by Graeber and Wengrow's description of Medieval seasonal festivals providing an opportunity for peasant's to lampoon the monarchy and so maintain "political self conciousness". And trace the tradition of clowns throughout history that subverted the status quo. "The first kings may well have been play kings. Then they became real kings."My kids love watching this episode and playing the game[...]<a href="https://adar.bearblog.dev/play-kings/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://adar.bearblog.dev/play-kings/</a><a href="https://social.coop/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> <a href="https://social.coop/tags/thedawnofeverything" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#thedawnofeverything</a> <a href="https://social.coop/tags/monarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#monarchy</a> <a href="https://social.coop/tags/books" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#books</a>

BenI'm reading "The Dawn of everything - A new History of Humanity" by David Wengrow and David Graeber at the moment. Graeber is spot on: it IS mind altering to know that our ancestors developed complex societies without hierarchy, and these societies built cities. Some of our ancestors lived in societies that adopted hierarchy only to leave it behind.<a href="https://social.coop/tags/TheDawnofEverything" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#TheDawnofEverything</a> <a href="https://social.coop/tags/books" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#books</a> <a href="https://social.coop/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> <a href="https://social.coop/tags/anarchism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#anarchism</a> <a href="https://social.coop/tags/history" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#history</a>

Javier Ruiz BarquínNuevo ídolo: Kondiaronk.<a href="https://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/la-sabiduria-de-kandiaronk" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/la-sabiduria-de-kandiaronk</a><a href="https://masto.es/tags/elamanecerdetodo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#elamanecerdetodo</a> <a href="https://masto.es/tags/graeber" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#graeber</a> <a href="https://masto.es/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a>

GeofCox<a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/@Anropa" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@Anropa</a> <a href="https://mastodon.green/@pvonhellermannn" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@pvonhellermannn</a> Oh - I have to confess profound ignorance too. I read some Levi-Strauss in my youth - but more in the process of getting to grips with structuralism, than exploring anthropology - and I read <a href="https://climatejustice.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> recently - but other than that, and the occasional Guardian article, I know nothing.

22Older item in the news cycle but <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a>’s book totally prepared me for this nonsense: after learning that the whose “blessed-vs-cursed state of nature dichotomy” between Rousseau and Hobbes (itself a direct response to the Indigenous critique of European societies from Native American societies) was conveniently fabricated to avoid examining uncomfortable truths, it’s totally believable that a mountain of ethnographic evidence sat silently, for centuries in some cases—<blockquote>‘Until now, the general sense among scientists has been that these accounts overwhelmingly pointed to men mainly hunting and women mainly gathering, with only occasional exceptions, says Robert Kelly, professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming and the author of influential books and articles on hunter-gatherer societies. But Kelly says that the views he and others held of the typical gender divisions around hunting were based on anecdotal impressions of the reports they'd been reading, combined with the field work many had engaged in personally. "No one," says Kelly, had done a systematic "tally" of what the observational reports said about women hunting. …The vast majority of the time, she says, "the hunting was purposeful. Women had their own toolkit. They had favorite weapons. Grandmas were the best hunters of the village."‘ <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i</a></blockquote>

22Thinking about <a href="https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@pluralistic</a>’s powerful article about <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/schismogenesis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#schismogenesis</a> drawing on <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a>’s work <a href="https://doctorow.medium.com/schizmogenesis-755bbb6a8515" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://doctorow.medium.com/schizmogenesis-755bbb6a8515</a> (will replace this with a non-Medium link when I find it) a lot today because my disagreeing with the LLM-haters absolutely does not mean suddenly that VCs or OpenAI or the laser-eyed class (<a href="https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/110087666364908932" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/110087666364908932</a>) aren’t shit. My mental models probably overlap a ton more with the LLM-fearers than the median LLM-lover and I cannot stomach the possibility of appearing to be allying with the shit-shilling types, the Chamaths and the Balajis.People are right to distrust capitalism’s latest devilry (that scene in Fellowship of the Rings—Boromir seeing the distant flames and asking, “What is this new devilry”?)

22This 150 people thing, that is, Dunbar’s number, is another casualty of my reading <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a>’s “Dawn of Everything”. In discussing ancient cities and continent-spanning cultural systems that allowed individuals to move far away from their family and expect to find welcome and shelter and help, thousands of years ago, they propose a number of ways to see why Dunbar’s limit is at most a soft limit, nothing as serious as we all tend to believe.For example, after discussing the modern hunter-gatherers whose groups are only 10% kin, and individuals migrate far to join those groups, they note:<blockquote>“It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents… In this, at least, modern foragers are no different from modern city dwellers or ancient hunter-gatherers. We all have the capacity to feel bound to people we will probably never meet; to take part in a macro-society which exists most of the time as ‘virtual reality’, a world of possible relationships with its own rules, roles and structures that are held in the mind and recalled through the cognitive work of image-making and ritual. Foragers may sometimes exist in small groups, but they do not – and probably have not ever – lived in small-scale societies.”</blockquote>

22BBC reporting that one Ben Bacon, a furniture guy from London, has decoded various markings on 20,000 year old cave paintings across Europe as indicating the mating/calving times of various creatures according to a lunar calendar: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64162799" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64162799</a>I dug up the full paper in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, it’s open-access! <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19</a>This. Is. Superb! <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> have taught me to see this as, wow, our ancestors were indeed brilliant, observant, sensitive people just like us. Nothing like old misguided ideas about them being stuck in some primitive/class-less ahistoric sameness.(Reminds me of how the <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/Maya" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Maya</a> hieroglyphs, thought to be undecipherable 😂!, were cracked in the 1950s by not a historian or archeologist but a linguist who studied the local languages in Yucatec Maya (anathema in archeology—the locals living near a site can’t possibly have anything to tell us about the past 🥸!).) <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/archeology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#archeology</a>

22<blockquote>“the evidence we have from Palaeolithic times onwards suggests that many—perhaps even most—people did not merely imagine or enact different social orders at different times of year, but actually lived in them for extended periods of time. The contrast with our present situation could not be more stark. Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like. Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them.If something did go terribly wrong in human history—and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did—then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.” —David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything</blockquote>This book is a great cornucopia of examples from history and archeology and anthropology of such alternative social and economic structures that our ancestors imagined and moved between and fought for. I am for the first time in my adult life beginning to dare to hope for a world very different than what we have, and even more audacious, hoping that world is better.<a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/TheDawnOfEverything" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#TheDawnOfEverything</a>

22I must talk about <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/Teotichuacan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Teotichuacan</a> again, this time with pictures from the <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/FieldMuseum" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#FieldMuseum</a>. This was the major city in central Mexico that seems to have started around 0 CE and went down the standard Mesoamerican kings package for a couple of hundred years—palaces, elite burials, depictions of warfare/slavery in art. Then around 300 CE, this stopped and as far as we can tell, the city reconfigured itself onto what appears to be egalitarian, multicultural, peaceful lines, for several hundred more years, with a population of 100,000 to 500,000 (like, Staten Island!).<blockquote>“nowhere among some thousands of… images do we find even a single representation of a ruler striking, binding or otherwise dominating a subordinate—unlike in the contemporary arts of the Maya and Zapotec, where this is a constant theme. Today scholars pore over Teotihuacan imagery, searching for anything that might be construed as a kingly figure, but largely they fail. In many cases the artists seem to have deliberately frustrated such efforts, for instance by making all the figures in a given scene exactly the same size.” (The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow, <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a>)</blockquote>In this recent interview with Wengrow <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-EN0YIBIg" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-EN0YIBIg</a> (around 15:50), the host asks about <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/Stonehenge" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Stonehenge</a>, which seems to have been built a little after when peoples all across Britain stopped cereal agriculture and returned to foraging—while keeping animal husbandry which they picked up along with agriculture—without any apparent exogenous or ecological influence: people across the island seem to have just decided. The host, channeling societal revolution here and in Teotihuacan, bursts out,<blockquote>"For contemporary audiences, the equivalent would be us deciding the Industrial Revolution wasn't a good idea, or just stop using fossil fuels."</blockquote>At which point Wengrow looks sly for a beat and bursts out laughing—that is of course the point of their book, the point Graeber made his whole career: Teotihuacan and the British megalith builders, and several other examples, point to societies in sometimes the very deep past that self-consciously decide for themselves, "We're done with this" and pick a new path.We can do it again.

22I often think about how white Americans were so captivated by the Hopewell and Cahokia earthworks that they concocted diverse outlandish theories to explain their origins because they couldn't imagine Indigenous peoples doing such impressive geoengineering.Racism. So, so delicious people cannot get enough. To get a taste, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_Builders#Popular_mythology" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_Builders#Popular_mythology</a>Yes I'm watching this excellent course on North American civilizations <a href="https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/ancient-civilizations-of-north-america" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/ancient-civilizations-of-north-america</a> by Dr Edwin Barnhart, whose lectures on South American archeology I am a huge fan of too. (You can watch it on Bezos-site but I waited for a sale and bought it from Great Courses because their player can do 2x and Prime doesn't.)(And yes, same Hopewell culture that features large in <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a>'s "Dawn of Everything".)

22The legacy of <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> continues to grow. Hearing an argument that presumes the Hobbes–Rousseau dichotomy, I still tend to reach for the ahistorical idea that domination has dominated human existence until Graeber and Wengrow pop up to remind me, no, archeology and anthropology has already rewritten the past and the message is diversity and variety and flexibility in how humans have chosen to organize themselves.For now it seems that for every example of a warlord dominating a society we also have a counterexample of an equally large and equally long-lived society that self-governed and had few markers of status, or a society dominated by priests, or a variety of other distinctly different organizations.I cannot wait for the various digs and findings profiled by Graeber and Wengrow to become more well-read and well-integrated with theories of development.

22“I think that people are really exhausted at being angry” —<a href="https://mastodon.social/@bcantrill" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@bcantrill</a>👏 I love this! People, tired of the way things are, change! Classic <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> for the modern era: instead of TINA (there is no alternative), we realize we can have nice things.

22<a href="https://mas.to/@Whysatan" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@Whysatan</a> it is probably very tasteless for me to try and apply something that an archeologist and an anthropologist wrote to a very tragic modern situation but frankly if the theory doesn’t work for our most pressing cases, it’s probably not that great. Graeber and Wengrow’s book The Dawn talks about how we are trained to think that ”there is no alternative” (TINA), that our societies and our social relationships—on every scale, between individuals or between nations—are fixed or it’s impossibly hard for them to change. But they spend the whole book looking at examples from archeology and anthropology, from a ton of the latest not-yet-widley-known research and digs, to show that humans have always had a bewildering, staggering variety of ways they structure their societies and furthermore (this is the part that pertains to this conversation) that they have always been very self-conscious about the societies they are in and very willing to experiment with and change their societies. My favorite example is Teotihuacan in Mexico. For the first hundred-ish years of the common era the city was going down the typical route of the Mesoamerican kings package but in the archeological record we see them do a U-turn and the city became heavily-anti-kings and self-governing for centuries afterwards. And there are countless examples from all over the globe from all times up to 12,000 years ago like this—people have a culture, for various and varied reasons they change it.To me this is an incredibly empowering message because it invites people to realize we have always been capable of introspecting on our own societies and capable of changing them dramatically, consciously, mindfully. That “the cycle of violence that lasts forever” is a learned cultural behavior that we can not only reject but that our forebears have rejected several documented times in the past.To the extent that there’s any appetite for this kind of theorizing impacting the tragic situation in the Middle East some reading might be this short profile <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/david-wengrow-dawn-of-everything/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.wired.com/story/david-wengrow-dawn-of-everything/</a> I also was live-tooting reading the book with <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a>.<a href="https://mas.to/@WahbAllat" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@WahbAllat</a>

22Triketora writes:> had a conversation yesterday in which someone asserted that twitter has no social value and it wouldn’t matter to society if it shut down (context was discussing elon musk mess). i disagree obv but it was an interesting thought experiment about what could/would replace twitter? <a href="https://nitter.ca/triketora/status/1566334816517251075" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://nitter.ca/triketora/status/1566334816517251075</a>Preface, (a) I respect Triketora a lot, (b) I try hard to curb my inner curmudgeon (I haven’t tooted anything about BeReal even though I’m getting on in years).The exercise of mapping something to simpler terms is risky (leads to “I could build that in a weekend” syndrome; I often think of the Hacker Newser who panned the original Dropbox announcement, saying it’s trivially implemented via ftp), but also sometimes useful.The same way a coffee mug is topologically equivalent to a torus (🍩), Twitter is maybe analogous to everyone having a blog, everyone being able to comment on your blog, but you can’t delete comments on your blog, and it’s really, really easy to blog something saying “look at this stupid thing this person blogged”.This analogy isn’t unique nor complete, but it helps illustrate what could replace Twitter: this world where everyone has a normal 2003-era blog, where you can have a commenter policy or login process of arbitrary complexity. Among any number of alternatives that Fediverse people can imagine (it’s funny that Triketora asked the above of other people on Twitter 😁).But what’s shocking is our lack of imagination. It’s always surprising to me to remember how easy it is to look at the world, to invoke Margaret Thatcher and say TINA: “there is no alternative”, and how valuable it is to instead go on Persian wisdom: “this too shall pass”.Yes this too is a <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> toot.

22I love how <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> have begun rewiring my brain. So, I love Mims and Ranjan both and they both endorsed this podcast interview (<a href="https://nitter.ca/mims/status/1561368786166595585" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://nitter.ca/mims/status/1561368786166595585</a>), and so the guest is talking about how, when tech allowed everyone to be a publisher–publicist, people spontaneously figured out that the fastest way to build a following is, not to praise something you like but to trash something you hate—there’s a bit in 22:45 where he’s like, “I think that’s just human nature, to dislike something more than liking it”.And I think the core argument by Graeber and Wengrow is, throughout our deep human history, people have over and over pretty carefully reflected on how their societies work and have chosen to reject things they don’t want and been quite self-conscious in choosing how to structure their lives—not just small bands but mega-sites and cities with tens to hundreds of thousands of people. If the Teotihuacanos could decide to stop with the kings thing after a couple hundred years and go equality, with no evidence of hierarchy or noble classes for hundreds more years, then why can’t we decide—you know, sure it’s fun to shit on things you don’t like but that’s not something adults do. We’re gonna deliberately focus on what brings us joy and gratitude, and praise the people who bring us positivity, and we’re consciously rejecting the anti-fan. That’s a much smaller ask!

22Many of the archeological finds profiled in <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> caught my eye—including the stunning Cucuteni-Trypillia and Longshan cultures of the Ukraine and China—and made me seek out the primary sources they cite, but I have spent a *most* delightful day trawling through museum books on <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/Teotihuacan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Teotihuacan</a> and Mesoamerican art.What a story:> As we’ve seen, when kings appear in the historical record, they tend to leave unmistakeable traces. We can expect to find palaces, rich burials and monuments celebrating their conquests. All this is true in Mesoamerica as well.… In Teotihuacan, all this seems to have been strikingly absent… > > nowhere among some thousands of such images do we find even a single representation of a ruler striking, binding or otherwise dominating a subordinate—unlike in the contemporary arts of the Maya and Zapotec, where this is a constant theme. Today scholars pore over Teotihuacan imagery, searching for anything that might be construed as a kingly figure, but largely they fail. In many cases the artists seem to have deliberately frustrated such efforts, for instance by making all the figures in a given scene exactly the same size. … the city’s artists appear to have been aware of formal and compositional principles found among their Mesoamerican neighbours, and to have set about deliberately inverting them… > > In its early years, they concluded, Teotihuacan had gone some way down the road to authoritarian rule, but then around AD 300 suddenly reversed course: possibly there was a revolution of sorts, followed by a more equal distribution of the city’s resources and the establishment of a kind of ‘collective governance’. The general consensus among those who know the site best is that Teotihuacan was, in fact, a city organized along some sort of self-consciously egalitarian lines.—David Graeber & David Wengrow. “The Dawn of Everything”Attachments from two wonderfully heavily-illustrated volumes:- ①③④: "Made to Order: Painted Ceramics of Ancient Teotihuacan" by Cynthia Conides - ②: "Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands: Gods, Ancestors, and Human Beings" edited by Brigitte Faugère and Christopher S. Beekman

22(Revisiting this because of this tidbit in Ter Ellingson’s book, “The Myth of the Noble Savage” (page 3):> But like some other anthropological folklore, this particular invented tradition is not only wrong but long since known to be wrong; and its continuing vitality in the face of its demonstrated falsity confronts us with a particularly problematic current in the history of <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/anthropology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#anthropology</a>. … not only is everything we have believed about the myth of the Noble Savage wrong, but it is so because our profession has been historically constructed in such a way as to require exactly this kind of obviously false belief.Ellingson is given as a source for much of the fascinating Native American commentary on European cultures in <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a>’s “The dawn of everything”, which I’d like to dig more into.)

22At first I was afraid of annoying everyone by live-tooting reading <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a>'s “The Dawn of Everything”.As I got into it I was then annoyed that readers like <a href="https://social.tchncs.de/@babelcarp" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@babelcarp</a> didn't sufficiently warn us how amazing the book was.But, ~40% in, finally I've come to realize that the book is just too full of amazing archeological and ethnographic discoveries (and commentary thereon) to live-toot or even properly capture its magnificence.The book is making me hopeful that we can and likely will realize dramatic changes in our global order, through thoughtful society-wide self-reflection rather than the chaos–upheaval model of the passing of the mandate of heaven.Had to stop reading on phone and switch to desktop to screencap a high-res version of this nice map from Chapter 7, "The ecology of freedom: how farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed its way around the world". There is a LOT of commentary and myth-busting packed into this little map, it's truly a wonder of modern scholarhood.

22<a href="https://octodon.social/tags/GraeberWengrow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GraeberWengrow</a> are describing ways that high-value goods traveled hundreds or thousands of miles millennia ago without any markers in sight, and, be still my poker-loving heart—not only did Iroquois speakers travel far to find things they saw in dreams, and not only did doctor-jugglers crisscross the continent,> 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 shell beads or other objects of personal adornment as the stakes. One archaeologist versed in the ethnographic literature, Warren DeBoer, estimates that many of the shells and other exotica 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(*The Dawn of Everything*, David Graeber & David Wengrow)I’ve previously complained about modern Puritanical views of <a href="https://octodon.social/tags/gambling" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#gambling</a> <a href="https://octodon.social/@22/108301686101863122" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://octodon.social/@22/108301686101863122</a> but this vignette, like this whole book, is truly luxurious.

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