This book will stay on my shelf, as I can see myself pulling it down from time to time and checking out all those pages I dogeared and all those passages I highlighted.

One thing, though–I’m not entirely certain the authors answered their own question–how did humanity get stuck in this particular rut? They posit three freedoms–the freedom to relocate, the freedom to disobey commands, and the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality. According to them, currently everyone on earth is lockstepped into obedience, of culture, of class, of church, of citizenship. While it wasn’t always this way (and they provide a mountain of evidence from scientific research old and new that it wasn’t), they say that now we’ve been trained to it and while we might like to break out of it we don’t know how and we don’t receive any encouragement to do so. They hope their work and the work of other archeologists and anthropologists will help.

I hope so, too. I’d especially like to get back to days when women were respected enough not only to run their own lives but the lives of entire tribes, cities, and nations.

Book Review Monday Chatter David Graeber David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything