Graeber & Wengrow, "The Dawn of Everything"

 

 

David Graeber & David Wengrow, "The Dawn of Everything:

A New History of Humanity" (2021)

 

 

열두 장으로 구성된, 본문만 500쪽이 넘는 이 책은, 계몽주의 사상이

몇몇 유럽 사상가들의 독창적인 사고의 결과라기보다는 그들이 받은

북미 원주민 지성의 영향 때문이라는 내용의, 제2장 "Wiked

Liberty"와, 수렵시대에서 농경시대로의 전환은 획기적인 '농업혁명'을

통해서가 아니고 BC 10,000 에서부터 3,000년 걸친 다양한 형태의

중간 실험 단계를 거쳤다는, 제6장 "Gardens of Adonis"만을 읽고,

나머지는 책 이름이나 기억해 두기로 한다.

 

제2장 "Wicked Libery" 에서 몇 구절 인용한다:

 

(마지막 세 인용이 제6장을 포함해 다른 장에서 다루는 내용들을

시사하는 것 같다. 첫 인용과 관련해서 생각나는 것: 20년 전쯤인데

한 젊은 철학 교수가, 우리가 자유를(자유의 개념을) 아는 것은

Mill 때문이다, 라고 하는 것을 듣고서(읽고서였나?) 놀란 적이 있다,

John Stuart Mill 자신도 그의 책 "On Librty"에서, 자신은 "상식적인

이야기를 쓰고 있다"고 했는데 말이다.)

 

Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man

theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in a given

age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual.

(p. 27)

 

Intellectual historians sometimes write as if Rousseau had personally

kicked off the debate about social inequality with his 1754 Discourse

on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind. In

fact, he wrote it to submit to an essay contest on the subject. (p. 27)

 

[E]ven in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they

were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as ... Gottfried Wilhelm

Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models

of statecraft), there's a tendency for contemporary historians to insist

they weren't really serious. (p. 29)

 

We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key

Enlightenment thinkersinsisted that their ideals of individual liberty

and political equality were inspired by Native American sources

and examples. Because it was true. (p. 37)

 

Back in the 1960s, the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres

suggested that precisely the opposite was the case. What if the

sort of people we like imagine as simple and innocent are free of

rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like,

not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they're

actually more imaginative than we are? (p. 73)

 

Evidence accumulating from archaeology, anthropology and related

fields suggests that ... the people of prehistoric times had very

specific ideas about what was important in their societies; that these

varied considerably; and that describing such societies as uniformly

'egalitarian' tells us almost nothing about them. (p. 75)

 

But self-conscious idea of 'equality,' putting forward as an explit

value (as opposed to an ideology of freedom, or dignity, or

participation that applies equally to all) appear to have been

relative latedcomers to human history.  And even when they do

appear, they rarely apply to everyone. (p. 76)

 

 

워싱턴포스트 서평

 

아래는 위 서평에서:

 

Graeber and Wengrow tell a dazzling array of stories about

civilizations across many continents and thousands of years, all

of which are grappling with what it means to be free. We’re

immersed in tales of the 9,000-year-old Turkish city of

Catalhoyuk, where there was no great 'agricultural revolution,'

but instead thousands of years of gradual transformation from

hunting and gathering to planting a yearly harvest.

 

Graeber and Wengrow speculate that the Hopewell peoples

of North America, whose incredible earthworks have stood for

millennia, did not define their civilization as a social ladder with

some overlord at its top. Instead, their many cities and villages

were in a loose confederation, where any individual had the

freedom to disobey her chief, leave her band and visit other

groups where she might be welcomed.

 

 

뉴욕타임즈 서평

 

아래는 위 서평에서:

 

“The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” ... may

or may not dislodge the standard narrative popularized in

mega-sellers like Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” and Jared

Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel.” But it has already

gathered a string of superlative-studded (if not entirely

uncritical) reviews.