#davidwengrow

"Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources - even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case." #DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (1/?) #eurocentrism

"Indigenous peoples are assumed to have lived in a completely different universe, inhabited a different reality, even; anything Europeans said about them was simply a shadow-play projection, fantasies of the 'noble savage' culled from the European tradition itself." #DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (2/?)

"Of course, such historians typically frame this position as a critique of Western arrogance (‘how can you suggest that genocidal imperialists were actually listening to those whose societies they were in the process of stamping out?’), but it could equally well be seen as a form of Western arrogance in its own right." #DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (3/3)

"A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus." DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (1/2)

"So one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them." DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (2/2)

"In fact, the terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World. " DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (3/3)

"Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist "Gregory Bateson coined the term 'schismogenesis' to describe people's tendency to define themselves against one another." #DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (1/3) #schismogenesis

"Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement bit, after an hour, they end up on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide - even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under normal circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other's points." #DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (2/3)

"They start out as moderate social democrats of slightly different flavours; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman. We know this kind of thing can happen in arguments. Bateson suggested such processes can become institutionalized on a cultural level as well." #DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (3/3)