David Wengrow > Quotes

“Civilizations, from the perspective of history, are shown to be the outcome of mixtures and borrowings, often of quite arbitrary things, but always on a prodigious scale.”
― David Wengrow, What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West

“Antiquity and modernity are cut from the same cloth. That is to say, our sense of things being ‘ancient’ is produced—both historically and in practice—by the sense that we ourselves are ‘modern’.”
― David Wengrow, What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West

“la de que las sociedades humanas podían disponerse según etapas de desarrollo, cada una con sus tecnologías y formas de organización características (cazadores-recolectores, agricultores, sociedad industrial urbana, etcétera).”
― David Wengrow, El amanecer de todo: Una nueva historia de la humanidad

“The idea of civilization has always been linked to the desire for universal history; a history that transcends written records, extending back in time to the origins of our species, outwards in space to encompass the full range of contemporary human diversity, and—at least in its early formulations—onwards into some improved future condition.”
― David Wengrow, What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West

“Suscita la posibilidad de que decisiones como adoptar o no adoptar la agricultura no eran solamente cálculos de ventaja calórica o asuntos de gustos culturales aleatorios, sino cuestiones bien reflexionadas acerca de valores, de lo que realmente somos los humanos (y de lo que pensamos ser) y de cómo deberíamos relacionarnos entre nosotros. El tipo de temas, de hecho, que nuestra tradición intelectual posterior a la Ilustración tiende a expresar a través de términos como libertad, responsabilidad, autoridad, igualdad, solidaridad y justicia.”
― David Wengrow, El amanecer de todo: Una nueva historia de la humanidad

“What we are suggesting is that indigenous doctrines of individual liberty, mutual aid and political equality, which made such an impression on French Enlightenment thinkers, were neither (as many of them supposed) the way all humans can be expected to behave in a State of Nature. Nor were they (as many anthropologists now assume) simply the way the cultural cookie happened to crumble in that particular part of the world. This is not to say there is no truth whatsoever in either of these positions. As we’ve said before, there are certain freedoms – to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties – that tend to be taken for granted by anyone who has not been specifically trained into obedience (as anyone reading this book, for instance, is likely to have been).Still, the societies that European settlers encountered, and the ideals expressed by thinkers like Kandiaronk, only really make sense as the product of a specific political history: a history in which questions of hereditary power, revealed religion, personal freedom and the independence of women were still very much matters of self-conscious debate, and in which the overall direction, for the last three centuries at least, had been explicitly anti-authoritarian.”
― David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“«Las sociedades —explicaba Mauss— viven de tomar prestado unas de otras, pero se definen a sí mismas más por sus rechazos a los préstamos que por su aceptación.»”
― David Wengrow, El amanecer de todo: Una nueva historia de la humanidad

“Todo esto empieza a hacer que el hábito de los antropólogos de colocar a los nobles yurok o a los artistas kwakiutl juntos en el saco de forrajeadores opulentos o cazadores-recolectores complejos parezca un tanto estúpido: el equivalente a afirmar que un ejecutivo petrolero de Texas y un poeta egipcio medieval son agriculturalistas complejos porque comen un montón de trigo.”
― David Wengrow, El amanecer de todo: Una nueva historia de la humanidad