“Revisiting what we will call the ‘indigenous critique’ means taking seriously contributions to social thought that come from outside the European canon, and in particular from those indigenous peoples whom Western philosophers tend to cast either in the role of history’s angels or its devils.”
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
“We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
“If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?”
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
“Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.”
― In the Dream House
― In the Dream House
“In the years between 1703 and 1751, as we’ve seen, the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought.”
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Pendle’s 2025 Year in Books
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