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“For far too long we have been generating myths. As a result, we’ve been mostly asking the wrong questions: are festive rituals expressions of authority, or vehicles for social creativity? Are they reactionary or progressive? Were our earliest ancestors simple and egalitarian, or complex and stratified? Is human nature innocent or corrupt? Are we, as a species, inherently co-operative or competitive, kind or selfish, good or evil? Perhaps all these questions blind us to what really makes us human in the first place, which is our capacity – as moral and social beings – to negotiate between such alternatives.”
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
“This is precisely why the ethnographic record is so important. The Nuer and Inuit should never have been seen as ‘windows on to our ancestral past’. They are creations of the modern age just the same as we are – but they do show us possibilities we never would have thought of and prove that people are actually capable of enacting such possibilities, even building whole social systems and value systems around them. In short, they remind us that human beings are far more interesting than (other) human beings are sometimes inclined to imagine.”
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
“Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility.”
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
“searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question. 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
“We do not have to choose any more between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story. Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge (as Lévi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them – at least the most reflexive among them – just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature. They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.”
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Jack’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jack’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
765 books
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165 friends
1,181 books
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60 friends
305 books
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41 friends
1,451 books
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143 friends
40 books
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38 friends
306 books
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601 friends
1 book
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72 friends
0 books
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33 friends
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