Yoly’s Reviews > The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity > Status Update

Zero progress. I am fucking so tired.

Cities are tangible things. Yet they have a life that transcends all this because they will often think and act as people who *belong* to the city. The city itself is a structure raised primarily in the human imagination, which allowed for the possibility of amicable relations with people they had never met.

There is no evidence for a central authority at Çatalhöyük. Each household appears more or less a world unto itself and has held a significant degree of control over its own rituals, learned mainly within the household itself through its ceremonies and micro-routines.

It's not of labour as such but of controllable labour at key times of year, so ecology does not explain the presence of slavery, freedom does.

What really needs to be theorized is not just the mode of production practiced by victims of predation, but also that of the non-producers who prey in them—the non-productive mode of production.

Are both institutional structure and the prevailing ethos of a society just effects of a different technological adaptation to the environment? Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?

Historically odd European social thoughts take the absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms (Spotify on repeat RAYE’s Click Clack Symphony 🎵)

What are so called egalitarian societies should less be about equality per se but should be about autonomy (my possibility of actually doing so and so).