Comment by Nicholas_C | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nicholas_C | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Disingenuous interpretations of the evidence and stating things as facts that are very much still debated or denied by other experts.

A good example: Graeber posits that the European Enlightenment came directly from contact with Native American ideals rather than being a home grown movement. To support this, Graeber repeatedly references a book written by a French Army officer named Lahontan about his travels in North America in the late 1600s[0]. In this book Lahontan has dialogue with a fictional Native American named Adario that is more or less a disguised critique of European society. Adario bears similarities to Iroquois Chief Kondiaronk[1]. It's thought that Adario was a literary device for Lahontan's ideas but Graeber makes a very hand wavy argument that Adario was actually Kondiaronk and the dialogue was real. Graeber then uses this as his main piece of evidence to support his theory about the origins of the European Enlightenment.

I couldn't finish the book because I kept looking up the evidence Graeber was presenting and it usually ended up like the Kondiaronk situation.

Graeber is also very condescending when he's writing about ideas held by other anthropologists (like Jared Diamond), it was off-putting and came off as unprofessional for someone who was supposed to be a leading academic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Voyages_to_North_America [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk

I honestly don't know your background. Do you have an education and training in anthropology and/or archeology? Maybe you do.

When I read the criticisms in the press and blogs about the work, I found it telling that most of the criticism about Graeber and Wengrow's book is from non-experts. While experts seem to find it a breathe of fresh air.

I personally don't have enough training and education in anthropology and archeology to properly interpret the evidence. I suspect most readers here do not. That's why it's such an important work, because it synthesizes the latest research. Turns out a lot of it is counter to a lot of contemporary works that don't rely on such depth.

Another poster here referenced the Wikipedia page for the book which has some good content under the “Reception” section. Not all anthropologists thought it was a breath of fresh air. And again, I looked up a lot of the evidence and it wasn’t as cut and dry as he made it out to be. He was trying to build a narrative to sell a book.

Just because I’m not an anthropologist doesn’t mean I have to take Graeber’s word for everything.

Did you read the same reception section as me? It seems to be very well regarded and even when there were some criticism, they were minor. For example,

> Anthropologist Durba Chattaraj said "elisions, slippages, and too-exaggerated leaps" when referring to archaeology from India, but stated that its authors are "extremely rigorous and meticulous scholars",

So yes, there are criticism of the book by experts in the field, but they seem minor compared to the whole picture and impact the book is having.

There is a reason this book is so positively received because Graeber and Wengrow are real scholars.

There are many other criticisms in the Reception section such as the below excerpt which is a good summary of how I felt about what I read of the book.

> The historian David A. Bell, responding solely to Graeber and Wengrow's arguments about the Indigenous origins of Enlightenment thought and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, accused the authors of coming "perilously close to scholarly malpractice."

They are real scholars but also trying to use their reputation to sling a narrative to sell a book for the masses. I don’t care that some of their Ivy League/anthropology buddies said it was a breath of fresh air, what I read and researched myself said it was a good amount of hot air.

Have you read any of his other stuff? His essay on Bullshit Jobs (https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) is a good example that isn't book-length (though he did write a book of the same name that came out later)

Here I definitely take his condescending / snarky tone with a grain of salt, but as a reader I understand it as largely a literary technique to build a narrative and suggest / propose an alternative, usually somewhat contrarian, viewpoint.

I can't at all disagree with you here re: Dawn of Everything, as I haven't read the book, but is it at all possible that -- given we're analyzing the reported history of indigenous societies and the book talks about a proposed alternative viewpoint -- some level of "matter of fact"-ness works in a similar way as a literary technique? In this context it seems impossible to truly make a definitive claim one way or the other, as we're talking about histories for groups of people (who were largely extinguished by invading colonialist armies; Guns Germs and Steel and all that...) that are no longer around in serious enough numbers to have an oral history, let alone a quasi-accurate one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything#Recepti... seems largely like reception was a mixed bag, and that while there are parts that are a bit of a stretch, most anthropologists and reviewers found it a refreshing read contrary to the "canonical" (imperialist) narrative(s) commonly taught in history class. Is it as "mixed" from your read as that Wikipedia summary says, or do you find the discrepancies/inaccuracies significantly more egregious than the way I'm characterizing them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com