Barrett Book Club

Join Dr. Soto for an engaging book club! Participants may earn extra credit or Barrett Bucks.

Did it really have to be this way? This is the question co-authors David Graeber and David Wengrow—a cultural anthropologist and archaeologist, respectively—ask in their new book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Heavily researched, the book draws from hundreds of case studies from archaeology, the latest evolutionary genetics and anthropology to think through human history from the earliest hominids to the present. Their thesis is that the human story has been interpreted with the bias of hindsight, in which we conceive our own society as the inevitable and greatest product of all history that came before it. The mentality is that everything different is a shadow of us, a case study on the journey to us; everyone who strays from this journey in the present is backwards, stuck in the past, in need of help. This also naturalizes the struggles we face in the present as inevitable and perhaps intractable. But if we look at the past on its own merits, there is enormous variety and experimentation–and history itself becomes much more interesting. If our present is only one possible outcome of history, then we also have more space to imagine new possibilities—perhaps better, more just, and prosperous ones.

Starting Sep. 9, the Barrett Polytechnic Book Club will meet every Friday for 13 weeks during the fall and spring semester (26 weeks total) from 11 a.m.–12 p.m. on Fridays in Lantana Classroom 121 to discuss The Dawn of Everything. We will read about 20 pages per week and use our Friday meetings for informal discussion. This is great for students who wish to supplement their knowledge of human history in parallel to the Human Event, but also students hoping to engage with cutting edge social scholarship. Those who participated in last year's book club may appreciate this as Graeber and Wengrow cite Sapiens as epitomizing the worst of the historical interpretation they critique. The club is open to all students, faculty and staff on campus.

If you want more information, I recommend reading reviews of this book in the Atlantic ("Human History Gets a Rewrite") and Boston Review ("The Radical Promise of Human History").