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- Convenors:
-
Khalil Betz-Heinemann
(University of Helsinki)
Nicholas Smaligo (Southern Illinois University - Carbondale)
Kevin Suemnicht (University of Illinois Chicago)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/009
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
'The Dawn of Everything' outlines monumental personal and political possibilities, undermining the premises of contemporary regimes instigating global crises. This roundtable explores how this book augments different schools of thought and everyday understandings of the 21st-century condition.
Long Abstract:
'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' (Graeber and Wengrow 2021) is a new international bestseller bringing anthropological and archaeological scholarship into the 'public' realm. The micro and macro political implications are currently being discussed in international readings groups and published as book reviews in popular media. Considering the monumental personal and political possibilities this work suggests, this panel asks: how is this book reframing, reanimating, and questioning what humankind imagines, what we understand and what we do? Furthermore, what does this text mean for social anthropologists? How are lay readers and non-academics engaging with and being influenced by Wengrow and Graeber's arguments? In the wake of Graeber's passing in 2021 and his significant contributions to anthropology, this roundtable reflects on these processes and questions.
Contributors:
(1) Nick Smaligo (online) on the groundwork for 'a new science of history
(2) Kevin Suemnicht (online) explores the books contributions to Black Studies
(3) Simona Ferlini (in person) on imagining alternatives and reinventing ourselves
(4) Felix Girke (in person) on schismogenesis and play
(5) Oana Mateescu (in person) on remaking technological sovereignty
(6) Nika Dubrovsky (in person) on architecture of cities and public housing
Chair: Khalil Avi Betz-Heinemann
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Oana Mateescu (Babes-Bolyai University)
Contribution short abstract:
Focusing on the discussion of kings as “ultimate abstractions”, this intervention provokes the book into stretching the notion of sovereignty onto digital platforms. What can kings teach us about platforms? What are the levers that TDoE suggests for remaking technological sovereignty?
Contribution long abstract:
This intervention approaches TDoE by first making a detour to David Graeber’s 2014 debate with venture capitalist Peter Thiel on technology and its capacity to circumvent the future with the aim of exploring the downsizing of technology in the historical scaffolding of TDoE. Focusing on the discussion of kings as “ultimate abstractions”, it provokes the book into stretching the notion of sovereignty onto digital platforms. What are the levers that TDoE suggests for the remaking of technological sovereignty? What can kings teach us about platforms?
Platforms illustrate the (geo)political quandaries of the digital age in which citizens are users and sovereignty the cumulative effect of infrastructural stacking. In this context, it is relevant that 21st century capitalism is often recast as techno-feudalism, by retrofitting the conceptual scaffoldings of feudalism for the analysis of the unbundling of sovereignty in relation to large scale computation.
Felix Girke (HTWG Konstanz and Allegra Lab)
Contribution short abstract:
In its examples of cultural contact, TDE emphasises people's oft-ignored awareness (manifest in schismogenesis and play) of the contingency of their own social forms and practices. Linked to Graeber's earlier work on imagination, this can provoke anthropology to reconsider some fundamentals.
Contribution long abstract:
"Imagination" is a key term in the work of David Graeber, at least since "Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value" (2001); as an anthropological topic, he uses it to cast light on various aspects of human sociality including hierarchy and bureaucracy. While not even included in the index of TDE, people's imagination of other ways to live and organize themselves is a thread running through the entire book. Even more: that people have not only been able to self-consciously reorganize their societies and that anthropology and other disciplines have systematically neglected this ability, is arguably one its key arguments. The evidence of past people's awareness of the "otherwise" comes out best in TDE's reconstructions of cultural contact in the Americas, and how there, models, ideas and ideologies seem to have been spread, imitated, ignored and rejected. Gregory Bateson's old notion of "schismogenesis" makes a furious come-back here as encapsulating that cultural change is never simply endogeneous, but a knowledge-based reaction; "play", another key term of TDE, expresses that people were aware of the contingency of their own social forms and practices. For anthropology, this reminder that (with Kopytoff) "pace introductory textbooks in anthropology, people do not always consider their culture to provide them with the best of all possible worlds" is a welcome reality check to reconsider not only phenomena like cultural change, identity, and conflict, but also some theoretical temptations.