INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or by taming our baser instincts. In their major New York Times bestseller, The Dawn of Everything , David Graeber and David Wengrow fundamentally challenge these assumptions and recast our understanding of human history. We will never again see the past in the same way. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, Graeber and Wengrow reveal how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual blinders and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing during all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organizations did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more open to playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. Destined to be a classic, The Dawn of Everything signals a paradigm shift, profoundly transforming our understanding of the human past and making space to imagine new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual and political range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and hopefulness.

Anthropologist David Graeber undertakes the first detailed ethnographic study of the global justice movement. The case study at the center of Direct Action is the organizing and events that led to the one of the most dramatic and militant mass protests in recent years -- against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. Written in a clear, accessible style (with a minimum of academic jargon), this study brings readers behind the scenes of a movement that has changed the terms of debate about world power relations. From informal conversations in coffee shops to large "spokescouncil" planning meetings and tear gas-drenched street actions, Graeber paints a vivid and fascinating picture. Along the way, he addresses matters of deep interest to anthropologists: meeting structure and process, language, symbolism and representation, the specific rituals of activist culture, and much more. Starting from the assumption that, when dealing with possibilities of global transformation and emerging political forms, a disinterested, "objective" perspective is impossible, Graeber writes as both scholar and activist. At the same time, his experiment in the application of ethnographic methods to important ongoing political events is a serious and unique contribution to the field of anthropology, as well as an inquiry into anthropologyʹs political implications.

What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change? In a world where more and more global struggles are refusing vanguard parties and authoritarian practices, does the idea of the detached intellectual, observing events from on high, make sense anymore? In this powerful and unabashedly militant collection, over two dozen academic authors and engaged intellectuals--including Antonio Negri and Colectivo Situaciones--provide some challenging answers. In the process, they redefine the nature of intellectual practice itself. The book opens with the editors' provocative history of the academy's inherent limitations and possibilities. The essays that follow cover a broad range: embedded intellectuals in increasingly corporatized universities, research projects in which factory workers and academics work side by side, revolutionary ethnographies of the global justice movement, and meditations on technology from the branches of a tree-sit in Scotland. What links them all is a collective and expansive re--imagining of engaged intellectual work in the service of social change. In a cultural climate where right-wing watchdog groups seem to have radical academics on the run, this unapologetic anthology is a breath of fresh air.