Yes, "The Dawn of Everything" does not play it straight. Why should anyone think it did?And I do wonder if there is anything Graeber and Wengrow have to say that is not a bastardized, inadequate, and confused version of Aristotle and his observations on the strengths and weaknesses of régime types...
Any time we're talking archaeology and cultural inference, we're talking stuff outside the bounds of knowledge. (As distinct from history, where we're faced with information incomplete to unknowable degrees through both unknown filters, supposable filters, and the random depredations of time and chance. It's possible for history to be knowledge, or at least contain it at a single remove.)
Given that, it's going to be narrative.
A preference for narratives about freedom over narratives about the inevitability of autocracy can be defended for that characteristic while being chided for doing world-building in preference to world observing, especially when the world-observing is itself as much narrative as error bars.
There'd be an interesting study in the filters; how women get written out of political movements, for example. Or how the manipulable abstraction tends to replace observation. People have this fondness for definite answers.
(Pointing out that "freedom" is a uselessly theological concept, frequently applied to justify terrible actions, nigh-impossible to usefully define, and when defined turns out to be an unhelpful abstraction, seems churlish. People want to feel good about their organising principles, too. Which is why Utopian projects can't fail, only be failed, and why it's so hard to think about the connection between systemic function and "less bad".)
I think perhaps "bullshit" is too strong.
Any time we're talking archaeology and cultural inference, we're talking stuff outside the bounds of knowledge. (As distinct from history, where we're faced with information incomplete to unknowable degrees through both unknown filters, supposable filters, and the random depredations of time and chance. It's possible for history to be knowledge, or at least contain it at a single remove.)
Given that, it's going to be narrative.
A preference for narratives about freedom over narratives about the inevitability of autocracy can be defended for that characteristic while being chided for doing world-building in preference to world observing, especially when the world-observing is itself as much narrative as error bars.
There'd be an interesting study in the filters; how women get written out of political movements, for example. Or how the manipulable abstraction tends to replace observation. People have this fondness for definite answers.
(Pointing out that "freedom" is a uselessly theological concept, frequently applied to justify terrible actions, nigh-impossible to usefully define, and when defined turns out to be an unhelpful abstraction, seems churlish. People want to feel good about their organising principles, too. Which is why Utopian projects can't fail, only be failed, and why it's so hard to think about the connection between systemic function and "less bad".)