Graeber (using his name as shorthand for both he and Wengrow, both because it’s less typing and because in the intro, Wengrow puts him on a pedestal as a “genius”) first cheats on page 54 when he says the “we have no laws” on the Wendat refers to more punitive criminal law, when he actually quotes Kandiaronk as referring to lawsuits over civil matters earlier in ths same “no laws” paragraph.

I say "first cheats," because between issues with his previous book, Debt, and issues with his connection to Occupy Wall Street, the word after "first" is a word that does not come out of nowhere. Note: For purposes of this long review, I'm going to "identify" politically. As I say on my blog, I'm a leftist of some sort, at least for America, but a skeptical leftist, including about leftism.

That said, to cut to the chase, that’s just part of a big cheat, as in THE big cheat. He continues to talk about us being “stuck” in the modern nation-state world, all while rejecting Diamond, Hariri and many others talking about the same situation as a “trap.” Per Daniel Immerwahr at The Nation, perhaps Graeber thinks there’s enough difference between the two words to offer glimmers of hope. I’m not so sure about the difference, or the glimmers.

Other than that? It’s ultimately anarchism lite — saying that surely, not only Places A, B and C didn’t have governments, ruling elites or whatever, so, reader, why can’t anarchism, or a lite version of that, still be the answer?

Maybe it could, if Graeber got all his information correct. But does he? He hasn’t in the past.

(Side note: As an eclectic encyclopedia of anthropology, it’s not bad. As a book of interpretation and analysis, it’s not good, or that close. And, per an Aeon link on my blog, I distrust the idea of “Big History.” [Per Immerwahr, I’d argue this IS “Big History,” with the big story being “there is no story.”] Finally, Graeber has a tendency to appeal to silence, the silence of archaeological evidence not yet seen, while decrying the past for making interpretive mistakes based on having even less evidence.)

With that, let’s dig into the details. This is basically footnote-type review in what follows. I will add one other thing, that many others have noted, and that ties with that first "footnote." This book needed an EDITOR, in addition to any problems with errors of fact, interpretation or analysis.

First, a 75-page chapter that is basically entirely introduction? It was overall pretty good, but surely could have been whacked 25 percent, and maybe 50 percent.

The “killer ape” hypothesis is NOT (primarily) about cultural evolution. It’s about biological evolution.

Claim that “counter-bullying” is purely human? Well, in other primates, non-alpha males will gang up to attack an alpha. It may not be over bullying per se, but …

The next chapter after that is actually pretty good. Graeber relies a lot on Claude Levi-Strauss, who before WWII was talking about seasonal structures, such as farmers in summer or wet season or whatever, and foragers in dry, AND how government structures, or lack thereof, changed along with this. Later cites a student of his, who was also related to Durkheim, and work on Lakota & Cheyenne similar.

Next chapter starts with strawmanning some “conventional anthropological wisdom” about rise of agricultural societies, not the farming themselves as much as the civilizations. Here, they’re not new.

Chapter after that, “Many Seasons Ago” and the potlatch culture versus (yes) Northern California culture is very good. Honest about the slavery of the potlatch culture. Schismogenesis an interesting word new to me.

On the American Indian “entrada”? Already wrong. The footprints at White Sands push it back at least 5,000 years before his 17,000 years ago. And, land and sea migrations (Berengeria vs Kelp Highway) aren’t mutually exclusive, anyway.

Pg. 225, nope, Europe wasn’t carving up the Middle East in the 19th century, because most of it remained Ottoman and Iran had long been independent with its own dynasties, in fact was never conquered by the Ottomans. Egypt wasn’t “conquered” further west puts you out of the Middle East.

Other parts of that chapter are good, though, above all on carefully defining matriarch and saying that true women-ruled societies generally didn’t exist.

“Ecology of Freedom” chapter is right on there being far more than the four “traditional” origins of agriculture. Wrong — speculatively wrong, but still wrong — on the cause of the Little Ice Age, which started before Europeans came to the Americas, and cause reforestation due to American Indian deaths. Its start is usually dated circa 1300.

Re Mohenjo-Daro, I SUPPOSE an egalitarian society, especially libertarian-egalitarian, COULD still have made itself so uniformitarian that without modern factory construction, all bricks were Acme Brick sameness. But I pretty much doubt that.

His interpretation of Teotihuacan? Called out by Immerwahr.

The chapter on the state having no origin? This one seemed the worst. There’s other definitions of what a “state” is, more nuanced, or even a Potter Stewert type definition, first. Second, to support their thesis, they seem to throw shit at the wall.

The next to last chapter, “Full Circle,” I find interesting in one particular way. Growing up in the U.S. Southwest, I’m most familiar, among American Indians, with Navajos and Pueblos. It’s arguable that, because of John Wesley Powell’s founding of the Bureau of Ethnography shortly after his Colorado River journeys, that the Indians of the Southwest have been, overall, more studied than any others in America. But, this chapter, while looking at many other Indians, and the book as a whole? Basically nothing. Were they seen as too studied for cherry-picking? One other note, re this chapter: A word used repeatedly, “mico,” is not in the index.

The conclusion chapter? That accepts that the state was foisted on the world purely by European colonialism. Ignores the many Chinese empire dynasties, as well as empires in India, the Muslim world, etc.

There’s also flat-out ignorance in the conclusion chapter. The fact that we’ve discovered the remains of toast, dated before 10,000 BCE, would be a notable point in favor of Graeber’s talk about wandering agriculture-forager mixed lifestyles, but he never mentions it. In other cases, it’s like a light bulb doesn’t go on. The fact that the New World’s civilizations knew the wheel is well known. The reason it wasn’t used as a “wheel” is because the New World had no draft animal to pull a cart, but Graeber doesn’t mention that. And, let’s play gotcha while I’m here. King James VI of Scotland was not yet King James I of England in 1598.

Final verdict? Two stars, primarily for its encyclopedic work, but not a lot else. (At the same time, other than the encyclopedic parts, it's not truly one-star, and it's certainly not "woke," and using that about an old-time anarchist is anachronistic. It IS, though, a book that's invoked a lot of tribalist stances.)

And, per Wengrow in reviews elsewhere, if he really does try to bring to life the other three books of what was reportedly planned as a quadrivium? Skip them.

(I almost filed this under my “bs-pablum” as well as the other tags; I did put it inder “politics-public policy” as well as “archaeology or anthropology,” because it is. It’s not under sociology because, despite the anarchism lite background, it’s not really about sociology.)