As I entered the windowless auditorium, social dynamics gradually came into view. Finally, one of the men, sitting alone at the edge of the stands, emerged as important. As he began to speak, I recognized the suspense of the room from my own tour of graduate school; he is a miser, a man of important opinions. Does he want? Dawn of everything? So sweet, Wengrow himself seemed respectful. Suspense broke out when the man – I later learned he was Daniel Bradley, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin – made a technical observation of the book, and then shook his head in amazement at the success of the book. that fruit.
Wengrow is very satisfied. But he was no less delighted when a child-faced lecturer, Neil Carlin, suggested with gentle tact that Wengrow was wrong in his analysis of Stonehenge. No Dawn, asked Carlin, merely to turn over the main account of the construction of Stonehenge? Carlin’s bile was excited, but my ears perked up for a different reason. Final. An archeological site that I have heard of.
“There is a huge presence on my shoulders when I talk about this,” Wengrow said. I brought together Michael Parker Pearson, one of Wengrow’s colleagues at UCL, a Stonehenge ranker and an archaeologist some consider Anglocentric. Did Wengrow get over his book’s thesis by not questioning the orthodoxes, especially the orthodox ones that claim great powers like Britain with all the great human achievements? The up-and-coming Carlin evades uncomfortably close to charging Wengrow with congeniality or even prodigious attitude.
Wengrow is not thrown. He is indifferent to the dynamics of wolves everywhere, especially in academic environments. ‘s preoccupation Dawn, after all, is a fallback of hierarchies. They come and go, sometimes literally by the weather; any seniority and groove system is a joke; We are neither ruled nor ruled. In particular, the fact that Wengrow had just become archeology archeology, Wengrow’s own 25Ka-dollar member, made him laugh. As Jacques Lacan wrote, “If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less.”
While Wengrow has received great acclaim in Vancouver, and a lot of support at Wynn’s, he seems to be most pleased with his dialogue with UCD archaeologists. And stimulating. Eye-opening questions, ego tests, conflicting debates. Reflecting on his partnership with Graeber, Wengrow ventured that university administration had made the academy so sterile that making friends there had become a radical act. “That way,” Wengrow said, “our relationship is going against the point.”
True to form, Wengrow seriously considered Carlin’s questions about Stonehenge, and even took notes. He then gave a complete hearing of the critique in an email to me. As with the missing sausages, Wengrow was not vandalized.
Like death of Wengrow’s intellectual confidant, Dawn opens much more questions than ends. The book is a number critics seems to balk at its ambitions more than its research. Some argue that the idea of the dawn of everything, which began 30,000 years ago, is more like its tenet. Other said Wengrow and Graeber were so eager to find anarchism and feminism in early civilizations that they obscured the data.
