The Importance of Counter-Narratives

For a long time archaeologists and anthropologists in the academy kind of stayed away from so-called grand narratives or we kind of just stuck with the ones that we had about the origins of agriculture and the rise of civilizations. I think graver recognizes that like if we stay away from those things they get picked up by people like Jared Diamond who's not trained to understand indigenous peoples ethnographically. That's where books like the dawn of everything provide a really important kind of counter narrative and counterpoint, he says. James: The open secret to all of kind of knowledge production is that any grand narrative is kind of there to be undermined by particular specific examples where things went in a slightly different direction.