The Civilizing Process by Claude Levistross

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The idea that having very stringent and complex systems of manners to constrain our behavior is somehow tied to one trajectory of historical development, the european onei is really not not the case. I mean that there are many, many we could look at china example. And even the enlightenment, as we go into in the book, is full of these cross currents,. You know, habits, physical habits, smoke, tobacco from pipes, sitting around in conversation, drinking caffinated beverages. Where do we get those habits from? The americas, the indigenous peoples of theAmericas. We're cultured its its growth.

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, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

In this conversation, based on the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Shermer speaks with professor of comparative archaeology, David Wengrow, about his pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology that fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society.