Un seminario su L’alba di tutto di David Graeber e David Wengrow. Ricezione, uso critico, possibilità: antropologia, storia, archeologia

Cristiano Viglietti

Abstract:

This chapter accounts for the context in which the idea of this volume has taken place – namely the author’s graduate class of Historical Anthropology of the Ancient World at the University of Siena – and highlights the collective urge of the participants for addressing and assessing the value and relevance of a book like The Dawn of Everything, which in Italy had got practically no attention among classicists, ancient historians and archaeologists, and received only occasional interest among cultural anthropologists – unlike what happened outside Italy. The paper goes on to underline the uniqueness of The Dawn of Everything in the current context of popular books of global history insofar as it doesn’t share with all the other books, but rather strongly contests, their explicit or implicit evolutionary and essentially ethnocentric epistemology. This criticism is not put forward only in theory but is based on an impressive amount of evidence, allowing for a formidable counter-narration of the history of mankind, which might pave the way for important shifts in humanities and social sciences, including the disciplines that deal with the ancient Greek and Roman world. Eventually the paper introduces the volume's chapters and authors, who either address the reception of The Dawn of Everything among cultural anthropologists (in Italy) and among archaeologists and historians of the Greek and Roman world (outside Italy), or utilize the book as a heuristic tool to deal with pre-existing topics, or to imagine new ways to teach the «history of humanity», in a new, genuinely different, perspective.