David Graeber and David Wengrow: Palaeolithic Politics and Why It Still Matters 13 October 2015

Talk given to the Radical Anthropology Group at Daryll Forde Seminar Room, Anthropology Building, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW on 13 October 2015. Anthropologist David Graeber and Archaeologist examine ethnographic and palaeolithic findings to challenge assumptions about development of hierarchical political structures in human society. Lecture based on their paper Ritual Seasonality and the Origins of Inequality.
For an assessment of Graeber and Wengrow's claims see Camilla Power's recent talk on this channel: Did gender egalitarianism make us human? or, if David Graeber and David Wengrow won't talk about sex and gender, it's not surprising they have almost nothing to say about equality or what drives change. vimeo.com/2607... (13 March 2018)
David Graeber is Professor of Anthropology at LSE with research interests in Madagascar, Europe, North America; Theories of value, money, debt, politics, manners, magic, class, social movements, social theory. He is the author of Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (2011), Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (2007), Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004). David Wengrow is Professor of Archaeology at UCL with research interests in Comparative archaeology of the Middle East, North-East Africa, and Eastern Mediterranean, early state formation, cognitive and evolutionary approaches to culture, prehistoric art and aesthetics, intellectual and social history of archaeology and anthropology. He is the author of What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West (2010) and The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2014).
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