We've heard the official story: humans started out as innocent, egalitarian foragers. Then somebody invented farming and the rest was inevitable: cities, kings, bureaucracies, and the 60-hour work week. Hierarchy, exploitation and inequality, we're told, are just the price of civilization.
But what if this was just a soothing fairytale lulling us into passivity, cutting us off from creative, historical possibilities?
Drawing on decades of new archaeology and anthropology, The Dawn of Everything tears up the script and reveals a human past far stranger, freer, and more politically inventive than we imagined: cities that ran for centuries with no rulers, societies that rearranged their entire power structure with the seasons, and Indigenous thinkers whose sharp critiques of European inequality may have lit the fuse on of the Enlightenment itself.
This isn't nostalgia for some lost utopia. Instead, it asks: if inequality wasn't inflicted on us by farming, or cities, or population growth, or any of the usual suspects… how did we get stuck? How did we lose the freedom our ancestors took for granted: the freedom to walk away, to disobey, to imagine the whole arrangement differently and then actually rebuild it.
This is a slow, intentional, communal read. No prior background needed. Just bring your curiosity and a willingness to have some assumptions cheerfully dismantled. We'll go chapter by chapter, argue in good faith, and ask the question the book keeps circling back to: if humans have built nearly every imaginable kind of society, why do we act like we're stuck with this one?
Come get your political imagination back.
Disclaimer: this is a long book. This class will cover the first half. We will read 7 chapters, 275 pages. At a pace of about one chapter every two weeks, this is a reading load of roughly 50 pages for 14 days. You are not required to complete the reading to attend the class, but it greatly improves the discussion. Schedule below.
(Part 2 of the book will be covered in the Fall Term)
My page numbers are based on the hardcover, which you can also purchase. Alternatively, there are also many free PDFs available online. Simply search “Dawn of Everything PDF” and you’ll easily find them. Let me know if you need help accessing the reading.
Schedule:
Week 1: Intro & Chapter 1 -- Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood ~27 pages
This isn't a book about where inequality came from—it's a book about why we ever accepted that the question had to be asked that way.
Week 2: Chapter 2 -- "Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of
Progress" ~51 pages
Our ideals of freedom and equality may be borrowed from the very Indigenous people the West dismissed as primitive; the very idea of "progress" was partly invented to explain away their inconvenient critique.
Week 3: Chapter 3 -- "Unfreezing the Ice Age: In and Out of Chains—The Protean
Possibilities of Human Politics" ~42 pages
Ice Age humans weren't stuck in simple equal bands. Their rich burials and monuments are evidence that they fluidly built and dismantled hierarchies with the seasons, exercising a political freedom we've since lost.
Week 4: Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 (Select Readings) ~50-60 pages
"Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property (Not
Necessarily in That Order)"
Distinct cultures arise as deliberate acts of mutual refusal (schismogenesis), and private property turns out to be not an economic invention but an offshoot of the sacred. Both are, at root, ways of setting something apart and excluding everyone else.
"Many Seasons Ago: Why Canadian Foragers Kept Slaves and Their Californian
Neighbors Didn't; or, the Problem with 'Modes of Production'"
Two neighboring forager societies with near-identical ecologies became moral opposites: one built on slavery and aristocratic display, the other defining itself by rejecting both. How people live is a political choice, not a byproduct of their "mode of production."
Week 5: Chapter 6 and 7 (Select Readings) ~60 pages
"Gardens of Adonis: The Revolution That Never Happened—How Neolithic Peoples Avoided Agriculture"
The "Agricultural Revolution" is a myth. Farming was adopted slowly, playfully, and reversibly over millennia; and many peoples who knew exactly how to farm deliberately refused to, because they understood that serious agriculture meant surrendering their freedom.
"The Ecology of Freedom: How Farming First Hopped, Stumbled and Bluffed Its Way Around the World"
Farming arose independently many times, spread unevenly, and never automatically produced hierarchy. Peoples around the world adopted, adapted, reversed, or pointedly refused it, sometimes cultivating crops precisely as a strategy to stay free.
Alina Garbuzov, PhD is a neuroscientist working at UCSD. She has studied evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and early human origins. In the lab, she is working with injury models to understand and promote neuro regeneration. Outside work, Alina has run a book club in the San Diego area since 2024 and loves spending her time reading and writing. She is passionate about the power of stories to teach, transform, and create new paths and possibilities.
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