Torsdag d. 7. december kl. 14.00 - 16.00
Moesgård Museum, auditorium 4240-020
Aarhus Universitet i smarbejde med Moesgård Museum
Efter foredraget er Moesgård Museum vært ved en mindre reception.
Most “big thinking” on inequality begins with our species’ departure from an egalitarian existence as hunter-gatherers into a fallen world, where spiralling inequality is the inevitable consequence of population growth and technological progress. The effect is to make our present seem little more than a footnote to the past: the major thresholds were crossed millennia ago—the invention of agriculture, cities, states—and there is no turning away, even in the face of mortal danger (the erosion of democracy, impending climate collapse, etc.). Supposedly, our species is trapped in a cage of our own, largely unconscious making. In our book The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and I marshalled a wealth of new evidence, mainly from the fields of archaeology and anthropology, to challenge this dominant narrative. Investigating the human past, we suggest, is not a matter of “digging for utopia” but rather of freeing us to think about the possibilities of human social arrangements, unhampered by dogmatic interpretations of obsolete data. In my Futures lecture, I will address some of the more striking features of the new history of humanity that is now starting to emerge from these disciplines, and consider its implications for long-standing debates about the roots of social inequality.
