Abstract: This essay explores the significance of Graeber and Wengrow's discussion of the "Indigenous critique" in The Dawn of Everything to Enlightenment historical accounts of stadial theory. Stadial theory emphasized land management as the basis for social progress in order to demote Indigenous societies in the civilizational scale. I demonstrate how stadial history worked to impose a uniform, linear model of development onto human history, thus casting Indigenous societies into the past as stuck in an "earlier" stage. Understanding stadial theory as a response to Graeber and Wengrow's "Indigenous critique" clarifies the long-lasting significance of this model of history to Western understandings of social development.
Rachael King (Thu,) studied this question.
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