Between the Dawn of Everything and the Dusk of Endtimes

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

In this talk Shannon will consider one of the most ambitious comparative studies to appear in a generation: Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). More particularly, she will assess its reception by the authors’ colleagues in history, archaeology, and anthropology. Critiques of the book offered by specialists evoke many of the epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues framed by this workshop, while its generally positive reception by non-specialists begs the question: can our work have any social value without engaging in comparison? Shannon then turns the spotlight on her own research, confessing her motivations and methods for comparative studies of two distinct phenomena: piracy and doomsdayism. She has been surprised by how both resonate with The Dawn in dialogically productive, if not always harmonious, ways.

Shannon Dawdy’s fieldwork combines archival, ethnographic, and archaeological methods, primarily in the U.S. South and Latin America. She is perhaps best known for her work on New Orleans, from the colonial period to the present. She is the author or editor of seven books and dozens of articles. Enduring themes of her work concern how landscapes and material objects mediate human relationships, and how shared cultural experiences affect our perceptions of time. Topically, she has studied death, disaster, sensuality, and histories of colonialism and capitalism. Also, pirates. Her current project is an exploration of deep future archives and doomsday practices in the Arctic and elsewhere. She is a MacArthur Fellow and has received funding for her work from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the ACLS, among others.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

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