I think all writing about history is necessarily just a reflection upon the current condition and so emphasizing the loss that humanity suffered “on the road to civilization” is an extremely important leftist understanding.

I don’t think you can really get the later writings of Marx, for example, until you truly get the absolute horror that settler-colonialism was, that it didn’t make those places better.

You’re right that a materialist analysis still says we need modern agriculture because so many mouths to feed and modern industry because who wants to die from measles?

But Graeber’s point, I think, is that we need to firmly reject the Stephen Pinker type idea that history arcs towards “progress”. It doesn’t.

I made it a little more than halfway through Dawn of Everything (I think I legitimately stopped only because hauling the giant book around became tedious), but iirc what I most enjoyed were the references to Kondiaronk and the unweaving of occidental american mythology, that and the jabs Graeber/Wengrow occasionally made at pop anthropologists to their right, like Hararri, or that piece of shit Peven Stinker. I can’t remember how in the weeds they get with schismogenesis as a concept, but yeah, I could see that as a valid critique. I do think it’s kind of funny people feel the need to qualify the work of someone like Graeber… schismogenesis as a concept just seems like a direct product of/contribution to dialectical materialist analysis

Instead read Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere.