Sui limiti della profezia in antropologia. Appunti per una discussione a partire da L’alba di tutto, di David Graeber e David Wengrow

In this article, *On the Limits of Prophecy in Anthropology: Notes for a Discussion from The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow*, the argument uses *The Dawn of Everything* as a stress test for how far anthropology can legitimately move from explanation toward “prophecy”, understood in a technical sense as a morally charged diagnosis of the present that advances alternatives for the future. The text opens by situating Graeber and Wengrow’s book inside a wider progressive reception and reads that enthusiasm as symptomatic of a contemporary desire for emancipatory narratives about human origins, narratives meant to enlarge the space of political imagination rather than primarily to settle empirical questions about deep history. The core critique targets what the article treats as an internal tension in Graeber and Wengrow’s project: a strong normative thesis that “freedom” is the deepest human ambition, paired with an argumentative style that repeatedly stages a rhetorical reversal (acknowledging common-sense points, then overturning them) to produce a deliberately provocative, anti-determinist story. Against this backdrop, the article argues that the book’s anti-authoritarian anthropology quietly depends on shaky conceptual moves (for instance around commands, compliance, and what it would mean for a society to be “unfamiliar” with command-like relations) and, more importantly, on systematic omissions: it underplays or bypasses bodies of work that address human social evolution through cognition, imitation, learning, and cooperation. A second line of criticism concerns ecology and political economy. The article contends that *The Dawn of Everything* treats forms of political organization as if they were largely matters of choice, while neglecting how ecological constraints, surplus storage, and technological affordances structure social stratification and power. The discussion uses the case of “complex foragers” (Northwest Coast) as a telling example: where storage and surplus become feasible, durable stratification and coercive authority become more likely, so political variability cannot be explained primarily by an abstract preference for liberty. This is presented not as a return to crude evolutionary stages, but as a call to take material and ecological determinants seriously when making general claims about human history. The article then turns reflexive: the real stake is what anthropology is for. It contrasts ethnography’s traditional commitment to describing and explaining what is the case (continuities, constraints, mechanisms) with an increasingly common disciplinary posture that aims to supply morally desirable “possibilities” for activism. Drawing on discussions of “anthropological realism” and debates on anthropology as a “moral science of possibilities”, the text argues that using anthropology primarily to manufacture alternatives risks collapsing scientific and political teloi into a single project. The proposed resolution is not political quietism, but a sharper division of labor: anthropology can contribute to public reasoning only if it preserves methodological rigor, engages competing explanatory frameworks (including evolutionary and cognitive work), and remains accountable to truth-claims before translating insights into normative or political registers.