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I respond to this report here https://jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com/p/on-the-philosophical-muddle-that
For what it’s worth, I agree. I have, with some trepidation, given it a bunch of my papers and asked…
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MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED JANUARY 6–CONTINUES TO GENERATE INTERESTING COMMENTS (READERS MAY DISCUSSION THE RECENT LINKED CRITIQUES HERE AS WELL)
When it comes to Rousseau and French Enlightenment, not at all. Their mistakes conform to Graeber's ideological agenda, however, which has to raise a red flag about the rest of their story. I'm curious whether readers have seen scholarly assessments of the archaeological claims in the book?
An interesting two-part discussion at Crooked Timber blog:
https://crookedtimber.org/2021/12/14/the-dawn-of-everything-part-1/
https://crookedtimber.org/2021/12/17/the-dawn-of-everything-part-2/
And a review in the Times Literary Supplement, behind a paywall:
Here are a couple of critiques, which I'm afraid (not being an archaeologist) I haven't read very closely:
https://mronline.org/2021/12/20/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong/
I'm only an amused observer here, but the continuing attention that David Graeber manages to attract is just weird. it is widely documented that he made things up (I assume this is a material part of the reason why Yale declined the opportunity to extend his contract).
Never mind his recent claims about enlightenment history, there is his famous description of how Apple corporation was founded (there are others):
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages…
This is not a mistake at the level of getting somebody's birthday wrong, this is a mistake at the level of claiming that France is in South America. Further, when called out on it, he continued to make similarly blusteringly unconvincing stuff up by way of excuse.
In short, why would anybody exert themselves even so far as to ask themselves whether they should trust any historical claim he might make?
Anthony Appiah's review seemed helpful: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/
People have probably read it, but Appiah's review makes it sounds pretty bad:
"Then there’s Mashkan-shapir in Iraq, which flourished four thousand years ago. “Intensive archaeological survey,” we’re told, “revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth” and “no obvious center of commercial or political power.” Here they’re summarizing an article by the archaeologists who excavated the site—an article that actually refers to disparities of household wealth and a “walled-off enclosure in the west, which we believe was an administrative center,” and, the archaeologists think, may have had an administrative function similar to that of palaces elsewhere. The article says that Mashkan-shapir’s commercial and administrative centers were separate; when Graeber and Wengrow present this as the claim that it may have lacked any commercial or political center, it’s as if a hairbrush has been tugged through tangled evidence to make it align with their thesis."
"And so it goes, as we hopscotch our way around the planet. If, a generation ago, an art historian proposed that Teotihuacan was a “utopian experiment in urban life,” we will not hear much about the murals mulled over and arguments advanced by all the archaeologists who have since drawn rather different conclusions. The vista we’re offered is exhilarating, but as evidence it gains clarity through filtration. Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth, and neither do a thousand."
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/
This is worth looking at: Authors with both anthropological backgrounds and seemingly anarchist sympathies argue that Graeber and Wengrow ignore significant archaeological evidence concerning both material circumstance (human ecological niche) and class dynamics. https://annebonnypirate.org/2021/12/16/all-things-being-equal/
I quite agree with comment #3 above. It's amazing what kid gloves some "thinkers" are treated with and for long after they might have had their 15 minutes of fame for having said something topical and provocative for some short moment in history. The way he went off the rails, and berated everyone else who wasn't as morally pure, with his advocacy of a fantasy "anarchist commune" in Syria a few years ago was the last straw for me.
Incidentally, there's no shortage of online fora where Graeber locked horns with others who didn't see things through his zany Hunter S. Thompsonesque "gonzo" style of reportage. It'll take an afternoon or two but some skillful googling will unearth a mountain of evidence of his habit of "mak[ing] similarly blusteringly unconvincing stuff up by way of excuse" m.o. of argumentation.
Like the founding of Apple example cited above, there's no shortage of people who have vivid, first-person memories of Occupy Wall Street for instance, and I'm willing to bet very few of them would come close to the conclusions that Graeber arrived at about those few weeks–"it was a success!" for one thing. libcom.org is an anarchist site where he often commented under his own name and usually elicited only derision from an admittedly partisan crowd.
I've read a decent amount of Graeber's stuff. I know there were various factual errors in Debt, and (apparently) in the new book too, which is a shame. I wouldn't assume mistakes of this sort played a role in his being denied tenure at Yale. That occurred in 2005-ish, and Debt came out in 2011. I'm not aware of any place in which he was accused of making substantial factual errors of this sort prior to Debt. Are you? That's a genuine question. A lot of well-respected anthropologists in Graeber's specialty stated that Yale was making an enormous mistake by firing him. Presumably they wouldn't have done so if his scholarship was that bad.
I think Graeber needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and I wouldn't use him as a source to make a factual claim, but I also believe he was quite perceptive and certainly contributed in meaningful ways at least to how I think about society.
I've heard that the book has a paleontological component. I don't have it with me but I think that near-worshipful piece in THE ATLANTIC mentioned a brief argument to the effect that there was no single cradle of homo sapiens, that the species emerged independently in several different parts of the African continent. Apparently these independent emergences would have been of sufficient similarity to interbreed. Can anyone confirm that they say this? If so, isn't it extraordinarily unlikely? Are there any actual paleo-anthropologists they are drawing on here?
I'm struck how 'withering' comments, here and quite a few I've read elsewhere, about the book take the form [at its fullest] 'I haven't read the book (and show no awareness of the central claims and arguments in Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value or Lost People or Possibilities or Revolutions in Reverse or Debt or What Makes Civilization? or The Origins of Monsters etc.), but Graeber and Wengrow are mistaken about X, therefore I won't read the book and a fortiori need not think about its central claims and indeed have no idea what they are, and besides he's an anarchist and he was let go by Yale and that just goes to show you; oh yes and nobody ever criticizes Graeber (except that, oddly enough, everybody smart already knows that he's untrustworthy, so again I don't have to bother considering anything he said or wrote); all that we smart folks have to do is read reviews like Anthony Appiah's that show how bad the book is'.–Hmm. So what does Appiah actually say? In summarizing and concluding his response to David Wengrow's response in the NYRB Appiah writes that the book "is the work of two remarkable scholars, and almost every page is energized by their intelligence, imagination, and surly sense of mischief. When it comes to confident claims about dense large-scale settlements free of rulers or rules (or, for that matter, the Haudenosaunee attitude toward commands), readers might well adopt Gertrude Stein’s mot “Interesting if true.” But as I hope I made plain, there’s much more to the book than that. Graeber and Wengrow’s argument against historical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable. Readers who imagine foragers on the Sahlinesque model of the San will encounter foraging societies with aristocrats and slavery, while the book’s account of the Poverty Point earthworks is a riveting study of collective action. We get an intriguing proposal about the nature of the state. And this is just to begin a long list of fascinations. That “kaleidoscope of social possibilities” emerges vibrantly from these pages. If readers should be a little cautious—possibilities may not be probabilities—they should be much more than a little grateful, as I am."
There is an exchange between Appiah and Wengrow:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-inequality-an-exchange/
I confess to not having read this particular piece. But I find Graeber's perspective interesting overall, and funny too. "Bullshit Jobs" describes academic administrative bloat quite
accurately (consider also the currently popular "assessment" BS), as well the the administrative nightmare we are all confronting in the US healthcare industry. As a matter of fact, the philosophy of bureaucracy is a fascinating subject that should
get more attention generally, as the entire 'leveling down' of society (mentioned by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Kafka, various Marxists and others) is a problem that is not going away, especially as combined with related problems wrought by technology, etc.
"Graeber and Wengrow’s argument against historical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable."
How is this different from the discussions of the origins of the state and inequality in Flannery & Marcus' (published 2012) book on these topics? They discuss the existence of persistent, relatively egalitarian sedentary-farming societies, the existence of foraging societies with substantial inequality, and "cycling" between relatively egalitarian and unequal societies. Do they differ with Yoffee's critique of traditional models of state formation (published in the mid-2000s)? If Graeber and Wengrove's primary goal is to attack simple stadial models of historical progression, then there is little new in their arguments.
Just want to second John Rapko's comment, and give my own two cents about the question under discussion. Do Graeber and Wengrow know what they're talking about in "The Dawn of Everything"? Yes.
Two relevant things about me: (1) I HAVE ACTUALLY READ THE BOOK (you'd think this should be a prerequisite to commenting on a thread whose subject is whether Graeber/Wengrow "know what they're talking about" in the book). And (2) I am an ancient historian who knows something about archaeology; I frequently collaborate/discuss things with archaeologists (earlier papers written by Graeber/Wengrow on these topics, and now this book).
I think their book is great. Archaeologists I have talked to generally think so too. The criticisms made of it so far on here amount to very little or nothing, when one cuts through the rhetoric/hostility to look at their factual basis. The only genuine error I have seen pointed out so far is their implication (in a one sentence aside–not central to their argument) that Rousseau lived a pampered life. I raised my eyebrow when I read that in the book too, because yes Rousseau worked as a servant. The book, however, contains other claims besides this implication about Rousseau's biography. It makes a generally well-argued and extremely important set of points, while effectively criticizing a lot of ideologically pernicious Big History falsehoods that have been perpetuated in some extremely influential books of the past decades (written by people who, unlike Graeber/Wengrow, are not domain experts about most of what their books discuss).
@John Rapko: In a world where we all have too much to read, you need filters to work out what to spend your time on. One of mine is: if the author claims expertise in some area in which they then make significant and consequential errors, that's evidence of poor scholarship and so good reason not to trust things they say in other areas; hence, I should read something else.
I read the exchange between Appiah and Wengrow linked to above, which led me to read the Appiah's original review in the New York Review of Books.
My knowledge of prehistoric societies is limited to reading Harari's Sapiens a few years ago. I have neither the time nor the energy nor the budget to investigate an extensive bibliography on the subject. So, let me ask a simple question: if you were to recommend one book on prehistory for an university educated layperson who is unlikely to read more than one book per decade on the subject, would you recommend The Dawn? If not, why not and what book would you recommend? Thanks.
I have no opinion about the theses contained in the book. My only point was that it is widely documented that Graeber is repeatedly unreliable on the historical facts and (as Appiah documents) plays very fast and loose with interpretations.
Such a person forfeited my attention (of which I have only a limited supply). As for how interesting his ideas might be; as Bertrand Russell might have put it, the worse your history, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.
re #11, it's a funny thing, once you acquire a bad reputation in a reputable field, folks tend to not engage with your latest "work":
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/world/europe/grichka-and-igor-bogdanoff-dead.html
Carrying on from John Rapko's comment above, here's a sort of pre-review of the book (historian Timothy Burke is working on a review of Graeber & Wengrow's book, but he was so irritated by some of the published reviews he was moved to address one of them here): https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-fighting-words.
"What irritated me particularly was Bell’s remark that Graeber and Wengrow stray “perilously close to scholarly malpractice” as a concluding dismissal in a short essay that: a) is focused narrowly on their comments about Rousseau; b) acknowledges that their argument in the book is in fact derived from the work of another scholar who is treated respectfully (how you can be guilty of scholarly malpractice while the originating scholar that you’re reprising is not, I can’t tell); and c) ultimately returns to a genuinely big and complex discussion about the representation of non-Western societies in Enlightenment-era writing in Europe."
Burke uses this to reflect on how one should review a work, which should interest readers here because we so often see even scholars failing to read, let alone read with intellectual generosity.
Someone explain to me how getting all the facts straight is however desirable essential to the argument. We are arguing about an astronomical number of years ago. The facts are many but obscure and debatable and probably controversial.
I mean we have to argue his points out- but it's not black and white, and probably not even grey
"Intellectual generosity" toward those who haven't earned the right to it is what has led to our perilous times. If Graeber had more literary talent, he should have followed in footsteps of Ursula Le Guin, but in the event he–like so many other cultish figures whose greatest talent was for self-promotion–chose to create a mish-mash of bad science and bad art buttressed by "intellectual intimidation":
P.S. I'm reminded of a forgotten formulation of Michael Polanyi: "Dynamo-Objective Coupling":
A dynamo-objective coupling is extremely difficult to alter. If
attacked on objective grounds, it is defended with all the moral
fervor of the covert moral position; and if attacked on moral grounds,
it is defended as a completely "objective" position having nothing to
do with morality.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c545/df063fe57e5cc2169507169dfa71dc168f80.pdf
Too many in the "Social Sciences" suffer from the problem he put his finger on.
According to the book, “Teotihuacan’s growth to urban dimensions began around the year 0.” (p.337). doesn't suggest a firm grasp of the Western calendar.
Refusing to engage with a scholar or reading their book in your spare time is one thing. To say that Graeber should not be accorded any intellectual generosity is quite another thing entirely. Several important scholars have found it worth their time to engage with Graeber, from Appiah to Noam Chomsky and Robin D.G. Kelley (who have blurbed the book, so I assume that they read it). That’s on one side. On the other side, there are (unsubstantiated) claims that (unnamed) people on anarchist discussion boards online didn’t take Graeber seriously. Of course, Chomsky and Appiah and Kelley may well be mistaken; but it’s troubling that some of the accusations here amount to little more than “A lot of people are saying…” Who is saying? Can we be more specific? And why did they say what they did?
Apart from anonymous people on discussion boards, is there anyone who says that Graeber is so unreliable and untrustworthy that he was not a serious scholar but a complete hack? And what was the basis of such accusations? It does not suffice to point to (1) a few factual errors across a vast corpus (as Bell does) or (2) accuse Graeber of a strong ideological slant (which is true of many scholars across the political spectrum). And there are bound to be strong interpretive disagreements in every scholarly field — disagreements which can only be assessed by scholars trained in that field. Rather, there should be a claim that this scholar systematically falsified or completely misrepresented (or completely misunderstood) the evidence on which they made their central theses.
These are not rhetorical questions. I’m genuinely curious, especially considering how “withering” (as noted above) these comments are, if those accusations against Graeber have any substance. Although I was aware that Graeber elicited strong reactions, this is the first that I have heard of this.
Here are some other – more anthropological – reviews of 'The Dawn of Everything':
‘What is Politics’ reviews of ‘The Dawn of Everything’: https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69/featured
James Suzman, ‘On the Origin of Our Species’: https://literaryreview.co.uk/on-the-origin-of-our-species
Chris Knight, ‘Wrong About (Almost) Everything’: https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything/
Two hundred or so pages into The Dawn of Everything I have abandoned the book, or at least put a pause to it. Other than written contemporary records very little about ancient human societies can be irrefutably proven. I enjoyed reading Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari mainly because the writing was good and not because I believe everything they said.
The stumbling block in The Dawn of Everything for me is the writing style. It is jerky and repetitive. I haven't read either author before. I wonder if the jerky style is a result of dual authorship. As a friend pointed out, it is like reading a casual academic discussion between two professors. May be this book lends itself better to listening on an audio device. I am not particularly interested in reading evolutionary history most of which is speculative and colored by current biases. But I do believe that societies in isolation may not have followed the linear path we are now accustomed to accepting. I was in fact wondering about the Indus Valley Civilization vs the latter day Indian society after the Aryan immigration which became hidebound in multitudes of hierarchies. The excavations at various Indus Valley sites seem to point to a relatively egalitarian system. There were no public places of worship (no priestly class?), no big palaces (no powerful ruling honchos?) and the municipal structures like irrigation and drainage appear to have been accessible to most residents. But these were settled societies, not hunter gatherers and the denizens traveled far and wide for trade and must have been exposed to other societies with central control such as Mesopotamia. So who knows why they decided to adopt a social structure that may have been freer and more egalitarian? Because it worked for them?
Also, archeological evidence comes only from urban settings. Urban settlements were a minuscule part of our ancestors’ lives not just in ancient times but even fairly recently. It makes perfect sense then to think that those outside the control of a city state, had a more elastic and fluid social arrangement depending on how drought, famine, changing climate and natural disasters affected them. In fact, this point was made by another author whose book did not get the kind of media attention that The Dawn of Everything is getting. See this review of “Against The Grain” by James Scott who incidentally was also anarchistic in his political leanings. From what I gather having read many reviews The Dawn of Everything too is framed along these lines. I may not go back to Graeber and Wengrow just yet because I have figured out the main thrust of their arguments and I tend to find that more convincing than the other more conventional narrative, including that of Yuval Harari's Sapiens.
The slanderous vitriol against Graeber that a couple of people are spewing on here is remarkable. There is no reason whatsoever to think that Yale let him go because of scholarly malpractice. I knew him a bit. He was an extremely serious scholar, but also someone who wore his politics on his sleeve, and practiced anti-authoritarianism daily, spontaneously. That attitude and Yale don't mix well. There is some background here: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/nyregion/when-scholarship-and-politics-collided-at-yale.html
Regarding the book, yes, there are some crude simplifications in the initial framing (I too was a bit irritated by the treatment of Hobbes and Rousseau, for example) and a fair few cut corners, but still it seems to me that many of the 'gotcha' reviews miss the wood for the trees. In the end we need to ask whether G&W are successful in replacing the "how did it start?" question with "how did we get stuck?". I do think they accomplish that–no small matter. For what it's worth, I will say more about this in print. For now I just wanted to try and set the record straight about Graeber's integrity.
Brings to mind Chomsky's opinion of Foucault scholarship: to wit untrustworthy, because a new grand theory must be elaborated at all cost (obviously that isn't science).
"What Phetland describes, accurately I'm sure, seems to me unimportant, because everyone always knew it — apart from details of social and intellectual history, and about these, I'd suggest caution: some of these are areas I happen to have worked on fairly extensively myself, and I know that Foucault's scholarship is just not trustworthy here, so I don't trust it, without independent investigation, in areas that I don't know — this comes up a bit in the discussion from 1972 that is in print. I think there is much better scholarship on the 17th and 18th century, and I keep to that, and my own research. But let's put aside the other historical work, and turn to the "theoretical constructs" and the explanations: that there has been "a great change from harsh mechanisms of repression to more subtle mechanisms by which people come to do" what the powerful want, even enthusiastically. That's true enough, in fact, utter truism."
I just finished the book this morning. As a physical scientist, I'm not professionally invested in these debates (or even terribly informed about them), and I didn't have the time or inclination to check whether the citations really support D&W's arguments (seemingly a common point of complaint.) Therefore, I took the more speculative passages with major grain of salt. However, the book was absolutely worth reading for how it challenges longstanding prejudices: for instance, the idea that the agricultural "Neolithic Revolution" was everywhere a major forward leap in productivity in comparison with the preceding mode of production; that adopting agriculture was everywhere historically rational; that peoples will inevitably act "rationally," in some materialist sense of the word, or at least leave the historical stage for those who do; that agriculture allowed for development of a social surplus, which could be appropriated by exploitative elites (boo!) but also artisans and thinkers (hooray!); that some characteristic machinery of state (a legal code, administrators, etc.) become necessary and rational once human activities reach a certain scale. Not to mention the default presumption of kingship for societies situated between the Neolithic and the Enlightenment. These prejudices are shared by liberal historiography and historical materialism alike, with the latter adding the eventual prospect of a redemptive (dialectical, if you like) end to the whole bloody business. Friedrich Engels and G. A. Cohen on the one hand, and Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari on the other hand, are not terribly far apart after all. Readers might also find new appreciation for Mesopotamian civic assemblies and the political history of indigenous Americans — or for the erasure of the very fact that they had a political history and political imagination before European contact.
In brief: D&W think that human history has been far more diverse and rich in possibility than any evolutionary-materialist framework can capture. As a long-time materialist — albeit a lay materialist — I appreciated the challenge, although I doubt they succeed in every point of attack. And although I encountered versions of these ideas in James C. Scott, D&W dissent from the received materialist narratives more radically than Scott.
(G&W, not D&W, of course)
I'm reading the book and enjoying it, though I haven't consulted the critiques of it that have been made. Just a couple modest points in defense of G and W. Please take them with a grain of salt; I have yet to read the various "take-downs."
1. Context. It's legitimate to judge this book as a contribution to scholarship in architecture, paleontology etc. However there is another more obvious comparison class: the spate of popular books for a non-scholarly audience on "deep history" (Yuval Harari's Sapiens, Pinker's Better Angels, Scott's Against the Grain etc.). For better or worse, these books are widely read and influential — especially among the Davos/Silicon Valley set. It's potentially a good thing for a far left perspective on the issues to be voiced. What is more, G and W consistently square off against these authors, Pinker and Harari in particular. These were some of the more rewarding parts of the book, I thought.
2. Very often, G and W make a claim like the following: the evidence [X, Y, Z…] is consistent with a wide range of possibilities about how people might have lived in the distant past; we can imagine together what this might be; and, in doing so, we are empowering ourselves to seek liberation in the present. At least when they argue in this way, G and W are on fairly solid ground, inasmuch as there is so little evidence about the distant past. If you object to these claims, then you object to speculation or conjecture as such. But that seems to be the game they (and Harari et. al.) are playing.
3. Again, a comparison class that isn't archaeology: classics of social theory. And, again, this is work G and W cite extensively and engage with — not just Rousseau, but also Weber, Marx (if memory serves), Mauss, Levi-Strauss etc. I can't resist but point out that a lot of these works don't quite hold up to modern standards of scholarly research either but we do still read them. So maybe, when considered alongside works like these, DoE appears in a more flattering light.
In any case, G and W are absolutely right (I think) to say that there has been a tendency in the tradition to political mode of life as a function of other factors. Marx and Rousseau are examples (whatever else may be said about G and W's knowledge of the French Enlightenment it's pretty clear that Rousseau thinks agriculture fates you to a system of private property and exploitation). Anybody who has read classics of political theory like Aristotle's Politics or Montesquieu knows these assumptions are common. Points of the form "Give me a population of this size … and I'll give you this kind of social/political system." Not so say G and W. And, again, that strikes me as an appropriately cautious response to an already very bold claim…
4. Small point. Ludovico cites Chomsky on Foucault. It's a bit of a non-sequitur in response, but Chomsky himself wrote a very positive blurb for the book. Of course, blurbs can't always be trusted. But I like to think that if the book were as blatantly un-scientific as is being suggested, NC would not have praised it so effusively.
Late to the party on this one. I listened to an interview with Wengrow at Lapham's Quarterly about this book, a while back. The book had not yet made the splash that it has now, and I hadn't noted Graeber's involvement, so I listened to Wengrow as just another writer with a book to flog. I had to turn off the interview when I had my fill of wild-eyed self-credulity and wanton conjecture-stacking. I certainly didn't get the impression that someone so high on his own supply should be indulged for a length of 700 pages by readers with more important things to do.
Here is the interview if you'd care to judge for yourself: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/david-wengrow
Graeber and Wengrow also wrote a piece for Lapham's that is basically a synopsis of the book's argument here: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/hiding-plain-sight
Late to the party on this one. I listened to an interview with Wengrow at Lapham's Quarterly about this book, a while back. The book had not yet made the splash that it has now, and I hadn't noted Graeber's involvement, so I listened to Wengrow as just another writer with a book to flog. I had to turn off the interview when I had my fill of wild-eyed self-credulity and wanton conjecture-stacking. I certainly didn't get the impression that someone so high on his own supply should be indulged for a length of 700 pages by readers with more important things to do.
Here is the interview if you'd care to judge for yourself: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/david-wengrow
Graeber and Wengrow also wrote a piece for Lapham's that is basically a synopsis of the book's argument here: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/hiding-plain-sight
"NC would not have praised it so effusively."
Heh, you want to learn to parse blurbs, especially from those who (generously and encouragingly) do so for a lot of books. They're like letters of recommendation, and without even having looked up exactly what Chomsky said, I can assure you it's more along the lines of an "interesting inquiry" that contains many insightful nuggets and which might lay ground for useful future research programs, etc.
Some of the encouraging words he has for this effort that builds on ideas from his own linguistic research may be applicable:
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KEYWORDS:
Primary Blog
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