* Book: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. By David Graeber and David Wengrow. Penguin, 2021

URL = https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/314/314162/the-dawn-of-everything/9780241402429.html

Contextual Quote

"Choosing to describe history… as a series of abrupt technological revolutions [Stone Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age, Information Age, etc], each followed by long periods when we were prisoners of our own creations, has consequences. Ultimately it is a way of representing our species as decidedly less thoughtful, less creative, less free than we actually turn out to have been.

It means not describing history as a continual series of new ideas and innovations, technical or otherwise, during which different communities made collective decisions about which technologies they saw fit to apply to everyday purposes, and which to keep confined to the domain of experimentation or ritual play. What is true of technological creativity is, of course, even more true of social creativity.

One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book – indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us – was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation – even, in some ways, as an encyclopaedia of social possibilities. (p.501)."

- David Graeber and David Wengrow [1]

Description

1. From the publisher:

""For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.

Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities than we tend to assume."

(https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/314/314162/the-dawn-of-everything/9780241402429.html)

2. Molly Fischer:

"Written in collaboration with the archaeologist David Wengrow, the book draws on new research to challenge received wisdom on civilization’s course. The story of humanity, as it is typically told, proceeds along a linear path. It passes in distinct stages from foraging bands and tribes on to agriculture, cities, and kings. But, surveying the historic and archaeological record, Graeber and Wengrow saw a wealth of other stories, taking humanity on varied and unpredictable routes. There were societies that farmed without really committing to it, for example. There were societies whose authority figures’ power applied only during certain parts of the year. Cities coalesced without any apparent centralized government; brutal hierarchies took shape among people who later reversed their course. The book’s 704 pages teem with possibilities. They are a testament, in the authors’ view, to human agency and invention — a capacity for conscious political decision-making that conventional history ignores. “We are projects of collective self-creation,” write Graeber and Wengrow. “What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such?”

(https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/david-graeber-dawn-of-everything.html)

Reviews

Pat Kane:

"The Davids’ target is a giant Western intellectual assumption—that we tragically fell from simple, egalitarian hunter-gathering into complex, hierarchical farming society. And it is a tragedy, the assumption continues—with all the inescapable fatedness the term implies.

If we want to be organised enough to reap the bounties that come from agriculturalism and industrialism, then we’ll have to pay the price of social hierarchy and class societies. It’s a sad, inevitable fall from innocence.

Ah! Not so, say D&D. They give example after example of societies which, for instance, “play farmed” (that is, cultivating crops for medicine, beauty and art materials, as well as for food). They consciously chose not to intensify their activities into full-blown agriculture.

Indeed, some communities, having tried out the agrarian method, then deliberately retreated from intensive farming—too much like hard work—returning to and revising their pastoral activities.

Hours and days were reclaimed from the agricultural model, which these communities then spent richly deliberating what to do next with themselves, using many different forms of assembly (well before ancient Greece, and often involving potlatch or carnival). This was often without a class of leaders, rulers or potentates to supervene the process."

(https://patkane.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-everything-and-a-new)

THE RIGHT WING IMPLICATIONS OF GRAEBER & WENGROW’S ARGUMENTS

Daniel Bitton:

"Something that’s worth noting about the idea that human social structure is mostly a matter of choice, is that if you take it to it’s logical conclusion it just ends up taking us to some very ugly places. Like if the traditional Haida of the pacific north west coast have chiefs and nobility and commoners and used to have slaves, and the Nuer in Sudan have male dominance, but the Mbendjele are totally egalitarian and gender egalitarian, and if it’s all just a matter of conscious choice, then that must mean that the Haida and the Nuer people are just choosing to bad people and the Hadza are just good people.

Or maybe Lese women are pathetic because they choose extreme subservience instead of “choosing” equality the way awesome Hadza women do. It’s like in our society, when people say that if you’re working the cash at McDonalds it must be because you’re stupid and lazy and it’s your choice, but if you’re CEO of ratheon, it’s because chose to be some kind of brilliant hard working genius, and you chose parents who could afford MBA school.

It’s ultimately right wing thinking – thinking that justifies hierarchy. Obviously that’s the opposite of what Graeber and Wengrow are trying to do, but again, their whole project is an incoherent, ill conceived mess, and one of the reasons it upsets me so much is that on top of making us stupid, it’s inadvertently giving right wingers a bunch of rhetorical gifts, just like occupy not making any demands was giving all the banks and governments of the world a giant gift.

In contrast, if you shift the focus onto the conditions that shape our social structures and our choices, this implies a “there but for the grace of God go I” type of philosophy. Individuals are different, and we all have agency, but in similar conditions, given similar constraints, people will tend to make similar decisions on average, and in the long run which is the scale of social structure formation. We spend less time judging people and more time trying to figure out how we can change the conditions which generate shitty people."

(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/)

CRITIQUES OF GRAEBER AND WENGROW

Chris Knight 2021 – Did Communism Make Us Human? The Anthropology of David Graeber [2]

Christ Knight 2021 – The Anthropology of David Graeber (video) [3]

Camilla Power 2018 – Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s ‘How to change the course of human history’ [4]

Discussion

Anthropological freedoms

Pat Kane (citing the authors):

"The authors ask us to consider three basic “freedoms” in human history - the freedom to move, to disobey and to change our social arrangements. They put them in context here:

The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today.

Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. (pp. 132-133).

If these freedoms are actually what Marx once called our “species-being”, then we may begin to conceive this “barely conceivable” politics."

(https://patkane.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-everything-and-a-new)

The Authors Systematically Ignore the Material Conditions that Influence Choice

Daniel Bitton:

"Something that never seems to have entered the minds of the authors is that a hierarchical social structure is rarely some kind of democratic choice. Rather, it’s a matter of relative bargaining power.

People have conflicting interests and desires – but certain conditions give certain people advantages such that some people get more of what they want than others do. If your livelihood depends on a specific territory – like it does for farmers or for fishing based hunter gatherers – then if you and your allies can control the productive territory, then you have power over those people who need the products of that territory to survive – boom hierarchy. That’s how capitalism works. Or how any hierarchical system works. In other words, social structure is usually a reflection of the balance of powers in a given society.

Sometimes, social structure can be more of a democratic choice involving trial and error. But people don’t do those kinds of experiments for kicks or as an BDSM bondage kink game or because they have superhuman agency. We do it to solve problems. And people with similar problems in similar conditions end up coming on similar solutions over time – because reality!

Like people who are stuck together on plots of land for extended periods of time will often choose some kind of person to endow with a little bit of authority so that they can arbitrate disputes, which are much more frequent and hard to resolve when you’re sedentary than if you can just go off to another band when you get annoyed or want a divorce like nomadic hunter gatherers do. And theories around how we got stuck with more serious hierarchies over time all revolve around certain changes of conditions which gave people in those positions of weak authority, leverage to turn it into stronger authority. Conditions!

Another example of people making conscious choices in reaction to conditions is when people come under frequent attack, they’ll usually organize themselves around closely related men who grow up together and stay together forming a tight team, while their sisters will marry outside the group, and unrelated women will marry in to the group from the outside.

And this choice, called Patrilocal Residence, which we see all the over world among people faced with frequent attacks – for example every single nomadic pastoralist society known to exist or to have ever existed organizes this way because it’s easy to steal animals from herds – when people organize this way for self defense, it means that all the women end up coming from separate families and are socially isolated from eachother while all the men are close allies and form a close coalition.

And so, the unintended consequence of this is that it gives men political advantages that women don’t have, which leads to varying degrees of patriarchy. And this is why every single nomadic pastoralist society ever known to exist from northern scandinavia to the deserts of arabia to the mongolian steppe, have all been male dominated.

This is one of the best known and easiest to explain paths to male domination – but it’s totally absent from The Dawn of Everything, because they don’t want us to think about conditions, it’s all just freedom and choices!"