Dawn of Everything
* 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
1. 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)
2. Daniel Bitton:
"The three main issues that I have with Dawn of Everything, and the preview chapters that have been coming out since 2015 are:
Graeber and Wengrow’s allergy to materialist explanations for human social structure – which is the fatal weakness of an otherwise wonderful book.
Graeber and Wengrow’s maddening mis-representation of the literature on egalitarian hunter gatherer societies and the intentions of the people who write that literature.
and #3. Graeber and Wengrow’s tirade against the concept of equality and egalitarianism, which is a big problem in our political discourse in general."
(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/2021/10/26/10-1xcript/)
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!"
(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/)
Materialism and Agency Are Not Opposed To Each Other
Daniel Bitton:
"if we want to answer Graeber and Wengrow’s question of how we got stuck in hierarchy – meaning if you want to understand where a particular dominance hierarchy comes from and how to get rid of it, or how to reduce it’s severity, then first you need to ask “what are the conditions that are giving some people the ability to impose their choices on other people”. And then once you’ve identified those, the next thing you need to ask is “what can we do to change those conditions in a way that reduces or eliminates those advantages”.
Unfortunately, as Graeber and Wengrow will later tell us in Chapter 5, they explicitly don’t want to think about conditions or circumstances. Instead, they want to focus on conscious choice and “freedom”. And the reason for this, is because they mistakenly think that if conditions are what result in hierarchy or equality, then this means that we are truly stuck forever stuck in hierarchy today because of the conditions inherent to advanced industrial civilization. And they quote Jared Diamond and others to that effect in chapter 1.
But what the authors forget as they go down this dead-end path of seeing hierarchy as a random choice disconnected from conditions, is that one of the powers of human beings is that we have the power to choose to shape and change the conditions that we live in – at least sometimes – it all depends on the conditions!
Unfortunately, as a result of trying to avoid materialist answers, and of trying to focus on discombobulated conscious choices outside the context of the conditions in which those choices are made, not only are the authors unable to answer their own questions, but they routinely bury or ignore all of the parts of the sources that they discuss which actually do answer those questions, which we saw last time and which we’ll see more of today.
Materialism and agency are not opposed to each other – materialism is simply the context in which freedom and choice are exercised. And without it we throw away our best tools for understanding why people make choices, or for predicting what choices they will make, which makes it impossible to design institutions and rules that will have the effect we want them to have."
(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/2022/04/21/10-4xcript/)
The potential origin of Graeber's rejection of original egalitarianism
Chris Knight:
"Graeber’s mature outlook on politics and anthropology is such a seemingly paradoxical combination that it can seem difficult to understand where it all came from. The clue lies in the title of his major fieldwork publication, Lost People (2007).24 It was his experience in a rural community in central Madagascar that decisively cemented his perspectives on social inequality, history, religion, state coercion, the power of narrative, and, critically, grassroots opportunities for resistance.
In this rural community, people were identified as either Black, known as “Mainty,” or noble, known as “Andriana.” The Mainty were lost people in being descendants of African slaves, uprooted from their former homes, cut off from their families as they were dispersed and sold to new owners. The Andriana came originally from South Borneo. Attached tenaciously to their ancestor-worshipping traditions, they too were “lost,” but in a different sense. Reticent about their slave-holding past and still reluctant to perform physical work for cash, they became increasingly impoverished when descendants of their former slaves began to skilfully manage the rising economy of money-lending, cash transactions, and trade.
Graeber’s ethnography describes a world turning upside down as the descendants of slaves progressively employ, exploit, and partially expropriate their former masters, against the background of a colonial-era state apparatus now so moribund as to be virtually irrelevant. With insight and humour, Graeber describes a dilapidated state of post-colonial near-anarchy, giving each “lost person” freedom to construct their own narrative in their own chosen way, with effective story-telling the surest route to confidence-building, public support, and some chance of financial success. Among the more economically successful people might be an astrologer, for example, whose success would rest on a special talent for plausible fictions.
Graeber, then, found himself in a world where economic facts seemed to be determined by imaginative fictions. That was a far cry from Marx’s idea that myths and ideologies are constrained ultimately by economic processes. In Madagascar, the primacy of story-telling seemed to make a mockery of any idea of conducting rigorous science. Worse, any attempt to conduct science seemed an external imposition, reinforcing the form-filling addiction of the colonial administrator, interested only in regularities. To follow the scientific method, Graeber felt, is to close your mind to the surprises and exceptions which make up real life, subordinating people’s creative agency to alien priorities of your own. In sympathy with his eminent supervisor, the late Marshall Sahlins, Graeber resolved not to bend his own creative imagination to such deadening and artificial imperatives.
For Graeber, setting aside science was a matter of according respect and equality to the people he was living among. He saw no reason why the visiting anthropologist should set himself up as a mind operating on a higher level. So decisive was that fieldwork in shaping his world view that he went on to apply its lessons elsewhere. Human beings, he came to insist, are by their very nature free agents, not robots or slaves to scientific laws. His reluctance to seek out regularities or norms among the Malagasy became matched, in subsequent publications, by a reluctance to claim regularities in any field.
This stance led Graeber to dismiss historical materialism, in particular the idea of history as a sequence of stages. In his view, allegedly “simple” hunter-gatherers are no more likely to share their land or resources than so-called “complex” storage hunter-gatherers, farmers, or city-dwellers. For Graeber, extant hunter-gatherers are just people who happen to have been thrown together by fate, often marginalised in impoverished, hostile environments, living as best they can and inventing myths as required. We have absolutely no reason to assume that current customs of the Bushman people of the Kalahari, for example, are genuinely ancient or can teach us anything about our distant past. Graeber does not quite say that today’s hunter-gatherers are “lost people,” but the implication is there. When it comes to human origins, in his view, nothing is to be gained by focusing on hunter-gatherers. Graeber’s Madagascan experience taught him to dismiss any notion of cultural regularities or laws. Irrespective of the prevailing mode of subsistence, people will always be free to choose between alternative political forms.
Much of Graeber’s later work, co-authored with the archaeologist David Wengrow, was an approach to human origins and prehistory moulded by these views. In place of evolutionist assumptions about complexity emerging incrementally from simple beginnings, the authors argued that the very earliest fully cultural societies, such as those of Upper Palaeolithic Europe, were already highly complex. In a controversial article, the authors offered a triumphantly non-Darwinian, explicitly anti-evolutionist account of human origins."
(https://brooklynrail.org/2021/06/field-notes/Did-communism-make-us-human)
On not understanding the Difference Between Democratic and Dominance Hierarchies
Daniel Bitton:
"A conventional or democratic hierarchy is where a group of people voluntarily organize into a hierarchy in order to achieve some goal. And while, like in every decision-making hierarchy, the people on top of the hierarchy have more decision-making power, the people at the bottom are still the ultimate deciders, in that the leadership position exists only because it serves their interests – and they can remove the person filling that position it if they’re not happy with their leadership service, and even remove the position entirely if they want to. And the terms of getting to be on top of a conventional hierarchy – like the degree of authority and responsibilities you might have, and the rewards you get – if any – are all ultimately determined by the people on the bottom.
A dominance hierarchy on the other hand, is something that people on the top impose on the people on the people below them because of differential bargaining power between the two sides. And if the people on the bottom tolerate the power imbalance, it’s because they don’t have any better options – like how you go to your job that you hate and you obey your dingus boss, because not going to that job will be worse in various ways than going to it.
For an example of a conventional hierarchy – even in the most hyper egalitarian hunter gatherer societies, who have no chiefs or authority figures – when there’s a hunting party, the hunters will often pick someone among them who has a lot of experience and good skills and instincts to be the party leader, and they’ll look to him for guidance and leadership on the hunt.
Not only do these hunting leaders not have any official authority, but the second that people don’t like what he’s doing they’ll either stop listening, or else never appoint him again, depending on the circumstances.
In that video I mentioned last time with the bro dude going hunting with the Hadza, the translators refer to one man called Sokolo as the “chief” but that’s a mis-translation from the translator who’s from a different more hierarchical ethnic group – Sokolo was just the hunting party leader – and any Hadza trying to pass himself off as a chief would get into enormous trouble with the rest of the community.
Now sometimes the lines might get blurry between a conventional and dominance hierarchy, and there’s a bit of a spectrum, which we can talk about more another time – but a good analogy to know which kind of hierarchy you’re dealing with is like the difference between Sadomasochism and sexual assault. On the surface they might look like the same thing – but the second someone says stop, and the other person doesn’t stop, then it becomes sexual assault.
So, by definition, when the authors ask “how did we get stuck” in hierarchy – what they’re talking about is dominance hierarchy not a democratic hierarchy, because you’re not stuck in a democratic hierarchy, you have entered into it on an equal footing with all the other members of that hierarchy, and you have an equal say with everyone else on determining how it will be shaped, and who gets to be in what position, and whether or not the hierarchy continues to exist at all.
Now one thing to note about dominance hierarchy is that since by its very nature, no one chooses to have it imposed on them – dominance hierarchy can only exist if there are certain conditions or circumstances that give some people a set of advantages which allow them to impose their dominance onto other people.
These sorts of conditions are things like – I have guns and you don’t, i’m an adult and you’re my child and you depend on me for food and shelter – or our economy depends on fishing, and my family got to this fishing spot first, and we’re numerous and strong enough to control it by force and you have no where else to get your fish, etc.
And so, by not distinguishing between conventional vs dominance hierarchies, and by not understanding that dominance hierarchy can only exist because of conditions and circumstances – the Dawn of Everything creates a lot of confusion when it comes to understanding why we got stuck in hierarchy and how we can get unstuck."
(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/2022/02/22/10-3xcript/)