Any complex society requires a state, and so any society that doesn’t have a state must not be complex. This circular logic doesn’t hold against the archeological and anthropological record. Mesoamerica, Crete and certain Mongolian periods aren’t exceptions but examples of alternative ways to structure societies in which we ought to listen.
That’s the broadest thrust of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a sprawling and intellectually ambitious 2021 book by anthropologist and activist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. I took most of a month digging through it.
The authors finished the book in August 2020, and sadly Graeber, radical coiner of the slogan “We are the 99 percent” and author of Bullshit Jobs, died a month later due to complications between pancreatis and the covid-19 pandemic.
The 600-page book started as a project to answer where inequality comes from. In the end, the pair aimed to complicate any narrative we have about how societies got structured the way they are. For example, they argue the transition to agriculture was no revolution, but a transition that took thousands of years, and may have finished more because of ecological change than anything. The post Ice Age-thaw slowed and climates stabilized, resulting in less glacial melting and rivers shifting, some 7,000 years ago, after many urban centers had formed. As they conclude: “Extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization.”
Whatever the case, the pair want much more variety in how we all can choose to live. Get the book, it’s a thinker. Below I share my (excessive) notes for my future reference.
My notes
- This book’s goal is to refute and complicate a common current intellectual binary, that an interpretation of modern economic life requires one to believe either Rousseau’s famous 1754 discourse in which we all started in peaceful tiny bands or Hobbes’s Leviathan from 1651 in which life from the start was “solitary poor nasty brutish and short” and government civilized us
- This book gathers evidence to offer a more hopeful and interesting alternative: that there was more political experimentation before agriculture, and early cities had more forms post agricultural too
- “It’s possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism, or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (What kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.”
- Everyone wants to say that in the past everyone was equal because they were all equally poor; and that today we can just “adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces”
- Fukuyama’s 2011 Origins of Political Order is an example of the modern received wisdom: that the world had highly egalitarian bands before the adoption of agriculture, like Jared Diamond’s 2012 book World until Yesterday: agriculture transitioned us from bands to tribes
- Small bands don’t have to be egalitarian and large societies don’t requires kings or presidents, authors argue. Just received wisdom
- Steve Pinker is “quintessential modern Hobbesian” who is a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along
- Those who argue for a state of nature commonly cherry pick data, authors argue: Rousseauans look to the peaceful Hadza and Hobbesians look to the warlike Yanomami. The point instead is there’s a variety
- “One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.”
- Bronislaw Malinowski’s category defining 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific has the anecdote of the Kula chain Heirloom treasure circles of the Massim Islands — men exchanging shells by dangerous canoe trips to various islands — they exchanged goods but pushed beyond what we mean by trade. Many anthropologists lack imagination to consider non-market reasons people might exchange goods like this
- Gordon Childe invented Neolithic Revolution, like Urban Revolution
- “What is the origin of inequality” is the wrong question, so what is?
- Rouseau’s essay was in response to an essay competition, not something he invented. Authors note that great man history often confuses men for creating something when really they represented something or just wrote down common things for their era (Shakespearean lines often common idioms of his day)
- The European Enlightenment was really a reaction to Europe opening to the rest of the world, finding India (mathematics and philosophy) and Chinese statecraft (civil service) and Eastern Woodlands indigenous Americans on equality
- The concept of Inequality and equality in social relations didn’t exist before Columbus, none found in the Middle Ages where it was assumed it was impossible (in the Garden of Eden, Adam outranked eve)
- Hobbes, Locke, Grotios could write and theorize not about the Bible (which had no sense of equality) but with the Americas as an example promoting natural rights and the origin of social constructs
- Some academics doubt native Americans had influence on equality debate but these authors argue it seems obvious they did
- Le grand voyage du pays Des Hurons and other missionary travel logs informed enlightenment thinkers In which indigenous found French Europeans poorer in community (if richer in technology)
- The average modern rich world resident may assume 17th century European perspectives were closer to ours today than indigenous Americans but it’s likely the opposite
- P 41: Personal freedom, we tend to believe, is inherently good (even if some of us also feel that a society based on total individual liberty – one which took it so far as to eliminate police, prisons or any sort of apparatus of coercion – would instantly collapse into violent chaos). Seventeenth-century Jesuits most certainly did not share this assumption. They tended to view individual liberty as animalistic. In 1642, the Jesuit missionary Le June wrote of the Montagnais-Naskapi:
- “They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and ha-ranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.”
- In the considered opinion of the Montagnais-Naskapi, however, the French were little better than slaves, living in constant terror of their superiors.
- Jesuits viewed indigenous individual Liberty including unwed sex and divorce by women to keep them from obeying the lord
- Eurasian concept of equality under the law follows equality under the sovereign, or equal subjugation — very different than the indigenous freedom
- An especially influential indigenous thinker on Enlightenment thinking is Kondiaronk (1649–1701) of near present day Montreal
- Some historians thought Lahontan used fictitious natives to make his divisive points but these authors say they ignore that likely Kondiaronk was source and he was brilliant
- They didn’t have money and punitive laws because they didn’t need it but you ask: did someone need money?
- Kandironk In dialogues: “A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason”
- Because Lahontan’s book likely exaggerated his stance, kamdironk’s character is called the ultimate noble savage
- Bateson: Schismogenesis, or the idea that nearby communities identify themselves with differences
- 1747: Letters of A Peruvian Woman, another in the form also seen as feminist and introduced state socialism (why didn’t French king redistribute wealth like the Sapa Inca?)
- Pierre Clastres In 1960s argues indigenous might have intentionally organized without bureaucracies and Europeans lacked the imagination
- Author argues Rousseau didn’t really promote the “noble savage” trope (as he is accused) because his essay was about an imaginary form — instead he introduced a blissfully stupid savage
- All humans didn’t start from single east Africa garden of Eden; we probably had more physical differences early on; more geographically distributed in Africa
- Aquatic ape and stoned ape are myths like the one human gathering (though I don’t understand why him saying humans were more spread in Africa doesn’t mean there still wasn’t some original human gathering style)
- The so-called Paleolithic (cognitive) revolution from around 45k years ago is a mirage, these authors argue. Instead it just shows we got a lot more evidence from Europe from that time, not that we only created culture then and there; and climate meant more seasonal gatherings of otherwise sparsely populated tribes
- Christopher Boehm: we seem doomed to believe we are trapped between “Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves, either believing we are instead hierarchercal or innately egalitarian. But Boehm notes what makes a society human is overcoming those base instincts — Aristotle said humans are “political animals”
- 1927 Paul Rider Man Pholosopge book was exceptional as an early book noting differences in tribes and not clean hierarchy
- Levi Strauss’s early anthropology on the Nkwanabana showed people that split wet season hunting and dry season farming, noting these Paleolithic societies were more complex
- Many Paleolithic burials are of humpbacks, little people and giants, likely other signs of people with personality disorders or mental illness. These burials were unusual and so likely show treating them as special after death, as if they were touched by gods
- Marcel Mauss’s work on “double morphology”, such as his 1903 paper Seasonal Varieties of Inuit (societies had different laws and religion by season
- Franz Boas’s research on Kwakiutl found they even used different names in summer and winter
- Clastres: indigenous like Amazonians had created “societies against the state” that allowed flow between systems during seasonality — they were more mature political actors not less. (Perhaps knew the states of the Andes; or were rebellions from earlier states)
- The right question isn’t the origin of social inequality but how did we get stuck in this form? (My note: different communities also used different senses of time but in a global world, we moved to a unified system, this seems similar)
- Nietzsche “beyond good and evil” aspirations; maybe human nature is always the flexibility between the two, whereas animals never sit in one or another
- Authors definition of Egalitarian society: (1) most people believe some agreed upon societal good (wealth, learning, spirituality) should be equally divided and (2) it mostly is
- But commonly property is used as the universal good to measure equality by western writers so all Hunter-gatherers are called egalitarian (they aren’t)
- “We are creatures of excess”, humans always generate surplus in ways other animals do not. Ruling classes are those who organize society to extract the most surplus
- James Woodburn has famous ethnography of gender equality within egalitarian societies
- Instead of egalitarian, Eleanor Leacock says many tribes prioritize “autonomy”
- John Stuart Mill wrote that “all the laborsaving machinery that has hitherto been invented, has not lessened the toil of a single human being “
- Marshall Sahlin’s landmark anthropology essay 1968 “The Original Affluent Society”
- Neo evolutionists: authors call this an old simplified framework that societies evolve from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states
- Average oppressed medieval serf worked less than Average 9-5 and the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who created Stonehenge worked even less each day. Authors say recent rich world hour reductions aren’t as much as we think
- Sahlins: some foraging communities had “rejected the Neolithic revolution in order to keep their leisure”
- “Our punishment for original sin is the infinity of our new desires” after eating from tree of knowledge and leaving foraging for farming, went Sahlins argument, but again many indigenous communities likely went in and out of different forms of society
- Poverty Point Louisiana heritage site is a Stone Age site in an area with no stone, took massive construction and organization
- John E Clark research showing consistent use of equilateral triangles in how mesoamericans made their monuments
- https://youtu.be/GYOe13IXO80?si=O67v0ICWNe-Vq1vD (https://youtu.be/GYOe13IXO80?si=O67v0ICWNe-Vq1vD)
- “Agricultural argument”: how colonists argued indigenous people weren’t really using the land and had no property rights , ignoring how land can be used differently
- Some argue it wasn’t even foraging but a different kind of farming (look back at Charles Mann’s 2006 book 1491 on this point)
- The Calusa in southwest Florida did not farm but had kings, conquest and inequality: agriculture isn’t a prerequisite for inequality
- The Clovis didn’t only walk an arduous land bridge between the old and new worlds, they also used boats (we think): 17k years ago, they likely traveled to settle in abundant shoreline communities; They lived in abundance not the scarcity we associate with the hunter-gatherers who survived today because no one wants their land (but shoreline materials were submerged by rising tides)
- Emile Durkheim’s definition of the sacred as “set apart” (the profane is everything mundane and ordinary)
- Property rights today stem largely from Roman law with three property concepts: “usus; fructus; abusus” or the right to use, the right to its fruits, and the right to damage or destroy. The defining feature today is the ability to destroy
- Eastern woodlands adopted mesoamerican maize farming but the pacific coast did not; “they weren’t pre-agriculture,” the authors wrote, “they were anti-agriculture”
- Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) argued lots of early peoples traveled so they knew each other’s technologies and culture. “Societies, wrote Mauss , “live by borrowing from each other, but they defined themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.”
- Authors argue the proper understanding of Weber’s famous 1905 Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism essay is that though China, India and Islamic world had wealthy merchants, their wealthy elite commonly retired to a palace or spent on public works and festivals; It took an extreme tradition like Calvinism that viewed any display of money as sinful to create a culture of reinvestment of profits to expand production — capitalism. Goldschmidt compared this ethic to Yurok villages in aboriginal California which had private individual ownership of everything
- These northwest Californians (Protestant foragers) were very different than those in northwest coast of there (fisher kings, with their potlach ceremonies); this is “schismogenisis” as depicted by the differences of Athens and Sparta
- Fernando Santos-Granero: some indigenous were “capturing societies”
- All slave raiders are stealing years of caring labor that raised a person to be work ready from their youth
- “Optimal foraging theory”: foraging societies that do not follow a cost benefit analysis of gaining the most calories for the least effort must be following something else
- An elegant theory the authors reject as overly-simplistic: Northwest coast societies were warlike and boastful compared to California lower south because they had few war-proof foods like tree nuts (acorns and pine nuts that are easy to collect and store but “back-loaded”with work to prepare immediately before consumption; in contrast smoked fish like what was plentiful in northwest was front-loaded work, meaning storing all that fish lured in raiders who might also over time take slaves too)
- Instead authors argue northwest coastal elites wouldn’t work so they required additional labor, and California societies developed as an alternative (their elites demonstrated that work)
- Marx: we make our own history but not under conditions of our own choosing
- Fertile Crescent was really at least cultures 10k years ago: uplanders in present Turkey and lowlanders in present day Syria etc, where already craftmakers specialized in different hamlets between stone grinding and bead carving and shell processing to diversify and trade.
- Earliest cereals: rye (was it endemic everywhere?), barley, wheat ; domesticated means it loses its ability to grow wild
- Cultivation of wild cereals dates back to 10kBC, (maybe as much to create straw as grain) and wasn’t completed until 7k so 3k years hardly a revolution.
- Authors argue criticize Jared Diamond (who called agriculture the worst mistake) and Noah Yuval Harrari (who cheekily argued that easy-to-grow wheat domesticated humans, because authors say that ignores that women were the likely scientists exploring production)
- Levi Strauss “science of the concrete”
- We now know agriculture doesn’t lead directly to mass civilization because there were domestic production at several sites beyond the great early cities — for example Eastern Woodlands domesticated squash, sunflower, goosefoot, sumpweed, pitiseed before they encountered maize from south
- In his 2010 book Why The West Rules — For Now, Ian Morris notes the ecological corridor of Eurasia allowed flora and fauna to expand far reaching east to west in similar climate but Americas and Oceania had more microclimates. The “wider” Eurasian continent was more transferrable than the “longer” Americas
- Alfred Crosby: Columbian exchange and ecological imperialism
- Little Ice Age could have been triggered by all the death in the Americas (per 1491) that let millions of acres of forest grow back
- Evidence increasingly showing cities did evolve without kings and central authority
- Dunbar number and nested social group sizes are
- Claude Fischer: “urbanites live in small social worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate” — it’s all about an identity of cities or mass societies
- Aristotle said Babylon was so big that when it was captured it took days before everyone there knew it
- The travois was a Plains-indians-created device for carrying goods on dogs
- Any prehistoric society without kings is considered simple but authors argue they’re just different: Ukrainian mega sites like Taljanky are not treated seriously by academics as a city because it had no sign of infrastructure ; they do ‘play farming’ to support
- In Ursula la Guin’s famous 1973 short-story “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas” includes: “We have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.”
- Why do we demand evidence of democratic prehistoric societies but don’t demand similar evidence of top-down hierarchy?
- Teotihucan also may have been a large city without a central power
- Is Teotihucan a 500-year blip on the road that led Olmec hierarchy to Toltec aristocracy and eventually Aztec imperialism? These authors clearly argue no, the transition was not inevitable
- Why Tlaxcala was a kind of democratic urban parliament that agreed to join cortes to battle Aztec empire
- Authors are critical of historian Charles Mann’s 2006 book 1491 referencing that the Tlaxcala was a confederation of four “kingdoms” because they were more properly republics — but secondary sources that Mann relied on glossed over this
- For instance, in Cortes’s five letters of relation to Charles V (1519-1526) he remarks on the 150k-person city and hinterland Tlaxcala for markets and agriculture and the “order of government so far observed among the people resembles very much the Republic of Venice, Genoa and Pisa, for there is no supreme overlord.”
- Famously, 1k Spanish soldiers overcame 250k-person Aztec Tenochtitlan with 20k army from Tlaxcala; there’s a Sparta vs Athens dichotomy between the two (349)
- This book is full of first sources especially on page 350: they believe Francisco Cervantes de Salazar has a key text detailing oral history of the decisions of indigenous to side with Cortes (overlooked)
- Origins of the state: Rudolf von Jhering coined “monopoly on the legitimate use of force” which Max Weber became associated with; Marxists argue the state is an institution to protect the interests of the ruling class; modern usage is now circular: any complex system requires a state and so all complex societies must have a state which these authors are challenging
- Authors argue three bases of power: control of violence, control of information and indivisible charisma (the mythical James Bond like secret agent embodied them all)
- Ritual mockery of successful hunters of the Hadza who want to keep anyone from getting too big headed
- Authors were critical of the time period creations like old, middle and new kingdoms of Egypt as creating narratives
- Inca really had elaborate administration and public works; Aztec really were brutal and Maya culture of art really features lots of sports — all had mother culture of Olmec
- Max Weber in 1780s argued what we see among mesoamerican kings: delegation is hard when only the individual king is considered powerful
- Administration, charismatic politics, sovereignty
- Origin of the state may be futile because definitions are futile but this book argues that state and civilization are not inevitably linked
- Phillip Abram’s: “The state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political political practice as it is.”
- Minoan Crete appear to have been a matriarchal theocracy but there’s resistance to say this
- James Scott and the “grain trap” of cereal grain agriculture letting population growth before a collapse due to crop loss or war; notes 3kBC-1600 AD was a barbarian golden age of looting empires ; Barbarians and empire lived together not different stages
- For a half millennia much of the world either lived outside a tax authority or were near a spot where they could leave that taxing authority; This is no longer true
- Mongolian adage: one can conquer on horseback but to manage one must dismount (445)
- Jaspers Axial Age of metal coinage and speculative thought in Greece India and China might have been a single movement across Eurasia , not an inevitable direction of development evolution
- Elizabeth Tooker, among others, looked at North American relational clans (Turtle Bear Wolf Hawk)
- Hopewell in Ohio another massive society that appears to exist without any central empire
- Many indigenous civilizations had peace chief and war chiefs
- AD 1100 maize and three sisters came to Iroquois
- Social sciences developed in academia to advance two key questions following the Enlightenment: (1) how to institutionalize its progress after its progress slowed and (2) why do good ideas sometimes turn out wrong?
- Enlightenment informed the scientific, American and French Revolutions
- AM Hocart: “the first kings must have been dead kings”
- Freedom to move away; freedom to disobey orders; freedom to shape new social realities or switch in between them (the third is what has gone away completely but likely as war and other elements eroded the first two freedoms too)
- War was not inevitable; Raymond Kelly writes of the invention of “social substitability” of breaking society into teams and killing one because another of their team hurt you
- Define objects by what you can’t legally do with it, or by enumerating what you can do
- Roman law basis founded to define treatment of slaves as objects over whom the patriarch had full control over
- Woodlands tribes tortured rivals, but they found European style executions of their own citizens an exercise in raw power
- “Perhaps the most stubborn misconception we’ve been tackling has to do with scale. It does seem to be received wisdom in many quarters, academic and otherwise, that structures of domination are the inevitable result of populations scaling up by orders of magnitude; that is, that a necessary correspondence exists between social and spatial hierarchies. Time and again we found ourselves confronted with writing which simply assumes that the larger and more densely populated the social group, the more ‘complex’ the system needed to keep it organized. Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy. Hierarchy, in turn, is used as a euphemism for chains of command (the origins of the state’), which mean that as soon as large numbers of people decided to live in one place or join a common project, they must necessarily abandon the second freedom – to refuse orders – and replace it with legal mechanisms for, say, beating or locking up those who don’t do as they’re told. As we’ve seen, none of these assumptions are theoretically essential, and history tends not to bear them out.“
- What if we “look at say Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken?”
- Max Plank: new theories replace old ones because scientists die