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ISBN 978-0-374-15735-7
It isn’t every day you get to read a book that upends everything you know about the last 30 thousand years of humanity. In the Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wingrow, in a scholarly but easy to read page turner, spell out a specific comprehensive new paradigm which replaces virtually all the narratives that we have been told about human society up until now.
The main concept of science of anthropology is the idea of “culture,” namely the organized consistent body of knowledge, expectation, strategy, and practice that nurtures a human community, that every human learns as a member of society. Human societies are the product of ongoing deliberate conscious and unconscious decisions adapting their lives and altering their behavior to meet their needs. Dawn shows just how creative, inventive, adaptive, imaginative, adventurous, sometimes outlandish but nearly always contemplative, reasoned consensual social systems can be.
The last 200 hundred years of human history, political science, anthropology, sociology has maintained a narrative of human society that, despite my every effort to avoid caricature, can be summed up as H. sapiens having evolved as a species of Paleolithic Flintstone family-based troops of men hunting to provide for their families, which then was suddenly followed by the Neolithic Revolution about 10K years ago after the retreat of the Ice Age which brought forth the modern era of the agricultural, trading, urban division of labor civilization and centralized empire based on largely male dominated administrations and bureaucracies, characterized by ongoing power struggle, violence, and authoritarian systems of control.
In fact, The Dawn of Everything, -in overwhelming scholarly detail -shows that virtually everything about that narrative has been wrong.
Thousands of years before the Neolithic, humans were managing whole ecologies, organizing themselves into area wide social groups, even urban centers, capable of monumental engineering projects, involving long distance trade systems and complex ideologies. Without central authority and without violence.
It was nearly 4 thousand years after the beginning of the Neolithic period before settled agriculture became standard and even then agricultural societies and large urban areas often existed without centralized authority and without hierarchies and without administrations, and yes violence occurred, but so did wholesale centuries of widespread peace.
When I was in graduate school, in the 60-70s, the anthropology paradigm was the concept of Man the Hunter as the biological driver of the evolution of human intelligence, culture, and technology.[despite thefact that clearly as a hominid, no Homo species has anything remotely carnivore about its dentition, but teeth solely adapted to processed, shared foods.]
In the half century or so since, we just have learned so very much. Satellite imagery mapping of ancient cities, highways, agricultural centers. DNA of human populations, of whole ecologies through detailed ancient pollen counts from soils. Details of diet. Fine details of climate. We can recreate diets from residue on teeth, Life histories from chemical analysis of bone. Just the unique shape of human teeth tells you almost everything you need to know tounderstand our species.
We can recreate the health, diet, ecology from fossil coprolites. Now it is clear that rather than hunting, it was the extensive knowledge of plant and animal ecology necessary, and the planning, production and use of tools, that drove our need for bigger better brains. It was the need to know and take advantage of systems of social reciprocity, of the technologies of social reciprocity, cooking, weaving, tanning, basketry, trapping, decorative arts, music, rhetoric, dramatic production, engineering, social rituals and the understanding of social requirements in extensive exchange systems in every aspect of life, i.e. culture, that was and is the driving force behind the evolution of the human..
That creativity we have always and everywhere primarily applied to creating our systems of social organization and exchange- everything that could be imagined and a lot that cannot be imagined has been tried. Every kind of family. Every kind of economy. We’ve invented our societies.
In the millennia both before and after the neolithic, large engineering projects involving precise knowledge of astronomy and other natural phenomena are found all over the planet long before what we know of civilization. There were no armies, no overseers, no violence. no lords, no peons. Communal organization.
One important aspect of Dawn is its resurrection of the impact of the Americas on European thought, philosophy, religion, political, and social thought in Europe in the 16th,17th,18thcenturies. Just as 50% plus of all agriculture done today is borrowed from first american domestication like chocolate, maize, turkey,tomato, potato, yam, beans, squash, pumpkin, berries like blueberries, black and red raspberries, peanuts, etc., just the same is Europe’s and Europeans’ borrowing first nations political thought wholesale
The Americas were crucial in the 17thand 18thcenturies in the development of European ideas of society. Not just explorers writings, but extensive transcripts of first nations thinkers were extensively read about, known, discussed. The ideas of the first nations about what society is or should be greatly influenced Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, William Penn, Jefferson, Franklin, Voltaire. The Jesuit Records of North America were avidly read throughout Europe, edited and published for common people to read. First Nations equivalents of teachers and scholars visited Europe or chiefs were invited and were not shy about analysing European social deficincies compared to First Nations social order, and even less shy about saying what they thought [widely repeated by Benjamin franklin in various letters]. Franciscan records in Latin America in Latin and Spanish, travelers accounts and scholars’ writings were printed, translated, read and well known throughout Europe but this direct influence on USA, American, and European political thought, philosophical, thought, social planning, religion has all but been erased from our intellectual history.
The Jesuit Relations, [Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France], are the reports of the Jesuit missions in New France collected and edited for the public annually and printed from 1632 up to 1673. Louis-Armand de Lahontan wrote 3 extensive books on the North American cultures he encountered travelling all the way to the beginning of the Missouri River. Most interestingly he published a book of dialogues with a major Huron war chief in Canada by the nameof Adario [the Rat] whose actual name is Kandiaronk, who travelled through France and other countries in Europe and who has brutal criticism of European society, in Supplementaux Voyages ou Dialogues avec le sauvage Adario.
The enormously revolutionary influx of new knowledge of social systems and equitable social systems into Europe in the 16thand 17thcenturies fundamentally changed Europe.
Central to this influence of first nations philosophy and political economy was the first nations’ basing society on equity and independence, and developing social organizations almost universally entirely based on suasion not force, persuasion, talking, rhetoric, logic, appeal to self interest and common good, engaging each other to lead to consensus.To first nations thought and practice, force was only rarely appropriate. All coommunities made their own decisions
For example, [not mentioned in Graeber and Wengrow], in Oman there are 3 millennium old systems of underground aqueducts [aflaj] designed, engineered, and maintained by local community collectives to carry water from the mountains down to coastal hamlets and towns. Communism, pure and simple. Local community farmers’ collectives owned and operated these community projects which bring the water to those communities entirely through gravitation hydrology. --- no government, no overseers, no hereditary controllers, no taxes.
Anthropologist Jane Goodale in Tiwi Wives [not the primatologist Jane Goodall] and Warren Shapiro, when I was a graduate student in the 60s and 70s, published their seperate studies that proved that it is the senior women who own, direct, decide and manage the economies of the all Australian first nations, not the men’s social clubs [British anthropologists could only see the mens’ clubs, which had no say in the matter, for a hundred years despite the men explain ning otherwise]
For most of the last 30 thousand years, humans have organized and operated and managed whole ecologies and economies successfully without capital, without captains, without military excursions, without armies, without invasions, without autocracy and oligarchy and without special privilege-Through community consensus. Yes empires occured: not exclusively, but here and there, with the bulk of human society lived away from power hegemony.
Yes, authoritarian police systems have also been contrived and put to workhere and there, but almost always, strictly limited with time andfunction controls, seasonal and rotating authority… group governing boards, restrictions on ownership and no inheritance of power.
Every possible social system, every possible family system, every possible economic exchange system that you can imagine has been tried and tested, and even more you can’t imagine. The australian aborigines, early in the 20thCentury, explained their economic and kinship systems clearly and explained how they worked but Europeans just did not believe them, for over a century, until Goodale and Shapiro published her work on mother in law bestowal and the economic decision making of senior women. Wherever, whenever the Man the Hunter paradigm was proven not part of the picture the research has been ghosted until Graebner and Wengrow study here takes it all out front stage for all to appreciate.
This review is too short to go into the extraordinary variation in human social and political constructs that humans have devised, but the take away is that we are not locked solely into the narrow choice between anarchy and authority, coercion and chaos, ‘democracy [sic] versus communism [sic]’. It’s not a choice between RNC and DNC and Wall Street hegemony of both. Endless mythical economic growth is not an option. Never was, as Malthus made clear.
Humans are reasonable, rational, caring and creative, and the cartels, corporations, and fearless leaders with bling on their chests have not served humanity well since colonialism took over. Communal, social, consensual systems are the most common and usually the most effective, the most human of human social systems.
DemocracyNow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDO28CPAPuM
TheBritish Library conversation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkm-BhtjASs
HowTo Academy
https://howtoacademy.com/events/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity/
TimesHigher Education
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/dawn-everything-david-graeber-and-david-wengrow
an excerpt from Dawn
Some Jesuits went further, remarking – not without a trace of frustration – that New World savages seemed rather cleverer overall than the people they were used to dealing with at home (e.g. ‘they nearly all show more intelligence in their business, speeches, courtesies, intercourse, tricks, and subtleties, than do the shrewdest citizens and merchants in France’).
Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It’s true that Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence. Still ,persuasiveness need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to which one privileges any ofthese has everything to do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumed dispositions of their audience.
It was largely the speakers of Iroquoian languages such as the Wendat, or the five Haudenosaunee nations to their south, who appear to have placed such weight on reasoned debate – even finding it a form of pleasurable entertainment in own right. This fact alone had major historical repercussions. Because it appears to have been exactly this form of debate – rational, sceptical, empirical, conversational in tone – which before long came to be identified with the European Enlightenment as well. And, just like the Jesuits, Enlightenment thinkers and democratic revolutionaries saw it as intrinsically connected with the rejection of arbitrary authority, particularly that which had long been assumed by the clergy.
Let’s gather together the strands of our argument so far.
By the mid seventeenth century, legal and political thinkers in Europe were beginning to toy with the idea ofan egalitarian State of Nature; at least in the minimal sense of a default state that might be shared by societies which they saw as lacking government, writing, religion, private property or other significant means of distinguishing themselves from one another.Terms like ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ were just beginningh to come into common usage in intellectual circles – around the time, indeed, that the first French missionaries set out to evangelize thei nhabitants of what are now Nova Scotia and Quebec.27 Europe’s reading public was growing increasingly curious about what such primordial societies might have been like. But they had no particular disposition to imagine men and women living in a State of Nature as especially ‘noble’, let alone as rational sceptics and champions of individual liberty.28 This latter perspective was the product of a dialogic encounter
As we’ve seen, at first neither side –not the colonists of New France, nor their indigenous interlocutors –had much to say about ‘equality’. Rather, the argument was about liberty and mutual aid, or what might even be better called freedom and communism. We should be clear about what we mean by the latter term. Since the early nineteenth century, there have been lively debates about whether there was ever a thing that might legitimately be referred to as ‘primitive communism’. At the centre of thesedebates, almost invariably, were the indigenous societies of the Northeast Woodlands – ever since Friedrich Engels used the Iroquoisas a prime example of primitive communism in his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Here, ‘communism’ always refers to communal ownership, particularly of productive resources. As we’ve already observed, many American societies could be considered somewhat ambiguous in this sense: women owned and worked the fields individually, even though they stored and disposed of the products collectively; men owned their own tools and weapons individually, even if they typically shared out the game and spoils.
However, there’s another way to use the word ‘communism’: not as a property regime but in the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. There’s also a certain minimal, ‘baseline’ communism which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one’s bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. What varies is just how far it is felt such baseline communism should properly extend