The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

I have mixed feelings about the book.

Its major shortcoming (in my view) is that it is overly long and dull. There's just far too much information here, much of which seems to be extraneous to the authors' central thesis. Maybe it seems overly long because I listened to the audio version? I don't know. Whatever the case, there are entire chapters that feel more like digressions than support for the primary argument.

Also, the book is built upon mountains of supposition. “Surely, it must be the case...” “One cannot help but assume...” And so on. The authors rightfully take other scholars to task for making assumptions and clinging to outdated notions, yet they commit these same crimes over and over and over again.

These qualms aside, there's a lot of fascinating material here.

There are some interesting Big Ideas about the grand scope of history (which boil down, essentially, to the Vulcan ideal: “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” — that is, human societies have existed in myriad forms over the past 12,000+ years, and it is impossible to generalize a progression of systemic organization) but there are also plenty of entertaining and enlightening nuggets to be found in the anecdotes and digressions.

I'd probably consider this a must-read for others who are interested in human history and the origins of civilization. I'm glad I read it. But don't expect it to be nearly as entertaining or well-written as, say, “Sapiens”. The research in “THe Dawn of Everything” may be more rigorous than the former, but former is a pleasure to read while the latter is a drag.

there are essentially two projects at play here. one succeeds, the other is unconvincing.

project 1: demonstrate that the human past (and present) is a record of radical variability. people have in fact almost always organised themselves in ways that are unthinkable in our parochial and unreflective contemporary world. and it has nothing to do with progress. the authors spotlight the inappropriate use of other societies as shallow metaphors and superficial lessons for today's societies in influential popular and academic narratives. this is a very important project as it demonstrates how contingent and provisional our current social arrangements are. we are all trying so hard to control our lives and will be made into fools when social relations inevitably shift in unexpected ways in spite of every effort to reify them. by sifting through the archaeological and anthropological record in a both sufficiently thoughtful and aggressive way, this project succeeds.

project 2: demonstrate that an ‘anarchic' form of social organisation is possible and perhaps desirable. this project is more latent, less explicit, but it seems to be where each argument wants to go. here, the authors fall prey to many of the lapses they have identified in other works. there are too many problems to cover without looking uncharitable. the top few for me are: (a) an apparent disregard of how power manifests ‘structurationally' (imo) in interpersonal relations and everyday phenomenon, not just in broad strokes of social organisation. given that most people like being in a society i.e., they don't want everyone else to just fuck off and leave them alone as the book sometimes implies, this is an important mode of analysis. it is unfortunately glossed over in favour of the notion that societies as a collective can choose new paths together through a mystery box process that somehow generates equitable results beloved by all despite a smorgasbord of power dynamics. (b) the dismissal of material agency. i fully agree that environmental determinism is dumb af, but i also think we exercise our will on the world around us based on the materials we can access and the pathways they avail to us. e.g., the climate is doing very poorly but we can't just dream up electric vehicles, we actually need to obtain the damn nickel. and so, where nickel is and what properties it has will determine the options we can bring to the table. nickel's material reality doesn't automatically imply a form of social relations or power structure, but it does imply a constrained starting point for our negotiations with one another. (c) it's fair enough to reject the ontological turn - no one knows what it means and probably societies ‘reason' in more similar ways than we imagine. but we cannot flatten the myriad of knowledge, ethical and aesthetic configurations of different societies (ironically accepted as diverse in their political configurations) and assume they would all make a “common sense” choice to move towards a small ‘f' sort of freedom marked by citizen assemblies and just uprooting the family if the king is being annoying. this conception of the individual seems like a recent invention and despite my personal attraction to the idea of a life shooting the shit, ultimately my communitarian ass would probably not want to live in that society.

overall, because project 1 is so fundamental to social change and yet so hard to parse in the monolithic discursive climate of our world, this book on the whole is a wild success.

240224 The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

This book promises a lot. It promises to turn upside down the reader's understanding. It promises to reveal hitherto concealed facts about early human civilization. It promises to undercut the conventional understanding of the history of early human civilization. It promises to tell us how we got “stuck.”

“Stuck” is a favorite word of the authors. “Stuck” is used 16 times. “Stuck” is a kind of criticism of modern Western society, as the authors imagine it. For example, they write the following:

Second, we'll start answering the question we posed in the last chapter: how did we get stuck? How did some human societies begin to move away from the flexible, shifting arrangements that appear to have characterized our earliest ancestors, in such a way that certain individuals or groups were able to claim permanent power over others: men over women; elders over youth; and eventually, priestly castes, warrior aristocracies and rulers who actually ruled?

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 121). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

So, how do they do?

In that they oversell the sizzle and provide a product that is far less then what they promise, not very well in my opinion.

What got me interested in the book was the promise to reveal human “deep history” – history prior to the last approximately 7,000 years. Scholars can sketch out a trace of human history up to around 5,000 years BCE. Before that time, things get sketchy. For example, we know that Jericho has been more or less continuously occupied since 9400 BCE. https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/ancient-jericho-the-first-walled-city-in-history By 8,000 BCE Jericho can be called a “town” with about 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants. Jericho appears to be the oldest such community that we have evidence for. The age of Jericho means that by the time that ancient Hebrews allegedly arrived at the walls of Jericho around 1,200 BCE, Jericho had a history that went back a further 8,000 years.

Ponder that.

History is deep.

Jericho's history is dwarfed by still deeper human history. Prior to the founding of Jericho, humans had been wandering the landscape of the region for a further 40,000 years.

What were they doing?

I purchased this book with the hope of finding out. Unfortunately, Graeber and Wengrow are less interested in telling us about what science has to say about the deep human past than in using an imagined past – both deep and far more recent (substantial attention is paid to the attractions of North American Native culture from the 18th century) – as a foil against modernity.

For example, the book beings with a critique of Rousseau and Hobbes' notion of the “state of nature.” Neither philosopher intended the idea of the state of nature to be historical. Rather, they used the state of nature – a hypothetical condition of equality that existed before human communities – as a way of critiquing their cultures.

Similarly, Graeber and Wengrow critique Rousseau to argue that the idea of a primitive condition of human equality is a mistaken quest. Although they acknowledge that Rousseau didn't think such equality ever existed as a matter of history, the authors spend a lot of time and effort arguing that we won't find such equality in the past.

As an attack on a strawman, they win they point.

However, they go on to create their own version of an ur-state of human equality, but this time it is labeled “freedom.” Their write:
Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck? If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality'), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 519). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

So, apparently, we are now “stuck” but previously we were not “stuck.” What did things look like before we became “stuck”? They write:

Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 503). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

It is hard to see where Rousseau would disagree with this new formula.

Where does this formula come from? If you aren't paying attention, you might think that Graeber and Wengrow have proven it somehow. They offer a lot of anthropological examples which give the impression that they are marshalling unassailable evidence They offer examples from the Wendat, California versus Northwest Indians, Egypt, Sudan, Gobekli Tepe, etc., etc. They have all of human history to cherry-pick. What they don't offer are counter-examples that prove their point or some logical demonstration as to why these three freedoms are basic.

. While criticizing other anthropologists for projecting their biases into the evidence, Graeber and Wengrow do the same. It is worth noting that Graeber was heavily involved in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. I didn't know this until after I had finished the book. There were red flags throughout the book that made me suspect that this book was aiming at indoctrination rather than objectivity. One such “tell” was the resurrection of Marija Gimbutas's hoary “The Goddess and Gods of Old Europe (1982).” While Gimbutas has always been popular among the feminist left and people who want to feel smart in having their biases confirmed, her theories that Europe was occupied by matriarchal Goddess-worshippers until the nasty Indo-Europeans invaded an imposed patriarchy and Sky God were rejected by anthropologists.

Graeber and Wengrow attempt to rehabilitate Gimbutas via “recent research” on DNA that shows that there was an influx of invaders into Europe. What they don't explain is how this proves a matriarchal society was overturned. No one to my knowledge ever denied that there were population invasions. Long before DNA research was possible, no one disputed that the intrusion of the Indo-European language family into Europe meant that a new population had arrived.

What's going on here is that Graeber is, and Wengrow may be, men of the Left and they have fairly conventional post-modern attitudes about feminism, colonialism, the evils of patriarchy, and the rest of the social imaginary package that constitutes the evils of modernity. They also probably know that they are going to score major points if they beat the feminist drum. All that is missing is some evidence of this matriarchal culture.

It is confirmation bias as far as the eye can see. Thus, they offer the example of the Iroquoian longhouses being run by a council of women. This may be surprising to the average person but I read anthropologist Marvin Harris's excellent “Cow, Pigs, Wars, and Witches” back in the 1970s. Harris described the Iroquois as an exception because their men were often away from home on raiding parties. In other words, there was a reason for this exception. They don't mention this and I suspect that we will find similar reasons apply to the scant other examples they mention, such as the Hopi, Zinu and Minangkabau, a Muslim people of Sumatra.

By the way, what do these examples have to do with Gimbutas' thesis? Nothing, really. We can't infer from a handful of exceptions to an unknown group as if it were a matter of deductive reasoning. This point is particularly germane when the reader understands that it is key part of Graeber and Wengrow's argument that social forms are not determined; rather, social forms just happen (perhaps because the intelligent hunter-gatherers tried one form, disliked it, and moved to another form, and sometimes because we got “stuck” for some reason.)

Graeber and Wengrow also offer the Cretans as a matriarchy based on Cretan paintings depicting women as larger figures and smaller male figures as bowing toward them. What this shows is aristocracy. According to other sources, there both male and female figures that are depicted as larger than other figures who are serving the larger figures.

Could Crete have been a matriarchy? Sure, but my problem is that this sounds like a lot of anthropology I read as a child in the 1960s that depicted the Mayans as peaceful. Later anthropology revealed the bloodletting, wars, and human sacrifices of the Mayans. It is not the case that Western scholars are always projecting racial inferior stereotypes into non-Western culture. A lot of anthropology involves using the imagined non-Western culture as an example of a utopia that the West missed out on having.

Sort of like Graeber and Wengrow do.

Graeber and Wengrow are particularly obnoxious on this front when they fall for the Kandiaronk hoax. Kandiaronk was a “Wendat Philosopher-Statesman” - an Indian chief - who befriended the French in approximately 1683. A Frenchman named Baron de la Hontan (Lahontan) purportedly transcribed conversations between Kandiaronk and the Governor General. Surprisingly, Kanriaronk turns out to have been the very model of the Enlightenment philosopher, with piercing comments about inequality and money.

Graeber and Wengrow discount the possibility that Kandiaronk was what moderns would call a “sock puppet” to put Lahontan's ideas into circulation, but this kind of thing was an established industry at the time. Lahontan's memoirs may be accurate, but if that was the case, they would have been exceptional in that regard. David Bell who teaches on the French Enlightenment at Princeton has this to say:

https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity


The error that Mann makes—and that Graeber and Wengrow uncritically repeat—is in some ways an understandable one. It can be very tempting to mistake Western critiques of the West, placed in “indigenous” mouths, for authentically indigenous ones. The language is familiar, and the authors know exactly which chords will resonate with their audience. Genuinely indigenous critiques, coming out of traditions with which people raised in Western environments are unfamiliar, can seem much more strange and difficult. The reductio ad absurdum of this mistake comes when people take as authentically Native American the words of Pocahontas, in the Disney film of the name: “You think you own whatever land you land on / The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim...”

The error is also—of course—deeply political. It fits what Graeber and Wengrow describe in their conclusion as a principal aim of the book: to “[expose] the mythical substructure of our ‘social science,'” and to reveal, contrary to what social scientists insist, that humans still have “the freedom to shape entirely new social realities.” Many Native Americans in the time of Kandiaronk still possessed this freedom, they claim. European societies, meanwhile, were incapable of real self-criticism. It took the wise Huron to open Western eyes to the possibility of a genuinely revolutionary politics. Graeber and Wengrow themselves now want to play a similar role.

Unfortunately, if their treatment of the Enlightenment is any indication, in pursuing this goal they are willing to engage in what comes perilously close to scholarly malpractice. I don't have the expertise to comment on Graeber and Wengrow's arguments about matters other than the French Enlightenment, but the quality of their scholarship on this subject does not bode well for the remainder of the book, to say the least.

Other scholars offer searing criticism in their area of specialty. For example, Graeber and Wengrow claim that Europeans, unlike Indians, would often stay with the other culture when given the opportunity. This claim – which will bury itself in many minds like a virus or earworm – is based on a doctoral dissertation which says that there was no difference between the cultures – no matter what culture the person came from, they wanted to go home.

The treatment given to Karl Marx is noteworthy. Graeber and Wengrow argue against economic determinism but they never call out Marx on that point. Instead he gets treated with deference as one of the people with courage to say “slightly ridiculous” things. This is the “dog that didn't bark” inasmuch as most anthropology is “Marxist,” not in the sense of advocating “from each according to the ability, to each according to their need,” but in the sense of a willingness to correlate cultural developments to economic realities. Marvin Harris, who I mentioned earlier, falls into this category.

But Graeber and Wengrow have nothing to say about how their discipline got “stuck” by adopting Marx?

And what is this “stuck” anyhow? Apparently, in the past, people had the ability the ability to boldly re-imagine their society and make changes if they chose.

Obviously, we can't do that, which is why slavery was not abolished in America in 1965, serfdom wasn't abolished in Russia in the 1850s, and a virulent form of social organization that subordinated everything to the State didn't collapse in Europe in 1989. It's also why no one has ever tried to form communes, some of which have been successful for decades.

What are they talking about.

This is not to say that there are no virtues in this book There are nuggets of information. I didn't realize that California Indians did not rely on the “three sisters” form of agriculture, for example. It is clear that the idea of an “agricultural revolution” leading to sedentary communities is not entirely accurate – although there may still be a positive correlation between the two. James C. Scott, who is given deferential treatment by the authors, has a lot of interesting things to say about this in “Against the Grain.”

The idea of “schismogenesis” is interesting:

Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘schismogenesis' to describe people's tendency to define themselves against one another.

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (pp. 56-57). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

On the other hand, I can see where it applies to direct interactions, but the authors apply it to explain the differences between California Indians and Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Most Indians in these two “cultural areas” would never interact with each other. Why didn't this effect lead to a checkerboard pattern of cultural differentiation?

But on the whole, it didn't address my interest in “deep time.” Where it moved into things I knew, it was wrong or overly simplistic.

I cannot recommend this book