Slow Read Book Club: Chapter 10 (Part 1) The Dawn of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
We grapple with the term 'state' and what it means to understand our present and past.
I am not a political theorist. I recommend to check out
as he has been writing about governance and society from ancient times till today. What I will do here is parse out the thought experiment posed by Graeber and Wengrow and run with it.What does it mean to think about the state? From our previous posts and chapters, we are trying to answer whether the ‘state’ is inevitable in our governance evolution. That means are we doomed to have too little freedom and equality?
Defining the State
What is the state? There is no consensus as to what it means but there are some characteristics that we recognise and attribute the term to ancient or present societies.
There is a legal idea or claim to a specific territory
There is a legal right to incite or use violence over anyone within the said territory. (Idea by Rudolf van Jhering and commonly attributed to Max Weber)
From the Marxist perspective, the state functions to protect the power of the elite and ruling class
There are problems accompanying this term including attributing other characteristics to the term ‘state.’ We have seen from all the previous chapters and posts that we can now separate:
urban city from the state
agriculture from the state
person-to-group authority from the state (I borrow Heller’s term here),
and social hierarchy or rank from the state. (We can have monarchies and aristocracies without the state)
As you can see, we are slowly teasing out terms that we confuse or collapse with the state. We can best apprehend what social phenomena we mean by not using the term ‘state’ to describe ancient and present societies.
Provocations and Questions
The more we separate terms from ‘state’, the more we need to ask the following:
What do we gain or lose by using the term ‘state’ to describe settlements?
What do we have in common (or difference) with past settlements?
What can we learn about the ‘state’ and freedom and equality?
Alternative Definition of the State
Graeber and Wengrow propose three principles that are the precursor of formal institutions that would comprise the state:
control over violence
control over access to information or knowledge
individual charisma - largely attributed to a heroic figure a precursor of an autocratic style of leadership
What we see in these three principles is the extreme form of control over another. Throughout human prehistory, we have seen settlements that control against these but also larger aggregates of people who have accepted governance forms from these three principles, even so-called egalitarian or democratic ones.
The ‘state’ as we recognise it converts the three principles into institutionalised forms that cover:
sovereignty - full authority over a group
bureaucracy - supplants the figure of the king (kingdom) as the mechanism of power through administrative control of information
political competition among certain elite groups or individuals
However, what Graeber and Wengrow argue is that though these may constitute the state, taken on its own, characteristics do not necessarily produce ‘statehood.’
As we have seen in Mesopotamia, the complex administrative bureaucracy led to a heroic type of governance. I will not go into their comparison of Spanish Mesopotamian cities, though similar, they are somewhat incomparable in terms of bureaucracies and sovereignty.
It seems the most common theme was a cycle of centralisation and decentralisation between autocracy and no kings or sole rulers. This means that labels of ‘Classical’ to ‘Post Classical’ to reflect these periods are mere reflections of the researcher’s political perspective.
our conventional vision of world history is a chequerboard of cities, empires and kingdoms; but in fact, for most of this period these were exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants, if visible at all to historians’ eyes, are variously described as ‘tribal confederacies’, ‘amphictyonies’ or (if you’re an anthropologist) ‘segmentary societies’ – that is, people who systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority (387)
For them, it would be much more productive to assess archaeological finds around how the three principles of domination operated (rather than fit them with the idea of the ‘state.’)
The ‘state’ as imagined
Using the three features of domination over other people, Graeber and Wengrow proceeded to analyse some Mesoamerican settlements and civilisation. They mark the Chavín de Huántar (1000 BC - 1 BC), the precursor of the Inca, high in the Peruvian Andes as possessing, not a state but what would be called a Geertzian ‘theatre state.’ This is from prehistoric Balinesian kingdoms in which Clifford Geertz described the power of the ‘state’ is directed and emanates from grand spectacular ritual performances.
Graeber and Wengrow argue that the monolith found within the settlement depicts less of a state than a culture built on esoteric ‘shamanic journey’ knowledge. When it came to the ball game from the Olmec then later inherited by the Maya and Aztec, Graeber and Wengrow argue for the competitive spectacle of these sport which were also played by aristocrats. There was no indication that Olmec dominated people in terms of military force or bureaucratic reach except for cultural practices such as the ball game.
The story is similar with the Natchez Indians in Mississippi as encountered by the French Jesuit Father Maturin de Petit. The Natchez lived on a settlement with two earthen platforms containing the temple and a palace with a plaza. All in all this Great Village once contained up to 4,000 residents. They were ruled by a dynasty headed by what they called the Sun God, his brother Tattooed Serpent, and eldest sister the White Woman. They were worshipped with the settlers regularly offering themselves as sacrifice during royal funerals joyously. During every day life though, residents avoided the Great Village which was regularly depopulated with the sacrificial practice. Settlements were at a distance away from the Great Village where people exercised military and commercial trade outside of the tentacles of the royal dynasty. Refusal was common to royal commands. Their power was largely circumscribed. They were sovereign but they were not a state.
Egalitarian or Not?
It is clear that these settlements were not egalitarian but were actually ruled by elite groups - whether in ritual or other forms of social rank. But suddenly we hear about the lack of total dominance over others outside of certain ritual rules. We return to our early chapters when social and political power is rather temporary and seasonal and not total. Are they egalitarian? No. Do you still have freedom? Yes, to a large extent.
Round-Up
In the first part of a long chapter, the authors Graeber and Wengrow breaks down, rather convincingly, that our idea of state has been a bit confused. Inf act, there is no consensus to what a state is.
The separation of key elements associated with the term state clarifies a lot of misconceptions about human (pre)history. Instead of using the ‘state’ to label things, the authors propose that we separate other things that has evolved independently from what we recognise as ‘state’ today.
intensive agriculture
cities formation
social inequality or rank hierarchy
control over another or groups
We could talk about our ancient or contemporary history without using the term state. Rather, the authors propose that we look into three principles that are precursors to state or are present in institutions.
Is there centralised means or control of violence?
Is there control over knowledge (ritual and religion plays a major role in extracting unwitting obedience and compliance)
Are there individual charismatic players involved (what we also call heroic societies with individual power players, which tended to be male - or what we have seen as the move away from feminine figure worship)
The answers to these assessment questions would show that there is no single evolutionary model in which the state is the expected output. What has come to more and more similar forms as we reach the contemporary period are three characteristics of the ‘state:’
full sovereignty
bureaucracy rather than simply kingship or kingdom reliant on a person
elite competition for power
Again, these six measures of political and social power, show degrees of statehood with no single ‘type’ especially when reading the past. As for the present, it seems obvious what ‘states’ are. In the next post, we’ll look at the quintessential early state that is the dynasty in Egypt.