Slow Read Book Club: Chapter 12, The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
This book is a quest to imagine new ways to live by looking at how our ancestors conceived of freedom, revolution, and community
Dear Reader,
We have come far, especially reading a book that is so thick that the likelihood of ever finishing it is high. I know because if I was not committed to writing for you, I would have stopped at Chapter 2.
As we close 2023, I am glad I finished. I am a better person and thinking individual for it. The insights of this book helped me re-examine museum interpretations, social theory, and also critically analyse the instruments of social science (comparison method, archaeological data, and ethnographic writing and description - for anthropology). It is not enough to discuss about egalitarianism or democracy, as much as reflecting on how we document societies and social change.
I am interested to build upon the knowledge that we gained here in our succeeding book. I have decided to tackle, Debt the First 5,000 Years, another thick and grand world building view of money from the same author David Graeber. It is another much cited but I suspect few have completely read the 427 pages. (I was intimidated to do Capital by Thomas Piketty but I think reading Debt will provide the social context for Capital).
If you have any special requests before the new year, I would be happy to consider it as well. We deserve another enlightened new year ahead.
Melanie
The Making of History
Graeber and Wengrow examined the nature of social change and innovation in human prehistory all the way to historical times. What is true is the following:
Our instruments of documentation and perspective as social scientists are flawed
Our Enlightenment framework (or ruptures in the status quo of history) works well to document revolutionary changes but make terrible assumptions that Pre-Enlightenment societies are unchanging, traditional, and ancient
These fatal blinders make it difficult for us to perceive innovation in pre-Enlightenment societies but also why enacting change following the philosophies and ideals of the Enlightenment is much more difficult and commonly result in failure.
Flawed Writing History
Graeber and Wengrow confess the limitations of anthropology itself in its ahistorical approach to comparison and documentation of the human condition. This is when well-meaning attempts to salvage the record of societies on the verge of transformation through colonial contact were ultimately placing these societies in a timelessness bubble. Ultimately, the reader understand these societies as unchanging or change attributed not by self-conscious choice but through a god. This means that (cumulative) innovations in agriculture, cooking, or mathematics will be overlooked or attributed to them.
Social science has been largely a study of the ways in which human beings are not free: the way that our actions and understandings might be said to be determined by forces outside our control. Any account which appears to show human beings collectively shaping their own destiny, or even expressing freedom for its own sake, will likely be written off as illusory, awaiting ‘real’ scientific explanation; or if none is forthcoming (why do people dance?), as outside the scope of social theory entirely.
Play as Experimental Modes of Change
This brings us to significant changes in these societies ignored or downplayed as a result of our (limited) social scientific methods and approaches. One of which is the importance of play in measuring changes. Graeber and Wengrow argue that people experiment on new forms and possibilities by way of play, games, and ritual.
Play farming is an important component in the Neolithic way of living whereby people discover and experiment on tasty grains and even tastier ways of cooking them.
The first kings must have been dead kings. A quote from A.M. Hocart originally proposed that the concept of monarchy (and the authors also argue that other institutional forms of government) were derived from mortuary ritual practice. If in life individuals were undifferentiated, it is in death that elaborate and grand funerary rites and grave goods were awarded to such individuals. It would be easy to transform such an idea to every day life.
Play technology. The level of technology in everyday life is not necessarily an accurate measure of change or innovation. For instance, the authors cite that wheeled transport appears in Mesoamerican toys but were not in use in reality. The concept exists but choices prevent it from being put to use.
The making of history then involves accounting for not just abrupt revolutionary ideas but also of collective decision-making in which people choose to implement concepts or retain them only in the experimental ritual space.
I think that their argument puts ritual practice, not just a religious or belief domain, but one in which people live out experimental forms of imagined life for extended periods of time. (Think visiting specific winter or summer spots and living different lives therein).
Imagination = Social Freedoms
Imagination = Social Freedoms
From the several chapters that we have seen, the space to imagine is critical to maintaining the social freedoms that we have seen as the default of the human condition:
Freedom to move (and remove themselves from any unwanted situation)
Freedom to ignore or disobey another person (freedom from domination)
Freedom to move between different social arrangements and realities (part-time hunting, foraging or planting or visiting certain sites and moving on)
Ritual plays an important role in ensuring that the third form of freedom allow people to conceptualise, enact, and retract when it did not work.
The key question is when did we lose it?
One of the clearest answers that the authors laid out is the development of culture areas or identities among specific communities. This is the emergence of different ways of governance and living as we have seen among the salmon fishers vs. the nut harvesters in the West Coast First Nations. A case of us vs. them. With culture areas, we begin to see specific forms of governance. It could be the exercise of any one of three characteristics — sovereignty, bureaucracy, or competitive politics, — alongside the exercise of violence.
What is unclear is the role of violence to the loss of imagination. Graeber and Wengrow focus on violence and winds down zig-zag rounds for their point.
Violence, as I read it here, is an outcome of culture areas and is always a potential in much of human history but not as frequent as we might have assumed in the Paleolithic or Neolithic periods. Violence can be taken as an extreme form of experimentation that can eliminate unwanted value systems or capture resources to build on a competing one. What is clear to me is the cyclical nature of destruction, rebuilding, and abandonment to human groups. Perhaps we can include violence as a costly way of imagining a different form of organisation.
Violence may be a key ingredient to cement first-order or second-order forms of governance. That is, mixing up one or two combinations between sovereignty, bureaucracy, and competitive politics to manage cities and populations at scale. However, from what we have seen, centralised bureaucracy or rule is NOT the default form of governance.
Finally, towards the end, Graeber and Wengrow theorise that violence intertwined with care and charity, locks individuals into fixed relations with little room for flexibility. The most common examples they cite are the situation of war captives and slaves who may be incorporated (or executed if refused) into rival clans (First Nations) or in early kingship courts. Thereby, kinship was built at the threat of violence and death. This was further cemented with ideas enshrined in Roman property law that form the bedrock of our legal policies. The legacy of the law places the authority of male-led households with all property under them, including people.
While their thesis on violence and care remains undeveloped at this point, it is a good to end it with the author’s words
…care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another.
Round-Up
Graeber and Wengrow wrote an ambitious book to explore human choices about community and governance throughout human history. What they found is that people experimented with different forms that is difficult to categorise. The consensus across the ages: people preferred to live outside of control over another for extended periods of time. When overt control did happen, communities were destroyed, abandoned, or rebuilt.
However, in the margins of relatively egalitarian communities, lie the threat of violence and warrior values that would eventually supplant egalitarian forms of organisation and resistance.
This does not mean our social imagination should end.
Coming Up
I’ll start with Debt, the First 5,000 Years the next week. I hope to challenge my assumptions about economics and money. (If not, I can always change my mind). Grab your updated and 2014 second edition copy.