Slow Read Book Club: Chapter 2, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Chipping away at this dense work...

How to Read Chapter Two

Personally, I would advise you to come back to this after you read the first half of this long chapter. The revelations here were shocking and I do not want to spoil the pleasure of discovery. It was what made me commit to continuing on to the book and following the trajectory of their argument.

A warning, David Graeber talks about other things such as the origin of the Left in Rousseau and other issues that may muddle the reader away from the its core argument: that we have always been modern!

Recap of Chapter One

At the central core of their argument, David Graeber and David Wengrow put forward the argument that pre-history and pre-historic humanity should be understood as complex. The conventional linear view of human development is false. They attribute the simple to the complex thesis as a holdover from Rousseauian writing and consequently, dominating European thinking. Graeber and Wengrow dissected Rousseau’s points and argued for the indigenous critique as the source of ideas about the modern ideals of individual freedom and social fairness. Chapter Two continues with this radical idea.

Chapter Two

The section on the indigenous critique is our book club’s favourite! We were all quite rightly pleasantly shocked about this new reinterpretation of what it is to be modern. So much so, that Graeber and Wengrow argue that

indigeous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century ones.

The source of their analysis stems from an obscure French traveler account¹ in 1735 by Baron de Lahontan, The Dialogues with a Savage. This is written as a discourse between Lahontan, a former French colonial administrator occupying the Iroquois and Wendat (Huron) territories in what was then French New Canada, and an Iroquois-speaking chief negotiator of the Wendat, named Kandiaronk (Adario in the text).

In the hands of anthropological radicals, Graeber and Wengrow re-read this conversation as a re-reading of our ancestors and our past. If we assume the complexity towards more complexity flow of human history, then the figure of Kandiaronk is not surprisingly an intelligent interlocutor who was able to travel to France and return to Huron with new ideas and observations. This enabled Kandiaronk to provide the societal and political critique against Western so-called ideals particularly the nature of (in)equality and individual freedom. This is a point that Graeber and Wengrow emphasise about the adventure spirit and curiousity of the indigenous people upon contact.

The discourse revolved around:

• sexual freedom - the religious and social mores of abstinence until marriage does not prevent the foreign soldiers from capturing First Nations women for sex or trading money for sex on a daily basis

• the nature of power - Kandiaronk questioned the nature of power because among First Nations, wealth itself cannot convert to power over another; no one can compel another person to follow another. This is in contrast to French society in which a slavery system or slavish conditions occur due to the acquisition of material objects, sometimes forcibly. (The only way to influence within First Nations groups is via consensus building by way of interlocution and discourse.)

• the impact of penal law (a society that assumes people are evil and punishment forces them to do good, p.54 or what is termed ‘wicked punishment’) - Kandiaronk observed that much of French legal and judiciary failings are due to a flawed system based on ‘money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest’ that incentivise people to do bad and thereby enact punitive punishment to force them to be good

• lack of mutual aid and individual freedom- Kandiaronk in his trip to Paris presumably saw the proliferation of begging and destitution, something that would rarely happen in their society as villagers would support everyone in need; rather, in Huron society, mutual aid allowed individual members to remain autonomous because everyone assumed everyone will be supported

Our book club was in awe of this historical re-reading. We now have a new now known hero. Definitely earth-shattering even if we assume that Lahontan embellished the account, these historical/literary arguments in the genre require exposure of these authors to another way of thinking and living. More directly, Graeber and Wengrow argue that the basis of French Republican ideas (and the Enlightenment movement and other democratic ideals), the French liberté, égalité, fraternité motto, may have stemmed from the indigenous critique during that period!

This radical reinterpretation is an example of decolonising the archive. Here, they use the results that emphasise advancement and complexity unacknowledged among present forager groups but especially those in our human past. It is rare to find this type of genre or dialogue reconstruction in other colonised regions.² Can you think of one in your own culture group?

Key Takeaways

1. The exchange between Kandiaronk and Lahontan questions what freedom and equality mean for us. Our modern ideas on individual freedom and equality are linked to private property whereas their indigenous counterparts situate freedom and equality as being free from the mental and social toil of property ownership and the unequal relations brought by this. Of course, this does not mean that First Nations did not have wealth or inequality as we will see in the next chapter.

2. Kandiaronk represents a flashpoint of what is possible when we assume the complexity to further complexity framework. The result is a rethinking of what may be modern values and ideals to us now has really been old news for a long time and did not come from Europe. ‘This canvas of human prehistory is distinctly modern.’

Bonus:

Graeber’s indigenous critique is elaborated in the Madagascar and Caribbean regions in his last book, The Pirate Enlightenment. A pirate island may be better at tracing the origins of our democratic values and institutions. (Also we like the Alan Rickman memoirs with some of his sketches and journal pages)!

1. A humanities scholar interprets this as a type of genre writing that treats the First Nation figure as fictionalised to criticise the Jesuits rather than French society in particular. If, let’s say, Kandiaronk is not the real figure of Adario, his beliefs, and observations would not have been entirely from Lahontan himself. Given his exposure to different colonial administrators and First Nation negotiators, Kandiaronk’s arguments here remain plausible. For a contrarian perspective, read David Bell’s piece on their flaws. It must be clear to the reader that Graeber and Wengrow are from a leftist orientation with a concern for the contemporary application of the past. However, the indigenous critique plays a role in showing our flawed view of our ancestral past.

2. If the Philippines had even one account such as this in Spanish archives or literature, it would be valuable to create an alternative narrative of the nation’s history. It is perhaps noteworthy that the Americans might have created a Philippine national hero because of Jose Rizal’s literary record and accounts about his colonial experience, albeit fictionalised. His primary work Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not), originally written in Spanish, has been translated as The Social Cancer in English. It talks about an educated elite’s view of the abuses of the friar and the discomfort of social reformation. ‘To My Fatherland: Recorded in the history of human sufferings is a cancer of so malignant a character that the least touch irritates it and awakens in it the sharpest pains.’ Other pantheons of Philippine revolutionaries were also writers, musicians, and poets.