Slow Read Book Club: Chapters 3/4, The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
What does it take to be free? Private property?
Dear Reader,
I find this chapter one of the more difficult sections to tease out and write about. I had grappled for days. The authors were linking ideas of the past, recent past, and present with ideas of freedom, equality, private property, agriculture, and hunting/gathering. Yes, the goal of the chapter is a monster! If I manage to make it clear by the end, I would have succeeded, dear reader.
Yours, Melanie
How I integrated chapters 3 and 4
In chapter three, I only focused on the direct implications of the archaeological evidence on human culture and behaviour. That was long enough. I am carrying over some of the threads of their argument in this chapter. Here, I am focusing on the implications of what these Late Pleistocene and Holocene finds say about ancient political cultures and what it means for us today.
Again, I would like to flag the method of comparison that Graeber and Wengrow are doing in both chapters. They shift between our Late Pleistocene and Holocene ancestors with contemporary documented indigenous societies.
The Nuer (Sudan) and Inuit (First Nations) should never have been seen as ‘windows on to our ancestral past.’ They are creations of the modern age just the same as we are - but they do show us possibilities we never would have thought of and prove that people are actually capable of enacting such possibilities.
The recent past of indigenous societies documented at the time of colonial contact or the 17th-20th centuries offers us a momentary record of adaptive behavioural options prior to extermination, Christian conversion, and forcible inclusion into an extractive economic system. The data is a point in time that is a partial view into adaptive behaviours that may be similar to the past. It should be how we need to approach its comparative use here.
Different political animals
Graeber and Wengrow use the astonishing finds of the Holocene to show that humans made choices to act a certain way.1 For instance, seasonal gathering and dispersal over long periods and distances. Or the construction of monuments and elaborate burial without evidence of a state or intensive cereal cultivation. The evidence points to the politically conscious indigenous and ancient actor, not unlike ourselves.2 They argued that our ancestors refused to dedicate cultivation despite their knowledge of it (in England) or be subservient to another’s power full time by opting to disperse instead.
The discussion on equality and freedom as our contemporary core values and the exercise of power to enforce it is what interested Graeber and Wengrow to investigate its development. They wanted to look into the past to find out how people designed a social environment in which people could ‘never exercise real political power’ over another. Concordantly, why did we get stuck in a system of subservience as permanent fixtures today?
Equality: How did we start controlling other people?
Graeber and Wengrow define ‘egalitarian societies’ as groups that share paramount values that are distributed equally to their members. What makes up the key values here become contentious. For European philosophers, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, shared values included possession of property holdings and specific property use. It is no wonder then that our human timeline has been defined as progressing into agriculture (enclosure of land) from hunting/ foraging (commons). Implicitly, these values express the significance of equality and freedom and the power to implement it over people.
This European thought and expression of the right to property resulted in genocidal practices and the displacement of thousands of indigenous people because they did not have ‘natural rights to their land.’ Graeber and Wengrow cite John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government in 1690 to underscore human oppression - ‘property rights are necessarily derived from labour.’3 This means if you do not work on the land, you had no rights to it. Hunting and gathering on common lands do not qualify because these activities satisfied basic needs with the minimum effort.’ It is no surprise that ‘lazy natives’ were subject to ‘bureaucratic terror’ and forced to work - ‘everything from outright enslavement to punitive tax regimes, corvee labour (compulsory unpaid work), and debt peonage (debt slavery).
The European approach to freedom and equality relies on intensive cultivation, permanent land enclosure, and labour-intensive work. We can contrast this to supposed egalitarian systems in hunting and foraging cultures. One of the erroneous beliefs we have is that the ancient past and the contemporary indigenous societies were equal. They are not. It is important to understand that equality is not found in our ancient past or our contemporary indigenous groups. Distinction and differentiation has always been a marker of human groups. The better question would be: how is inequality exercised without coercion and without intensive cultivation?
During the Mesolithic period (12,000 BC), cultural differences started to become apparent in the archaeological record. One interesting tidbit that Graeber and Wengrow noticed was that groups were dispersing into much wider areas and territories rather than aggregating into larger and larger populations.
…the scale on which social relations operated doesn’t get bigger and bigger; it actually gets smaller and smaller
People were not aggregating into city-like settlements as is the commonly held belief. Cultural distinction requires dispersal. People that move with animal herds, those that settled by riverine and coastal areas, or those that eat grain gradually distinguish themselves from each other. These groups, some with common toolkits and other with distinct pottery can be found in the Americas, Eastern Europe, all the way to Japan, and Northeast Asia.
During this period, even before farming in the Middle East, we are starting to see evidence of arrangements along the scale of collaboration to some form of coercion. To answer our question, how did we begin to control people, let’s look at the relationship of control with work in these monuments and settlements.
Across the globe, we see Late Paleolithic and Holocene groups moving, settling, and abandoning sites along coastal and riverine areas. These sites show us some form of differentiation in elaborate or selected burial practices. This leads us to confirm that we have always been unequal. Socially differentiated. However, social inequality and differential access to resources did not necessarily imply authority over another. Taken together with seasonality, control would be difficult over the long term.
Freedom: dispersal as political action
Asserting control over another person or group poses some problems.
Seasonal dispersal means that people did not have a staggering amount of material possessions to carry over long distances. There are limited wealth goods to accumulate or control.
Temporary settlements were locations that had ample food resources. There was no reason to control another’s capacity or monopolise a source within a group except against outsiders. (More on that in chapter five).
The difficulty of assessing who is in control (who is a leader and a follower) in most groups was a problem for outsiders. This non-distinction of power within groups led Graeber and Wengrow to cite the example of Nambikwara of Brazil. This group from the Amazon, visited and documented by Claude and Dina Levi-Strauss between 1932-1936 and 1938, is one contemporary example of diffused leadership structure.4
The Nambikwara, as Graeber and Wengrow state, are contemporary examples of people moving between different economic arrangements. They live on the fringes of the state but hire themselves out as labourers, and return to farming or foraging. The point they make is that this is nothing strange. The seasonality of behaviour demonstrates ‘self-conscious political actors’ choosing to participate or withdraw from other social or economic relations. What is strange is how we have come to be immovable.
Power: how did we get stuck?
From seasonal movements, the jump to private property is not too high. Graeber and Wengrow argue that ritual contexts are separation practices that differentiate people and things from the everyday. The notion of the sacred is a form of exclusion and setting apart of something and someone. It could simply be sacred to an individual or group and need not be always for supernatural reasons. For instance, selected burials practices for some but not for others.5 Social distinction and specific property ownership in itself are not automatically linked to the power to control others. This is what differentiates early and contemporary indigenous groups from European beliefs about property.
There is another leap required for this to happen. More on how cultural distinction led to conflict and power struggles in the next chapter.
Round-Up
Graeber and Wengrow wanted to find out why, from a wide range of options on equality and freedom in the ancient past, we have narrowed to only a single adaptive option today - having equality and freedom by exercising power and control over another in the path of acquisition, accumulation, and control of private property.
To answer these questions, they established foundational assumptions:
We have always been modern, that is, we are self-conscious political actors choosing decision pathways. Since the late Paleolithic periods, our choices have included seasonal mobility that diffuses central control.
Equality has never been present for human groups including ancient humans and contemporary indigenous groups. The way equality is expressed is what distinguishes most groups from the historical European approach to equality and natural rights via private property.
Social and cultural differentiation occurred as people dispersed across greater distances in small groups.
Inequality through social and cultural differentiation does not always result in control over others, the formation of the state, the building of larger concentrations of the population, or intensive grain cultivation. The Late Paleolithic and Holoence monument constructions show there was differentiation without centralised authority, state formation, or grain cultivation.
Permanent settlement rather than mobility was the anomaly.
In the next post, let’s dive deep into the complex ties between cultural differences, the origins of farming, and the nature of conflict and violence.
I am excluding the Early Paleolithic period because of the limited durable remains of settlement artefacts beyond the stone tools. However, if you watch Netflix’s Unknown Cave of Bones, there are enough contextual clues of Homo genus behaviour two million years ago that deserve a separate post. The Late Paleolithic age though has evidence of monuments and settlements and I have included here (Paleo Indian sites in the USA).
Historically, some colonial research looked into personality and psychology. These works demonstrate the agency and options that we have somehow forgotten. One of them was Paul Radin, who focused on investigating Winnebago Indian thought and published, Primitive Man as Philosopher in 1927. Graeber and Wengrow found that there is some leeway and tolerance for the weird and eccentric members of their society without forcing them to conform. Another reference the authors cited is Claude Levi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind. In the first chapter, Levi-Strauss likens magic thinking as closer to scientific thinking than we realise.
Scroll to Chapter V (Property) from the treatise, referring specifically to Sec. 31-32 which rejects hunting and foraging as working the land. Only intensive agriculture accrues property rights.
David Price (1981) struggled to figure out the leadership structure among the contemporary Nambikwara. A leader must also be a worker and people do not rely on hereditary ties. People simply stop listening and follow another more worthwhile leader.
Of course, people could have died elsewhere and this was a matter of timing. People would have also allocated a separate burial site elsewhere but nothing has been found within the surrounding areas or survived in these sites. However, it is clear from the evidence that not everyone was adorned with special ritual items indicating social differentiation.