The Dawn of Everything – A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber & David Wengrow.
A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization. [cf: Unwin]
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Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
P3
Human society, in this view, is founded on the collective repression of our baser instincts, which becomes all the more necessary when humans are living in large numbers in the same place.
P8
A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization. [cf: Unwin]
…
Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom?
P16
Chagnon’s central argument was that adult Yanomami men achieve both cultural and reproductive advantages by killing other adult men; and that this feedback between violence and biological fitness — if generally representative of the early human condition – might have had evolutionary consequences for our species as a whole.20
P20
Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.31
P39
[~1628 Brother Gabriel] Sagard was at first highly critical of Wendat life, which he described as inherently sinful (he was obsessed with the idea that Wendat women were all intent on seducing him),
P43
Add to this that the laws of the Country, which to them seem most just, attack the purity of the Christian life in a thousand ways, especially as regards their marriages. 22
The Jesuit Relations are full of this sort of thing: scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will.
P46
Still, persuasiveness need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to which one privileges any of these has everything to do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumed dispositions of their audience.
P81
It seems reasonable to assume that behaviours like mating and child-rearing practices, the presence or absence of dominance hierarchies or forms of language and proto-language must have varied at least as much as physical types, and probably far more.
P82
…feminist theories that see distinctly human sociability as originating in collective child-rearing practices – can indeed tell us something important about the paths that converged in modern
humanity.8
P85
As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or innately egalitarian.
P86
…Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning (and in the case of inveterate sociopaths, sometimes even outright assassination)19 —none of which have any parallel among other primates.
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if the very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part of our history? In the end, confusingly, Boehm assumes that all human beings until very recently chose instead to follow exactly the same arrangements…
P93
The sociopolitical world of the foragers is another area about which we know next to nothing … scholars cannot even agree on the basics, such as the existence of private property, nuclear families and monogamous relationships. It’s likely that different bands had different structures. Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos.
P94
Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem.
P97
It’s often people who are just slightly odd who become leaders; the truly odd can become spiritual figures, but, even more, they can and often do serve as a kind of reserve of potential talent and insight that can be called on in the event of a crisis or unprecedented turn of affairs.
P100
How should we think about these chiefs? They were not patriarchs, Lévi-Strauss concluded; neither were they petty tyrants (even though for certain limited periods they were allowed to act as such); and there was no sense in which they were invested with mystical powers.
P107
Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea.44
P115
If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did ‘we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?
P139
As St Augustine put it, we rebelled against God, and God’s judgment was to cause our own desires to rebel against our rational good sense; our punishment for original sin is the infinity of our new desires.23
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It’s not that Sahlins is suggesting that his own phrase ‘original affluent society’ is incorrect. Rather, he acknowledges that, just as there might have been many ways for free peoples to be free, there might have been more than just one way for (original) affluent societies to be affluent.
P215
Or consider one of Sigmund Freud’s two favourite students: Otto Gross, an anarchist who in the years before the First World War developed a theory that the superego was in fact patriarchy and needed to be destroyed so as to unleash the benevolent, matriarchal collective unconscious, which he saw as the hidden but still-living residue of the Neolithic. (This he set out to accomplish largely through the use of drugs and polyamorous sexual relationships; Gross’s work is now largely remembered for its influence on Freud’s other favourite student, Carl Jung, who kept the idea of the collective unconscious but rejected Gross’s political conclusions.)
P245
…it is equally possible, and perhaps more plausible, to see what happened as the result of mutual and self-conscious differentiation, or schismogenesis, akin to what we traced in the last chapter among the recent foraging societies of America’s West Coast. The more that uplanders came to organize their artistic and ceremonial lives around the theme of predatory male violence, the more lowlanders tended to organize theirs around female knowledge and symbolism ~ and vice versa.
P304
At 3300 BC, Uruk was a city of around 200 hectares, dwarfing her neighbours on the southern Mesopotamian floodplain. Estimates of Uruk’s population at this time range widely, between 20,000 and 50,000… Cuneiform script may well have been invented at Uruk…
P311
We are witnessing the first known emergence of what Hector Munro Chadwick famously called ‘heroic societies’ and, moreover, these societies all seem to have emerged just where his analysis tells us to expect them: on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities.
P365
We would like to suggest that these three principles — call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma — are also the three possible bases of social power.
P374
As with the Aztecs, consolidation of the Inca’s empire seems to have involved a great deal of sexual violence, and resulting changes in gender roles. In this case, what began as a customary system of marriage became a template for class domination.
P376
As the Zapatistas also show, it was in these territories, where no major state or empire had existed for centuries, that women came most prominently to the fore in anti-colonial struggles, both as organizers of armed resistance and as defenders of indigenous tradition.
P402
When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a ‘patrimonial system’…
P404
…the Shilluk, show how relatively mobile societies that place great value on individual freedom might, nonetheless, prefer an arbitrary despot – who could eventually be got rid of – to any more systematic or pervasive form of rule. This is especially true if, like so many peoples whose ancestors organized their lives around livestock, they tend toward patriarchal forms of organization.84
P405
…what exactly do they [ie: the dead] eat? For whatever reasons, the answer that gained traction across the Nile valley around 3500 BC was that ancestors do indeed get hungry, and what they required was something which, at that time, can only have been considered a rather exotic and perhaps luxurious form of food: leavened bread and fermented wheat beer, the pot-containers for which now start to become standard fixtures of well-appointed grave assemblages.
It is no coincidence that arable wheat-farming – though long familiar in the valley and delta of the Nile – was only refined and intensified around this time, at least partly in response to the new demands of the dead.87
P406
In the case of Peru, we have the Spanish chroniclers to help us understand how an intoxicant could gradually become the lifeblood of an empire;
P413
In terms of the specific theory we’ve been developing here, where the three elementary forms of domination – control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power – can each crystallize into its own institutional form (sovereignty, administration and heroic politics), almost all these ‘early states’ could be more accurately described as ‘second-order’ regimes of domination.
P426
Over the course of this book we have had occasion to refer to the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.
P429
Could it be that, in the same way that play farming – our term for those loose and flexible methods of cultivation which leave people free to pursue any number of other seasonal activities – turned into more serious agriculture, play kingdoms began to take on more substance as well? The evidence from Egypt might be interpreted along these lines. But it’s also possible that both these processes, when they did happen, were ultimately driven by something else, such as the emergence of patriarchal relations and the decline of women’s power within the household.
P438
Pretty much all the available evidence from Minoan Crete suggests a system of female political rule — effectively a theocracy of some sort, governed by a college of priestesses. We might ask: why are contemporary researchers so resistant…?
P439
What these scenes celebrate, as he eloquently puts it, is quite the opposite of politics: it is the ‘ritually induced release from individuality, and an ecstasy of being that is overtly erotic and spiritual at the same time (ek-stasis, “standing beyond oneself”) – a cosmos that both nurtures and ignores the individual, that vibrates with inseparable sexual energies and spiritual epiphanies’.
P442
As a result, the same portrayers of world history who profess themselves believers in freedom, democracy and women’s rights continue to treat historical epochs of relative freedom, democracy and women’s rights as so many ‘dark ages’.
P445
such conscious rejection of bureaucratic values — another example of cultural schismogenesis — could also give rise to ‘heroic societies’, a hurly-burly of petty lords whose pre-eminence was founded on dramatic contests of war, feasting, boasting, duelling, games, gifts and sacrifice.
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Throughout much of history, grain states and barbarians remained ‘dark twins’, locked together in an unresolvable tension, since neither could break out of their ecological niches. When the states had the upper hand, slaves and mercenaries flowed in one direction; when the barbarians were dominant, tribute flowed to appease the most dangerous warlord; or alternatively…
P447
…it might be useful to summarize the older scheme’s basic sequence here:
[Band societies, Tribes, Chiefdoms, States]
P455
There were significant differences between Freudian psychoanalysis and Iroquoian practice, most dramatically in the collective nature of the therapy. ‘Dream-guessing’ was often carried out by groups, and realizing the desires of the dreamer, either literally..
P484
Together they set about winning over the people of each nation to agree on creating a formal structure for heading off disputes and creating peace. Hence the system of titles, nested councils, consensus-finding, condolence rituals and the prominent role of female elders in formulating policy.
P487
In other words, the image of the witch was at the centre of a complex of ideas that had everything to do with unconscious desire, including the unconscious desire to dominate, and the need both to realize it and to keep it under control.
P487
References to cannibalism in the Gayanashagowa epic are not pure fantasy: endemic warfare and the torture and ceremonial sacrifice of war prisoners are sporadically documented from AD 1050. Some contemporary Haudenosaunee scholars think the myth refers to an actual conflict between political ideologies within Iroquoian societies at the time; turning especially on the importance of women, and agriculture, against defenders of an older male-dominated order where prestige was entirely based in war and hunting. 77
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The Jesuits later reported how Iroquoian women were careful to space their births, setting optimal population to the fish and game capacities of the region, not its potential agricultural productivity. In this way the cultural emphasis on male hunting actually reinforced the power and autonomy of Iroquoian women, who maintained their own councils and officials and whose power in local affairs at least was clearly greater than that of their men.79
P494
As a result, the social sciences were conceived and organized around two core questions: (1) what had gone wrong with the project of Enlightenment, with the unity of scientific and moral progress, and with schemes for the improvement of human society? And: (2) why is it that well-meaning attempts to fix society’s problems so often end up making things even worse?
P495
those on the right are more likely to see themselves as defenders of Enlightenment values, and those on the left its most ardent critics. But over the course of the argument all parties have come to agree on one key point: that there was indeed something called ‘the Enlightenment’, that it marked a fundamental break in human history, and that the American and French Revolutions were in some sense the result of this rupture.
P497
People living in this mental world, he felt, saw their own actions as simply repeating the creative gestures of gods and ancestors in less powerful ways, or as invoking primordial powers through ritual. According to Eliade, historical events thus tended to merge into archetypes.
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And this ‘linear’ sense of time, Eliade insisted, was a relatively recent innovation in human thought, one with catastrophic social and psychological consequences. In his view, embracing the notion that events unfold in cumulative sequences, as opposed to recapitulating some deeper pattern, rendered us less able to weather the vicissitudes of war, injustice and misfortune, plunging us instead into an age of unprecedented anxiety and, ultimately, nihilism. The political implications of this position were, to say the least, unsettling.
P501
If we are trying to frame more interesting questions to ask of history, this might be one: is there a positive correlation between what is usually called ‘gender equality’ (which might better be termed, simply, ‘women’s freedom’) and the degree of innovation in a given society?
P504
One important factor would seem to be the gradual division of human societies into what are sometimes referred to as ‘culture areas’; that is, the process by which neighbouring groups began defining themselves against each other and, typically, exaggerating their differences. Identity came to be seen as a value in itself, setting in motion processes of cultural schismogenesis.
P507
Sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics are magnifications of elementary types of domination, grounded respectively in the use of violence, knowledge and charisma.
P508
found in most later kingdoms or empires, such as the Han, Aztec or Roman. In each case there was a close connection between the patriarchal household and military might. But why exactly should this be the case?
P511
All Wendat wars were, in fact, ‘mourning wars’, carried out to assuage the grief felt by close relatives of someone who had been killed. Typically, a war party would strike against traditional enemies, bringing back a few scalps and a small number of prisoners. Captive women and children would be adopted. The fate of men was largely up to the mourners, particularly the women, and appeared to outsiders at least to be entirely arbitrary.
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What seems to have really appalled them, however, was not so much the whipping, boiling, branding, cutting-up – even in some cases cooking and eating — of the enemy, so much as the fact that almost everyone in a Wendat village or town took part, even women and children.
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ordeals, and it was very much a communal affair.11 The violence seems all the more extraordinary once we recall how these same Wendat societies refused to spank children, directly punish thieves or murderers, or take any measure against their own members that smacked of arbitrary authority. In virtually all other areas of social life they were renowned for solving their problems through calm and reasoned debate.
P512
While Amerindian cannibal rituals showed the desire to take over the strength and courage of the alien so as to combat him better, the European ritual revealed the existence of a dissymmetry, an irrevocable imbalance of power.13
P513
Prisoner sacrifice was not merely about reinforcing the solidarity of the group but also proclaimed the internal sanctity of the family and the domestic realm as spaces of female governance where violence, politics and rule by command did not belong. Wendat households, in other words, were defined in exactly opposite terms to the Roman familia.
P514
It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps, confusion – between 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. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck, and why.
P519
Along the journey he suggested one possible answer to the question that had so puzzled Robert Lowie, and later Clastres: if stateless societies do regularly organize themselves in such a way that chiefs have no coercive power, then how did top-down forms of organization ever come into the world to begin with? You’ll recall how both Lowie and Clastres were driven to the same conclusion: that they must have been the product of religious revelation.
P521
[NB: Franz] Steiner may not have foregrounded the issue, but his observations are directly relevant to debates about the origins of patriarchy. Feminist anthropologists have long argued for a connection between external (largely male) violence and the transformation of women’s status in the home. In archaeological and historical terms, we are only just beginning to gather together enough material to begin understanding how that process actually worked.