More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Greeks called the καιρóς (Kairos) – the right time – for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.’
Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, which he wrote in 1754. Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands.
the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’ – which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats
Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, is in many ways the founding text of modern political theory. It held that, humans being the selfish creatures they are, life in an original State of Nature was in no sense innocent; it must instead have been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – basically, a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else.
human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments,
nowadays it’s mostly deployed to convince us that while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering.
‘When it came to violence in pre-state peoples,’ writes the psychologist Steven Pinker, ‘Hobbes and Rousseau were talking through their hats: neither knew a thing about life before civilization.’
If we did want to reach a general conclusion about what form human societies originally took, based on statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials, we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker): in
it might be claimed, our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short.
The French had more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.
That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case. What they differed on was whether or not individual liberty was desirable.
Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’ observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perhaps even unknowable Other.
Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives,
In fact, their attitude towards indigenous ideals of liberty is the exact opposite of the attitude most French people or Canadians tend to hold today: that, in principle, freedom is an altogether admirable ideal. Father Lallemant, though, was willing to admit that in practice such a system worked quite well; it created ‘much less disorder than there is in France’
Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans.
why do so many tens of thousands of years stand between the biological origins of humanity and the widespread appearance of typically human forms
What were we actually doing in the interim? Many researchers have puzzled over this and have even coined a phrase for it: ‘the sapient paradox’.
mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of ‘neolithic science’ as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles.
overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labour seems well established.
The case of the British Neolithic – with its alternating phases of dispersal and monumental construction –
Inuit lived the way they did because they felt that’s how humans ought to live.
people actually adopted different names in summer and winter – literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.
Plains nations were one-time farmers who had largely abandoned cereal agriculture, after re-domesticating escaped Spanish horses and adopting a largely nomadic mode of life.
band/state amalgam.
Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen as evolving from the ‘band’ level to the ‘state’ level roughly every November, and then devolving back again come spring. Obviously, this is silly. No one would seriously suggest such a thing. Still, it’s worth pointing out because it exposes the much deeper silliness of the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with.
human beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again,
searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question.
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 come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition?
Were our earliest ancestors simple and egalitarian, or complex and stratified? Is human nature innocent or corrupt? Are we, as a species, inherently co-operative or competitive, kind or selfish, good or evil? Perhaps all these questions blind us to what really makes us human in the first place, which is our capacity – as moral and social beings – to negotiate between such alternatives.
As we’ve already observed, it makes no sense to ask any such questions of a fish or a hedgehog. Animals already exist in a state ‘beyond good and
increases in the sheer number of human beings seem to have pulled in the opposite direction, ensuring that, for much of human history, ever-diminishing proportions of people actually travelled – at least, over long distances or very far from home.
Roughly 6,000 years stand between the appearance of the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of what we are used to calling
the first states; and in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything remotely like those states.
The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have
been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today.
Sahlins’s essay, perhaps the last truly great example of that genre of ‘speculative prehistory’
we pointed out above, the average oppressed medieval serf still worked less than a modern nine-to-five office or factory worker, and the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who dragged great slabs to build Stonehenge almost certainly worked, on average, less than that.
impossible to know precisely which forms of property or ownership existed at places like Göbekli Tepe, Poverty Point, Sannai Maruyama or Stonehenge,
world as it existed just before the dawn of agriculture was anything but a world of roving hunter-gatherer bands.
after the end of the last Ice Age, the archaeological record is increasingly characterized by ‘culture areas’: that is, localized populations with their own characteristic styles of clothing, cooking and architecture; and no doubt also their own stories about the origin of the universe, rules for the marriage of cousins, and so forth.
trace virtually all Eurasian languages to a single hypothetical ancestor called ‘Nostratic’.
good schismogenetic fashion, as a kind of mirror image; a conscious inversion of those on the Northwest Coast.
make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing.
idealize hunter-gatherer bands, earlier generations of poets, anarchists and bohemians had tended to idealize the Neolithic as an imaginary, beneficent theocracy ruled over by priestesses of the Great Goddess, the all-powerful distant ancestor of Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte and Demeter herself – that is, until such societies were overwhelmed by violent, patriarchal Indo-European-speaking horse-men descending from the steppes,
Early cultivators, it seems, were doing the minimum amount of subsistence work needed to stay in their given locations, which they occupied for reasons other than farming: hunting, foraging, fishing, trading and more.
Eurasia, peat bogs and waterlogged sites preserve glimpses of a wood-carving tradition that
They hovered at the threshold of agriculture while remaining wedded to the cultural values of hunting and foraging.
mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did.
consensus process, with a fallback on majority vote);
