The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from forager egalitarianism. It

Such neat geographical alignments between early centres of crop domestication and the rise of centralized states invited speculation that the former led to the latter: that food production was responsible for the emergence of cities, writing, and centralized political organization, providing a surplus of calories to support large populations and elite classes of administrators, warriors and politicians. Invent agriculture – or so the story once went –

there’s every reason to believe that farming ‘reached’ California just as soon as it reached anywhere else in North America. It’s just that (despite a work ethic that valorized strenuous labour, and a regional exchange system that would have allowed information about innovations to spread rapidly) people there rejected the practice as definitively as they did slavery.

this has less to do with the nature of seed cultivation itself than with imperial and commercial expansion: seeds can spread very quickly if those carrying them have an army and are driven by the need endlessly to expand their enterprises to maintain profits. The Neolithic situation was altogether different.

Of course, there were always paths of least resistance, topographical features and climatic regimes conducive or less conducive to the Neolithic economy.

How far can geography go in explaining history, rather than simply informing it?

the story of agricultural expansion before the sixteenth century is very far from being a one-way street; in fact, it is full of false starts, hiccups and reversals. This becomes truer the further back we go in time.

why is our discussion of these issues confined only to the last 10,000 or so years of human history? Given that humans have been around for upwards of 200,000 years, why didn’t farming develop much earlier?

the fate of early farming societies often hinged less on ‘ecological imperialism’ than on what we might call – to adapt a phrase from the pioneer of social ecology, Murray Bookchin – an ‘ecology of freedom’.17 By this we mean something quite specific. If peasants are people ‘existentially involved in cultivation’,18 then the ecology of freedom (‘play farming’, in short) is precisely the opposite condition. The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers;

Moving freely in and out of farming in this way, or hovering on its threshold, turns out to be something our species has done successfully for a large part of its past.

We learn a great deal about these Holocene hunter-foragers from their funerary customs.

they were moving into areas with little or no prior occupation. Whether that reflects a conscious policy of avoiding local foragers is unclear.

It seems that women of inland origin (who until then had been eating largely meat, not fish) were joining coastal groups.

it would be simplistic to attribute the initial failure of Neolithic farming in Europe to such factors alone.

Voyaging eastwards, Lapita peoples left a trail of distinctive pottery, their most consistent signal in the archaeological record.

On first inspection, these three variations on ‘the Neolithic’ – European, African, Oceanic – might seem to have almost nothing in common. However, all share two important features. First, each involved a serious commitment to farming.

All of them had become ‘serious’ farmers.

Second, all three cases involved a targeted spread of farming to lands largely uninhabited by existing populations.

But not all early farming expansions were of this ‘serious’ variety.

In Greater Amazonia, such seasonal moves in and out of farming are documented among a wide range of indigenous societies and are of considerable antiquity.37 So is the habit of keeping pets.

We are dealing here with people who possess all the requisite ecological skills to raise crops and livestock, but who nevertheless pull back from the threshold, maintaining a careful balancing act between forager (or better, perhaps, forester) and farmer.

Until quite recently, Amazonia was regarded as a timeless refuge of solitary tribes, about as close to Rousseau or Hobbes’s State of Nature as one could possibly get. As we’ve seen, such romantic notions persisted in anthropology well into the 1980s, through studies that cast groups like the Yanomami in the role of ‘contemporary ancestors’, windows on to our evolutionary past. Research in the fields of archaeology and ethnohistory is now overturning this picture.

In fact, farming of this particular sort (‘low-level food production’ is the more technical term) has characterized a very wide range of Holocene societies, including the earliest cultivators of the Fertile Crescent and Mesoamerica.

So while it’s tempting to hold Amazonia up as a ‘New World’ alternative to the ‘Old World Neolithic’, the truth is that Holocene developments in both hemispheres are starting to look increasingly similar, at least in terms of the overall pace of change.

Neolithic farming was an experiment that could fail – and, on occasion, did.

Farming, as we can now see, often started out as an economy of deprivation: you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done, which is why it tended to happen first in areas where wild resources were thinnest on the ground.

Since the first farmers made more rubbish, and often built houses of baked mud, they are also more visible to archaeologists.

Seasonally erected monuments like those of Göbekli Tepe or Lake Shigirskoe are as clear a signal as one could wish for that big things were afoot among Holocene hunter-fisher-gatherers.

Most likely, the largest communities were concentrated around lakes, rivers and coastlands, and especially at their junctures: delta environments – such as those of southern Mesopotamia, the lower reaches of the Nile and the Indus – where many of the world’s first cities arose,

Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.

If you put enough people in one place, the evidence seemed to show, they would almost inevitably develop writing or something like it, together with administrators, storage and redistribution facilities, workshops and overseers. Before long, they would also start dividing themselves into social classes. ‘Civilization’ came as a package. It meant misery and suffering for some (since some would inevitably be reduced to serfs, slaves or debt peons), but also allowed for the possibility of philosophy, art and the accumulation of scientific knowledge. The evidence no longer suggests anything of the sort.

It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did.

There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much.

And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else.

It would seem, then, that kinship in such cases is really a kind of metaphor for social attachments, in much the same way we’d say ‘all men are brothers’ when trying to express internationalism

modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents. This might seem odd, but from the perspective of cognitive science it makes perfect sense. It’s precisely this capacity to shift between scales that most obviously separates human social cognition from that of other primates.

In this, at least, modern foragers are no different from modern city dwellers or ancient hunter-gatherers. We all have the capacity to feel bound to people we will probably never meet; to take part in a macro-society which exists most of the time as ‘virtual reality’,

Foragers may sometimes exist in small groups, but they do not – and probably have not ever – lived in small-scale societies.7 None of which is to say that scale – in the sense of absolute population size – makes no difference at all. What it means is that these things do not necessarily matter in the seemingly common-sense sort of way we tend to assume. On this particular point, at least, Canetti had it right. Mass society exists in the mind before it becomes physical reality. And crucially, it also exists in the mind after it becomes physical reality. At this point we can return to cities.

Cities are tangible things.

Yet

cities have a life that transcends all this. This is not because of the permanence of stone or brick or adobe; neither is it because most people in a city actually meet one another. It is because they will often think and act as people who belong to the city

urbanites live in small social worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate.8

It was a structure raised primarily in the human imagination, which allowed for the possibility of amicable relations with people they had never met.

In Chapter Four we suggested that for much of human history, the geographical range in which most human beings were operating was actually shrinking. Palaeolithic ‘culture areas’ spanned continents. Mesolithic and Neolithic culture zones still covered much wider areas than the home territory of most contemporary ethno-linguistic groups (what anthropologists refer to as ‘cultures’). Cities were part of that process of contraction,

Living in unbounded, eternal, largely imaginary groups is effectively what humans had been doing all along.

It’s not just that some early cities lack class divisions, wealth monopolies, or hierarchies of administration. They exhibit such extreme variability as to imply, from the very beginning, a conscious experimentation in urban form.

surprisingly few of these early cities contain signs of authoritarian rule.

Certainly, that situation became increasingly typical in later ages, but in the first cities small-scale gardening and animal-keeping were often at least as important; so too were the resources of rivers and seas, and for that matter the continued hunting and collecting of wild seasonal foods in forests or in marshes. The particular mix depended largely on where in the world the cities happened to be,

Did the sort of temporary, seasonal aggregation sites we discussed in earlier chapters gradually become permanent, year-round settlements? That would be a gratifyingly simple story. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be what happened. The reality is more complex and, as usual, a good deal more interesting.

Almost everywhere, in these early cities, we find grand, self-conscious statements of civic unity, the arrangement of built spaces in harmonious and often beautiful patterns, clearly reflecting some kind of planning at the municipal scale.