The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.

it suggests that Pierre Clastres was quite right when he proposed that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so.

What’s really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality.

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.

If there is a riddle here it’s this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens – supposedly the wisest of apes – allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? Was this really a consequence of adopting agriculture?

So, as a first approximation, we can speak of an egalitarian society if (1) most people in a given society feel they really ought to be the same in some specific way, or ways, that are agreed to be particularly important; and (2) that ideal can be said to be largely achieved in practice.

Far from rushing blindly for their chains like Rousseau’s savages, Woodburn’s ‘immediate return hunter-gatherers’ understand precisely where the chains of captivity loom, and organize much of their lives to keep away from them. This might sound like the basis of something hopeful or optimistic. Actually, it’s anything but. What it suggests is, again, that any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers.

Few anthropologists are particularly happy with the term ‘egalitarian societies’, for reasons that should now be obvious; but it lingers on because no one has suggested a compelling alternative. The closest we’re aware of is the feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s suggestion that most members of what are called egalitarian societies seem less interested in equality per se than what she calls ‘autonomy’. What matters to Montagnais-Naskapi women, for instance, is not so much whether men and women are seen to be of equal status but whether women are, individually or collectively, able to live their lives and make their own decisions without male interference.

strangers). Mutual aid – what contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’ – was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.

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. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.15 If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court.

All this begins to make the anthropologists’ habit of lumping Yurok notables and Kwakiutl artists together as ‘affluent foragers’ or ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ seem rather silly: the equivalent of saying a Texas oil executive and a medieval Egyptian poet were both ‘complex agriculturalists’ because they ate a lot of wheat. But how do we explain the differences between these two culture areas? Do we start from the institutional structure (the rank system and importance of potlatch in the Northwest Coast, the role of money and private property in California), then try to understand how the prevailing ethos of each society emerges from it? Or did the ethos come first – a certain conception of the nature of humanity and its role in the cosmos – and did the institutional structures emerge from that? Or are both simply effects of a different technological adaptation to the environment? These are fundamental questions about the nature of society. Theorists have been batting them about for centuries, and probably will be for centuries to come. To put the matter more technically, we might ask what ultimately determines the shape a society takes: economic factors, organizational imperatives or cultural meanings and ideas? Following in the footsteps of Mauss, we might also suggest a fourth possibility. Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?

The most striking difference between the indigenous societies of California and the Northwest Coast is the absence, in California, of formal ranks and the institution of potlatch. The second really follows from the first. In California there were feasts and festivals, to be sure, but since there was no title system, these lacked almost all the distinctive features of potlatch: the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of cuisine, the use of ranked seating orders and serving equipment, obligatory eating of oily foods, competitive gifting, self-aggrandizing speeches, or any other public manifestations of rivalry between nobles fighting over titular privilege.

While slavery of any sort was a fairly unusual institution among indigenous peoples of the Americas, some of these distinctively Amerindian features were shared, at least in their broad outlines, across much of the continent, including the tropics, where the earliest Spanish sources document local forms of slavery back to the fifteenth century AD. The Brazilian anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero has coined a term for Amerindian societies that possessed these features. He calls them ‘capturing societies’

‘Capturing societies’ in the Americas considered slave-taking as a mode of subsistence in its own right, but not in the usual sense of producing calories. Raiders almost invariably insisted that slaves were captured for their life force or ‘vitality’ – vitality which was consumed by the conquering group.

Communal tenure, ‘open-field’ principles, periodic redistribution of plots and co-operative management of pasture are not particularly exceptional and were often practised for centuries in the same locations.

In short, there is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from forager egalitarianism. It may have happened that way sometimes, but this can no longer be treated as a default assumption.

Many earth scientists now consider the Holocene over and done. For at least the last two centuries we have been entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which for the first time in history human activities are the main drivers of global climate change.

Actually, almost all these ‘classic’ theoretical formulations of the last century started off from exactly this assumption: that any large and complex society necessarily required a state. The real bone of contention was, why? Was it for good practical reasons? Or was it because any such society would necessarily produce a material surplus, and if there was a material surplus – like, for instance, all that smoked fish on the Pacific Northwest Coast – then there would also, necessarily, be people who managed to grab hold of a disproportionate share? As we’ve already seen in Chapter Eight, these assumptions don’t hold up particularly well for the earliest cities. Early Uruk, for example, does not appear to have been a ‘state’ in any meaningful sense of the word; what’s more, when top-down rule does emerge in the region of ancient Mesopotamia, it’s not in the ‘complex’ metropolises of the lowland river valleys, but among the small, ‘heroic’ societies of the surrounding foothills, which were averse to the very principle of administration and, as a result, don’t seem to qualify as ‘states’ either. If there is a good ethnographic parallel for these latter groups it might be the societies of the Northwest Coast, since there too political leadership lay in the hands of a boastful and vainglorious warrior aristocracy, competing in extravagant contests over titles, treasures, the allegiance of commoners and the ownership of slaves. Recall, here, that Haida, Tlingit and the rest not ...

So what kind of societies were these? One thing we can definitely say is that they were artistically brilliant.

games. Around AD 600, someone living at Cahokia or close by seems to have come up with the idea for chunkey, later to become one of the most popular sports in North America.

Arguing about whether Hopewellians were ‘bands’, ‘tribes’ or ‘chiefdoms’, or indeed whether Cahokia was a ‘complex chiefdom’ or a ‘state’, tells us virtually nothing.

The exact time and circumstance of the League of Five Nations’ creation is unclear; dates have been proposed ranging from AD 1142 to sometime around 1650.75