The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always, at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way to live.

The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production took something in the order of 3,000 years.

much of this egalitarianism relates to an increase in the economic and social visibility of women, reflected in their art and ritual.

Settlements inhabited by tens of thousands of people make their first appearance in human history around 6000 years ago, on almost every continent, at first in isolation.

Still, what evidence does exist is robust enough, not just to upend the conventional narrative but to open our eyes to possibilities we would otherwise never have considered.

Crested eagles curl in on themselves, vanishing into a maze of ornament; human faces grow snake-like fangs, or contort into a feline grimace.

three elementary principles of domination – control of violence (or sovereignty), control of knowledge, and charismatic politics

When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship.

(sovereignty, administration and heroic politics),

Perhaps this is simply how sovereignty manifests itself, in bureaucratic form. By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity – but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves.

It’s the addition of sovereign power, and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it’ that allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.

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.

We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises. The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, much as physically running away from a difficult situation is the most basic element of the first. In fact, the earliest word for ‘freedom’ recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means ‘return to mother’ – because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom, cancelling all non-commercial debts and in some cases allowing those held as debt peons in their creditors’ households to return home to their kin.132

As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence.

If ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.

What until now has passed for ‘civilization’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.

As we’ve said before, there are certain freedoms – to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties –

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.

In other words, not only did indigenous North Americans manage almost entirely to sidestep the evolutionary trap that we assume must always lead, eventually, from agriculture to the rise of some all-powerful state or empire; but in doing so they developed political sensibilities that were ultimately to have a deep influence on Enlightenment thinkers and, through them, are still with us today.

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?

War did not become a constant of human life after the adoption of farming;

In each case there was a close connection between the patriarchal household and military might.

Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love. Wendat torture, in the same period of history, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to make clear that no form of physical chastisement should ever be countenanced inside a community or household. Violence and care, in the Wendat case, were to be entirely separated.