The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

It was not so much that they feared poverty themselves, but rather that they found life infinitely more pleasant in a society where no one else was in a position of abject misery

the ease with which outsiders, taken in by ‘Indian’ families, might achieve acceptance and prominent positions in their adoptive communities, becoming members of chiefly households, or even chiefs themselves.

The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, Bronisław Malinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes how in the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Islands off Papua New Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in outrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most important ones has its own name, and history of former owners) – only to hold it briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from another island. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider, it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen.

1. Dreams or vision quests: among Iroquoian-speaking peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was considered extremely important literally to realize one’s dreams. Many European observers marvelled at how Indians would be willing to travel for days to bring back some object, trophy, crystal or even an animal like a dog that they had dreamed of acquiring. Anyone who dreamed about a neighbour or relative’s possession (a kettle, ornament, mask and so on) could normally demand it; as a result, such objects would often gradually travel some way from town to town. On the Great Plains, decisions to travel long distances in search of rare or exotic items could form part of vision quests.

Sixteenth-century scholars, such as the Spanish missionary José de Acosta, were more likely to conclude they were looking at the fallen vestiges of some ancient civilization, or refugees who had, in the course of their wanderings, forgotten the arts of metallurgy and civil governance.

A certain folk egalitarianism already existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during popular festivals like carnival, May Day or Christmas, when much of society revelled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down’, where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground or made a mockery of. Often the celebrations were framed as a return to some primordial ‘age of equality’ – the Age of Cronus, or Saturn, or the land of Cockaygne.

‘They consider themselves better than the French: “For,” they say, “you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.” They are saying these and like things continually.’

‘They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.’17

Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts’ eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall (or so the subtext seemed to be) not showing themselves to be particularly bright.

They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.

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, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’.

Wealthy Wendat men hoarded such precious things largely to be able to give them away on dramatic occasions like these. Neither in the case of land and agricultural products, nor that of wampum and similar valuables, was there any way to transform access to material resources into power – at least, not the kind of power that might allow one to make others work for you, or compel them to do anything they did not wish to do.

Father Le Jeune, Superior of the Jesuits in Canada in the 1630s: ‘There are almost none of them incapable of conversing or reasoning very well, and in good terms, on matters within their knowledge. The councils, held almost every day in the Villages, and on almost all matters, improve their capacity for talking.’

the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:

And yes, for the first thirty years after the banishing of self-interest, no doubt you would indeed see a certain desolation as those who are only qualified to eat, drink, sleep and take pleasure would languish and die. But their progeny would be fit for our way of living.

Zilia wondering why the French king, despite levying all sorts of heavy taxes, cannot simply redistribute the wealth in the same manner as the Sapa Inca.

there was a strong emphasis in ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one’s direct control).

We find it difficult to picture what a truly free society would be like; perhaps they have no similar trouble picturing what arbitrary power and domination would be like. Perhaps they can not only imagine it, but consciously arrange their society in such a way as to avoid it.

Most societies imagine a mythic age of creation. Once upon a time, the story goes, the world was different: fish and birds could talk, animals could turn into humans and humans into animals. It was possible, in such a time, for things to come into being that were entirely new, in a way that cannot really happen any more: fire, or cooking, or the institution of marriage, or the keeping of pets. In these lesser days, we are reduced to endlessly repeating the great gestures of that time: lighting our own particular fires, arranging our own particular marriages, feeding our particular pets – without ever being able to change the world in quite the same way.

As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies.

The result probably would have struck a modern observer as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past.

Each was erected on a framework made of mammoth tusks and bones, taken from many tens of these great animals, which were arranged in alternating sequences and patterns that go beyond the merely functional to produce structures that would have looked quite striking to our eyes, and magnificent indeed to people at the time.

If, he noted, a Winnebago decided that gods or spirits did not really exist and refused to perform rituals meant to appease them, or even if he declared the collective wisdom of the elders wrong and invented his own personal cosmology (and both these things did, quite regularly, happen), such a sceptic would definitely be made fun of, while his closest friends and family might worry lest the gods punish him in some way.

They were ill; but the illness was a direct consequence of being touched by God.

As a result, a person who might otherwise have spent his life as something analogous to the village idiot would suddenly be found to have remarkable powers of foresight and persuasion;

Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the ‘nomadic adventures’ of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner; in the wet season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. In doing so they cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.

The adolescent boys in both Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice, for instance, had pronounced congenital deformities; the bodies in the Romito Cave in Calabria were unusually short, with at least one case of dwarfism; while those in Grimaldi Cave were extremely tall even by our standards, and must have seemed veritable giants to their contemporaries. All this seems very unlikely to be a coincidence. In fact, it makes one wonder whether even those bodies, which appear from their skeletal remains to be anatomically typical, might have been equally striking in some other way; after all, an albino, for example, or an epileptic prophet given to dividing his time between hanging upside down and arranging and rearranging snail shells would not be identifiable as such from the archaeological record.

The ethnographic record abounds with examples of anomalous beings – human or otherwise – treated as both exalted and dangerous; or one way in life, another in death.

people took advantage of an abundance of wild resources to feast, engage in complex rituals and ambitious artistic projects, and trade minerals, marine shells and furs.

abandoning the cultivation of cereals and returning, from around 3300 BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people

In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin – much more so than the Nambikwara chiefs in the dry season. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. 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.

Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastline of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over compatriots classified as commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations – still ranked, but with entirely different and much less formal structures. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter – literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.

In order to ensure a maximum kill, a police force – either coinciding with a military club, or appointed ad hoc, or serving by virtue of clan affiliation – issued orders and restrained the disobedient. In most of the tribes they not only confiscated game clandestinely procured, but whipped the offender, destroyed his property, and, in case of resistance, killed him. The very same organisation which in a murder case would merely use moral suasion turned into an inexorable State agency during a buffalo drive. However … coercive measures extended considerably beyond the hunt: the soldiers also forcibly restrained braves intent on starting war parties that were deemed inopportune by the chief; directed mass migrations; supervised the crowds at a major festival; and might otherwise maintain law and order.

Not only did they dismantle all means of exercising coercive authority the moment the ritual season was over, they were also careful to rotate which clan or warrior clubs got to wield it: anyone holding sovereignty one year would be subject to the authority of others in the next.

It wasn’t just that Amazonian chiefs were calculating politicians. They were calculating politicians forced to manoeuvre in a social environment apparently designed to ensure they could never exercise real political power. In the winter, the groups they led were tiny and inconsequential. In the summer, they didn’t ‘lead’ at all. Yes, their houses might have resembled social service dispensaries in modern welfare states; but as a result, in terms of material wealth, they were actually the poorest men in the village, since chiefs were expected constantly to give everything away. They were also expected to set an example by working much harder than everybody else.

His argument that the ‘typical Indian chief is not a lawgiver, executive, or judge, but a pacifier, a benefactor of the poor, and a prolix Polonius’ (that is, the actual functions of chiefly office are to (1) mediate quarrels, (2) provide for the needy, and (3) to entertain with beautiful speeches)

In carnival, women might rule over men, children be put in charge of government, servants could demand work from their masters, ancestors could return from the dead, ‘carnival kings’ could be crowned and then dethroned, giant monuments like wicker dragons built and set on fire, or all formal ranks might even disintegrate into one or other form of Bacchanalian chaos.

When forager bands gather into larger residential groups these are not, in any sense, made up of a tight-knit unit of closely related kin; in fact, primarily biological relations constitute on average a mere 10 per cent of total membership. Most members are drawn from a much wider pool of individuals, many from quite far away, who may not even speak the same first languages.

Aboriginal Australians, for instance, could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners. Similarly, a North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements – speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own – with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them.

In fact, the dominant view among anthropologists nowadays is that the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all.

what the Hadza, Wendat or ‘egalitarian’ people such as the Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones.12 They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers).

That every Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbour is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which, indeed, they consider themselves to be. There is no master and no servant in their society, but only equals who regard themselves as God’s noblest creation … even the suspicion of an order riles a man and he either does not carry it out or he carries it out in a casual and dilatory manner that is more insulting than a refusal.

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.

The fact that many hunter-gatherers, and even horticulturalists, only seem to have spent somewhere between two and four hours a day doing anything that could be construed as ‘work’ was itself proof of how easy their needs were to satisfy.

far from agriculture being some sort of remarkable scientific advance, foragers (who after all tended to be intimately familiar with all aspects of the growing cycles of food plants) were perfectly aware of how one might go about planting and harvesting grains and vegetables. They just didn’t see any reason why they should. ‘Why should we plant,’ one !Kung informant put it – in a phrase cited ever since in a thousand treatises on the origins of farming – ‘when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’

Not only did the Kwakiutl surround themselves with endless piles of possessions, but they also put endless creativity into designing and crafting them, with results so striking and intricately beautiful as to make them the pride of ethnographic museums the world over. (Lévi-Strauss remarked that turn-of-the-century Kwakiutl were like a society where a dozen different Picassos were operative all at the same time.)

Most experts today view its monuments as expressions of sacred geometry, linked to calendar counts and the movement of celestial bodies. If anything was being stockpiled at Poverty Point, it may well have been knowledge: the intellectual property of rituals, vision quests, songs, dances and images.

What to a settler’s eye seemed savage, untouched wilderness usually turns out to be landscapes actively managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years through controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, fertilizing and pruning, terracing estuarine plots to extend the habitat of particular wild flora, building clam gardens in intertidal zones to enhance the reproduction of shellfish, creating weirs to catch salmon, bass and sturgeon, and so on. Such procedures were often labour-intensive, and regulated by indigenous laws governing who could access groves, swamps, root beds, grasslands and fishing grounds, and who was entitled to exploit what species at any given time of year.

on the death of a Calusa ruler, or of his principal wife, a certain quota of their subjects’ sons and daughters had to be put to death. By most definitions, all this would make Carlos not just a king, but a sacred king, perhaps divine.

court life appears to have been made possible not only by complex systems of access to coastal fishing grounds, which were exceedingly rich, but also by canals and artificial ponds dug out of the coastal everglades.