The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

it would be more accurate, perhaps, to say there was no difference between officials, priests and philosophers.

In the beginning, the three main divisions – Sky People, Earth People and Water People – descended into the world and set out in search of its indigenous inhabitants. When they located these inhabitants, they were discovered to be in a repulsive state: living amid filth, bones and carrion, feeding on offal, rotting flesh, even each other. Despite this more-than-Hobbesian situation, the Isolated Earth People (as they came to be known) were also powerful sorcerers, capable of using the four winds to destroy life everywhere. Only the chief of the Water division had the courage to enter their village, negotiate with their leader and convince his people to abandon their murderous and unsanitary ways. In the end, he persuaded the Isolated Earth People to join them in a federation – to ‘move to a new country’, free from the pollution of decaying corpses.

the narrative sets off from the neutralization of arbitrary power: the taming of the Isolated Earth People’s leader – the chief sorcerer, who abuses his deadly knowledge – by according him some central position in a new system of alliances.

in 1725 a French explorer named Bourgmont brought an Osage and Missouria delegation across the Atlantic to Paris, around the time Lahontan’s works were at the height of their popularity.

there are certain freedoms – to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties – that tend to be taken for granted by anyone who has not been specifically trained into obedience

a breakdown of relationships in which the country is plunged into chaos and revenge, spiralling to a point where social order has dissolved away and where the powerful have become literal cannibals. Most powerful of all is Adodarhoh (Tadodaho), who is represented as a witch, deformed, monstrous and capable of commanding others to do his bidding.

Deganawideh the Peacemaker, who appears from what is later to be the Attiwandaronk (Neutral) territory to the northwest, determined to put an end to this chaotic state of affairs. He wins to his cause first the Jigonsaseh, a woman famous for standing outside all quarrels (he finds her hosting and feeding war parties from all sides of the conflict); and then Hiawatha, one of Adodarhoh’s cannibal henchmen. Together they set about winning over the people of each nation to agree on creating a formal structure for heading off disputes and creating peace.

the very last to be won over is Adodarhoh himself, who is gradually healed of his deformities and turned into a human being.

Since Haudenosaunee names are passed on like titles, there has continued to be an Adodarhoh, just as there is also still a Jigonsaseh and Hiawatha, to this day.

These meetings always begin with a rite of ‘condolence’, in which they wipe away the grief and rage caused by the memory of anyone who died in the interim, to clear their minds to go about the business of establishing peace (the fiftieth, the Peacemaker himself, is always represented by an empty place).

Notwithstanding the evil character of Adodarhoh the people of Onondaga, the Nation of Many Hills, obeyed his commands and though it cost many lives they satisfied his insane whims, so much did they fear him and his sorcery.

For the Haudenosaunee, the giving of orders is represented as being almost as serious an outrage as the eating of human flesh.

even if one dreamed of appropriating a neighbour’s possession, it could only be refused at the risk of endangering their health. To do so was considered beyond awkward; almost socially impossible. Even if one did it would cause outraged gossip, and very possibly bloody revenge: if somebody was thought to have died because somebody else refused to grant a soul wish, his or her relatives might retaliate physically, or by supernatural means.

Dreams were treated as if they were commands, delivered either by one’s own soul or possibly, in the case of a particularly vivid or portentous dream, by some greater spirit.

(Needless to say, there were few more terrible crimes than to falsify a dream.)

Iroquoian women were careful to space their births, setting optimal population to the fish and game capacities of the region, not its potential agricultural productivity.

instead allowed war parties from both sides free passage through their territories. This echoes the behaviour attributed to the Jigonsaseh, Mother of Nations, the highest-ranking woman official among the later Haudenosaunee, in their national epic, who was indeed said to have been of Attiwandaronk origin.

But when he decided to hand on his mantle to the daughter of his youngest Tuscarora wife, a similar child prodigy, disaster struck. So infuriated by this plan was his senior (Attiwandaronk) wife, of the highest-ranking Turtle clan, that she ambushed and killed the daughter, whose mother took her own life in despair. Tsouharissen, in a rage, massacred the culprit’s entire lineage, including his own heirs, thus effectively destroying any possibility of dynastic succession.

The Jigonsaseh, however, had chosen not to attend Denonville’s meeting. The arrest of the entire Grand Council left her the highest-ranking League official. Since in such an emergency there was no time to raise new chiefs, she and the remaining clan mothers themselves raised an army. Many of those recruited, it is reported, were themselves Seneca women. As it turned out, the Jigonsaseh was a far superior military tactician to Denonville. After routing the invading French troops near Victor, New York, her forces were at the point of entering Montreal when the French government sued for peace, agreeing to dismantle Fort Niagara and return the surviving galley slaves.

The more rosy, optimistic narrative – whereby the progress of Western civilization inevitably makes everyone happier, wealthier and more secure – has at least one obvious disadvantage. It fails to explain why that civilization did not simply spread of its own accord; that is, why European powers should have been obliged to spend the last 500 or so years aiming guns at people’s heads in order to force them to adopt it.

The Enlightenment is seen as introducing a possibility that had simply not existed before: that of self-conscious projects for reshaping society in accord with some rational ideal. That is, of genuine revolutionary politics.

such pre-Enlightenment social movements could now largely be dismissed as so many examples of people insisting on a return to certain ‘ancient ways’ (that they had often just made up), or else claiming to act on a vision from God (or the local equivalent).

When Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian historian of religion, proposed that ‘traditional’ societies lived in ‘cyclical time’, innocent of history, he was simply drawing the obvious conclusion. As a matter of fact, he went even further.

In traditional societies, according to Eliade, everything important has already happened. All the great founding gestures go back to mythic times, the illo tempore,1 the dawn of everything, when animals could talk or turn into humans, sky and earth were not yet separated, and it was possible to create genuinely new things (marriage, or cooking, or war). People living in this mental world, he felt, saw their own actions as simply repeating the creative gestures of gods and ancestors in less powerful ways, or as invoking primordial powers through ritual.

If anyone in what he considered a traditional society does do something remarkable – establishes or destroys a city, creates a unique piece of music – the deed will eventually end ...

The alternative notion, that history is actually going somewhere (the Last Days, Judgment, Redemption), is what Eliade referred to as ‘linear time’, in which historical events take on signif...

In his view, embracing the notion that events unfold in cumulative sequences, as opposed to recapitulating some deeper pattern, rendered us less able to weather the vicissitudes of war, injustice and misfortune, plunging us instead into an age of unprecedented anxiety and, ultimately, nihilism.

Social science has been largely a study of the ways in which human beings are not free: the way that our actions and understandings might be said to be determined by forces outside our control. Any account which appears to show human beings collectively shaping their own destiny, or even expressing freedom for its own sake, will likely be written off as illusory, awaiting ‘real’ scientific explanation; or if none is forthcoming (why do people dance?), as outside the scope of social theory entirely.

such discoveries were, again, based on centuries of accumulated knowledge and experimentation – recall how the basic principles of agriculture were known long before anyone applied them systematically – and that the results of such experiments were often preserved and transmitted through ritual, games and forms of play (or even more, perhaps, at the point where ritual, games and play shade into each other).

‘Gardens of Adonis’ are a fitting symbol here. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort.

Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple door...

For most of history, then, the zone of ritual play constituted both a scientific laboratory and, for any given society, a repertory of knowledge and techniques which might...

a British anthropologist named A. M. Hocart proposed that monarchy and institutions of government were originally derived from rituals designed to channel powers of life from the cosmos into human society. He even suggested at one point that ‘the first kings must have been dead kings’,2 and that individuals so honoured only really became sacred rulers at their funerals.

To say that, for most of human history, the ritual year served as a kind of compendium of social possibilities (as it did in the European Middle Ages, for instance, when hierarchical pageants alternated with rambunctious carnivals), doesn’t really do the matter justice. This is because festivals are already seen as extraordinary, somewhat unreal, or at the very least as departures from the everyday order. Whereas, in fact, the evidence we have from Palaeolithic times onwards suggests that many – perhaps even most – people did not merely imagine or enact different social orders at different times of year, but actually lived in them for extended periods of time.

What we can now see is that the first two freedoms – to relocate, and to disobey commands – often acted as a kind of scaffolding for the third, more creative one. Let us clarify some of the ways in which this ‘propping-up’ of the third freedom actually worked. As long as the first two freedoms were taken for granted, as they were in many North American societies when Europeans first encountered them, the only kings that could exist were always, in the last resort, play kings. If they overstepped the line, their erstwhile subjects could always ignore them or move someplace else.

Identity came to be seen as a value in itself, setting in motion processes of cultural schismogenesis. As we saw in the case of Californian foragers and their aristocratic neighbours on the Northwest Coast, such acts of cultural refusal could also be self-conscious acts of political contestation, marking the boundary (in this case) between societies where inter-group warfare, competitive feasting and household bondage were rejected – as in those parts of Aboriginal California closest to the Northwest Coast – and where they were accepted, even celebrated, as quintessential features of social life.

Play kings cease to be play kings precisely when they start killing people; which perhaps also helps to explain the excesses of ritually sanctioned violence that so often ensued during transitions from one state to the other.

two communities might choose to resolve a dispute by partaking in a contest, and often they do; but the ultimate difference between war (or ‘contests of injuring’, as she puts it) and most other kinds of contest is that anyone killed or disfigured in a war remains so,

There is nothing particularly primordial about such arrangements; certainly, there is no reason to believe they are in any sense hardwired into the human psyche. On the contrary, it’s almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other in such systematic yet indiscriminate ways. It would seem that for most of human history, no one saw much reason to do such things; or if they did, it was rare.

Ethnography provides plenty of examples of what could best be described as play war: either with non-deadly weapons or, more often, battles involving thousands on each side where the number of casualties after a day’s ‘fighting’ amount to perhaps two or three. Even in Homeric-style warfare, most participants were basically there as an audience while individual heroes taunted, jeered and occasionally threw javelins or shot arrows at one another, or engaged in duels.

there is an increasing amount of archaeological evidence for outright massacres, such as those that took place among Neolithic village dwellers in central Europe after the end of the last Ice Age.

While they spent their public lives making sober judgments as magistrates, they lived their private lives in households where they not only had near-total authority over their wives, children and other dependants, but also had all their needs taken care of by dozens, perhaps hundreds of slaves. Slaves trimmed their hair, carried their towels, fed their pets, repaired their sandals, played music at their dinner parties and instructed their children in history and maths. At the same time, in terms of legal theory these slaves were classified as captive foreigners who, conquered in battle, had forfeited rights of any kind. As a result, the Roman jurist was free to rape, torture, mutilate or kill any of them at any time and in any way he had a mind to, without the matter being considered anything other than a private affair.

All Wendat wars were, in fact, ‘mourning wars’, carried out to assuage the grief felt by close relatives of someone who had been killed. Typically, a war party would strike against traditional enemies, bringing back a few scalps and a small number of prisoners. Captive women and children would be adopted. The fate of men was largely up to the mourners, particularly the women, and appeared to outsiders at least to be entirely arbitrary. If the mourners felt it appropriate a male captive might be given a name, even the name of the original victim. The captive enemy would henceforth become that other person and, after a few years’ trial period, be treated as a full member of society. If for any reason that did not happen, however, he suffered a very different fate. For a male warrior taken prisoner, the only alternative to full adoption into Wendat society was excruciating death by torture.

What seems to have really appalled them, however, was not so much the whipping, boiling, branding, cutting-up – even in some cases cooking and eating – of the enemy, so much as the fact that almost everyone in a Wendat village or town took part, even women and children. The suffering might go on for days, with the victim periodically resuscitated only to endure further ordeals, and it was very much a communal affair.11 The violence seems all the more extraordinary once we recall how these same Wendat societies refused to spank children, directly punish thieves or murderers, or take any measure against their own members that smacked of arbitrary authority. In virtually all other areas of social life they were renowned for solving their problems through calm and reasoned debate.

Clearly, at some points in their history people living in this region found effective ways to ensure that vendettas didn’t escalate into a spiral of retaliation or actual warfare (the Haudenosaunee story of the Great Law of the Peace seems to be about precisely such a moment); at other times, the system broke down and the possibility of sadistic cruelty returned.

Wendat who visited France were equally appalled by the tortures exhibited during public punishments and executions, but what struck them as most remarkable is that ‘the French whipped, hanged, and put to death men from among themselves ’, rather than external enemies.

A captive warrior might either be treated with loving care and affection or be the object of the worst treatment imaginable. No middle ground existed.

Children were to be submissive to their parents, wives to husbands, and subjects to rulers whose authority came from God. In each case the superior party was expected to inflict stern chastisement when he considered it appropriate: that is, to exercise violence with impunity. All this, moreover, was assumed to be bound up with feelings of love and affection.

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.

They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule.