The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Almost all the Ice Age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that lived a little like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another.

Scholarship does not always advance. Sometimes it slips backwards.

What all this confirms is that searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question.

But even if all monarchies, including ceremonial monarchies, were to disappear, some people would still play at being kings.

But the overall direction of history – at least until very recently – would seem to be the very opposite of globalization. It is one of increasingly local allegiances: extraordinary cultural inventiveness, but much of it aimed at finding new ways for people to set themselves off against each other.

Overall, though, what we observe is not so much the world as a whole getting smaller, but most peoples’ social worlds growing more parochial, their lives and passions more likely to be circumscribed by boundaries of culture, class and language.

On the one hand, ‘egalitarianism’ (as opposed to ‘equality’, let alone ‘uniformity’ or ‘homogeneity’) seems to refer to the presence of some kind of ideal.

If all societies are organized around certain key values (wealth, piety, beauty, freedom, knowledge, warrior prowess), then ‘egalitarian societies’ are those where everyone (or almost everyone) agrees that the paramount values should be, and generally speaking are, distributed equally.

There’s only one way out of this dilemma: to create some sort of universal, objective standards by which to measure equality. Since the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, this has almost invariably meant focusing on property arrangements.

Conventional wisdom also tells us that the moment a material surplus does become possible, there will also be full-time craft specialists, warriors and priests laying claim to it, and living off some portions of that surplus (or, in the case of warriors, spending the bulk of their time trying to figure out new ways to steal it from each other); and before long, merchants, lawyers and politicians will inevitably follow.

One of the things that sets us apart from non-human animals is that animals produce only and exactly what they need; humans invariably produce more. We are creatures of excess, and this is what makes us simultaneously the most creative, and most destructive, of all species. Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements.

Truly egalitarian societies, for Woodburn, are those with ‘immediate return’ economies: food brought home is eaten the same day or the next; anything extra is shared out, but never preserved or stored.

(John Stuart Mill protested that ‘All the labour-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being.’)

‘Abundance’ is not an absolute measure. It refers to a situation where one has easy access to everything one feels one needs to live a happy and comfortable life.

As we pointed out above, the average oppressed medieval serf still worked less than a modern nine-to-five office or factory worker, and the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who dragged great slabs to build Stonehenge almost certainly worked, on average, less than that.

When it comes to labour and affluence, every new technological breakthrough seems to cause us to fall yet further.

Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature – which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it.

The argument goes back to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argued that property rights are necessarily derived from labour.

For most of human history, fishers, hunters and foragers did not have to contend with expansive empires; therefore, they themselves tended to be the most active human colonizers of aquatic environments.

In fact, Eurasian populations made a much earlier entry to what was then a genuinely ‘New World’, some 17,000 years ago.

Even among those forager groups, famous for their assertive egalitarianism, he notes, there was one striking exception to the rule that no adult should ever presume to give direct orders to another, and that individuals should not lay private claim to property. This exception came in the sphere of ritual, of the sacred.

What makes the Roman Law conception of property – the basis of almost all legal systems today – unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy).

Indigenous peoples of California were not pre-agricultural. If anything, they were anti-agricultural.

The systematic rejection of all domesticated foodstuffs is even more striking when one realizes that many Californians and Northwest Coast peoples did plant and grow tobacco, as well as other plants – such as springbank clover and Pacific silverweed – which they used for ritual purposes, or as luxuries consumed only at special feasts.

what is it that causes human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbours?

‘Societies’, wrote Mauss, ‘live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.’

The Yurok were what we’ve called ‘possessive individualists’. They took it for granted that we are all born equal, and that it is up to each of us to make something of ourselves through self-discipline, self-denial and hard work.

Schismogenesis, you’ll recall, describes how societies in contact with each other end up joined within a common system of differences, even as they attempt to distinguish themselves from one another.

Each society performs a mirror image of the other. In doing so, it becomes an indispensable alter ego, the necessary and ever-present example of what one should never wish to be.

‘Take good care of your people,’ went the elder’s advice to a young Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) chief. ‘If your people don’t like you, you’re nothing.’24

Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?

but on the West Coast we can at least observe how many of the elements that later came together in the institution of slavery emerged at roughly the same time, starting around 1850 BC,

What makes a slave different from a serf, a peon, captive or inmate is their lack of social ties. In legal terms, at least, a slave has no family, no kin, no community; they can make no promises and forge no ongoing connections with other human beings. This is why the English word ‘free’ is actually derived from a root meaning ‘friend’.

Unsurprisingly, the archetypical slaves are usually war captives, who are typically far from home amid people who owe them nothing.

most of the tribal names traditionally applied to them by Europeans are derogatory terms used by their neighbours (‘Eskimo’, for example, means ‘people who don’t cook their fish’, and ‘Iroquois’ is derived from an Algonkian term meaning ‘vicious killers’).

We are introducing them as a way to illustrate how 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.

Historical events by definition happen only once, and there’s no real way to know if they ‘might’ have turned out otherwise

In the dog days of summer, when nothing can grow, the women of ancient Athens fashioned these little gardens in baskets and pots. Each held a mix of quick-sprouting grain and herbs. The makeshift seedbeds were carried up ladders on to the flat roofs of private houses and left to wilt in the sun: a botanical re-enactment of the premature death of Adonis, the fallen hunter, slain in his prime by a wild boar.

Located on the Konya Plain of central Turkey, Çatalhöyük was first settled around 7400 BC, and continued to be populated for some 1,500 years

Çatalhöyük as a monument to the ‘origins of farming’. Certainly, it’s easy to understand why this should be. It is among the first large settlements we know of whose inhabitants practised agriculture, and who got most of their nutrition from domesticated cereals, pulses, sheep and goats.

Today, most archaeologists consider it deeply unsound to interpret prehistoric images of corpulent women as ‘fertility goddesses’. The very idea that they should be is the result of long-outmoded Victorian fantasies about ‘primitive matriarchy’.

Only something like 5 per cent of Neolithic Çatalhöyük has been excavated.15 Soundings and surveys offer no particular reason to believe that other parts of the town were substantially different, but it’s a reminder of how little we really know, and that we also have to think about what is missing from the archaeological record.

Between 10,000 and 8000 BC, foraging societies in the ‘upland’ and ‘lowland’ sectors of the Fertile Crescent underwent marked transformations, but in quite different directions.

We already know how this one goes. Humans were once living a ‘fairly comfortable life’, subsisting from the blessings of Nature, but then we made our most fatal mistake. Lured by the prospect of a still easier life – of surplus and luxury, of living like gods – we had to go and tamper with that harmonious State of Nature, and thus unwittingly turned ourselves into slaves.

Let’s focus on wheat and barley. After the last Ice Age, these particular crops were among the first to be domesticated, along with lentils, flax, peas, chickpeas and bitter vetch.

What they showed was that the key genetic mutation leading to crop domestication could be achieved in as little as twenty to thirty years, or at most 200 years, using simple harvesting techniques like reaping with flint sickles or uprooting by hand.

Today we consider straw a by-product of cereal-farming, the primary purpose being to produce food. But archaeological evidence suggests things started the other way round.32

fact, the latest research shows that the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent was not fully completed until much later: as much as 3,000 years after the cultivation of wild cereals first began.

What they show is that, in certain parts of the region such as northern Syria, the cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC.35 Yet in these same regions, the biological process of crop domestication (including the crucial switch-over from brittle rachis to tough) was not completed until closer to 7000 BC – that is roughly ten times as long as it need have taken

Cultivating domestic cereals, as the ‘affluent’ foragers of the Pacific Coast knew well, is enormously hard work.38