The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

The word ‘democracy’ might have been invented in Europe (barely, since Greece at the time was much closer culturally to North Africa and the Middle East than it was to, say, England), Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything (p. 17). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Just consider the case of Leibniz: over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European governments gradually came to adopt the idea that every government should properly preside over a population of largely uniform language and culture, run by a bureaucratic officialdom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competitive exams. It might seem surprising that they did so, since nothing remotely like that had existed in any previous period of European history. Yet it was almost exactly the system that had existed for centuries in China. Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources – even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case. As we will shortly see, the whole story we summarized in the last chapter – our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

Those closer to the coast were fishers, foresters and hunters, though most also practised horticulture; the Wendat (Huron),13 concentrated in major river valleys further inland, growing maize, squash and beans around fortified towns. Interestingly, early French observers attached little importance to such economic distinctions, especially since foraging or farming was, in either case, largely women’s work. The men, they noted, were primarily occupied in hunting and, occasionally, war, which meant they could in a sense be considered natural aristocrats. The idea of the ‘noble savage’ can be traced back to such estimations. Originally, it didn’t refer to nobility of character but simply to the fact that the Indian men concerned themselves with hunting and fighting, which back at home were largely the business of noblemen. “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.”

Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ 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’. 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. Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ‘equality before the law’, which is ultimately equality before the sovereign – that is, once again, equality in common subjugation.

such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus.

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: Indeed, a strong case can be made for the real origins of the ‘Western gaze’ – that rational, supposedly objective way of looking at strange and exotic cultures which came to characterize later European anthropology – lying not in travellers’ accounts, but rather in European accounts of precisely these imaginary sceptical natives: gazing inwards, brows furrowed, at the exotic curiosities of Europe itself.

theories of social evolution – now so familiar that we rarely dwell on their origins – first came to be articulated in Europe: as a direct response to the power of indigenous critique.

Boehm’s own work is revealing in this regard. An evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate studies, he argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way. Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning (and in the case of inveterate sociopaths, sometimes even outright assassination)19 – none of which have any parallel among other primates. For instance, while gorillas do not mock each other for beating their chests, humans do so regularly. Even more strikingly, while the bullying behaviour might well be instinctual, counter-bullying is not: it’s a well-thought-out strategy, and forager societies who engage in it display what Boehm calls ‘actuarial intelligence’. That’s to say, they understand what their society might look like if they did things differently: if, for instance, skilled hunters were not systematically belittled, or if elephant meat was not portioned out to the group by someone chosen at random (as opposed to the person who actually killed the beast). This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another. In this sense, one could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’ – since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge.

for instance, the extraordinary outlays of labour involved in making grave goods (10,000 work hours for the Sunghir beads alone, by some estimates); the highly advanced and standardized methods of production, possibly suggesting specialized craftspeople; or the way in which exotic, prestigious materials were transported from very distant locations; and, most suggestive of all, a few cases where such wealth was buried with children, maybe implying some kind of inherited status. But what has mostly intrigued scholars of different disciplines so far is something else: the apparent proof they offer that ‘hunter-gatherer societies had evolved institutions to support major public works, projects, and monumental constructions, and thus had a complex social hierarchy prior to their adoption of farming.’27 Again, matters are not so simple, because these two phenomena – hierarchy and the measure of time – were closely interwoven.

the standards of their day, the kind of structures we’ve been describing can only have been considered public works, involving sophisticated design and the co-ordination of labour on an impressive scale. over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling ‘states’.

Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem. Kandiaronk, the seventeenth-century Wendat philosopher-statesman Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation.

Perhaps not coincidentally, what really struck him about the ‘primitive’ societies he was most familiar with was their tolerance of eccentricity. This, he concluded, was simply the logical extension of that same rejection of coercion that so impressed the Jesuits in Quebec. it would never occur to them to punish him, or that anyone should try to force him into conformity – for instance, by blaming him for a bad hunt and therefore refusing to share food with him until he agreed to perform the usual rituals.

they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists (in the tradition of Turgot) insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters and foragers to farmers and back again.

Levi Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the few mid-twentieth-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals; However, chiefs did play an analogous role, brokering between two entirely different social and ethical systems, which obtained at different times of year. Allow us to explain. In the 1940s, the Nambikwara lived in what were effectively two very different societies. During the rainy season, they occupied hilltop villages of several hundred people and practised horticulture; during the rest of the year they dispersed into small foraging bands. 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 soldiers were thus a concomitant of numerically strong aggregations, hence functioned intermittently rather than continuously.’ But the soldiers’ sovereignty, he stressed, was no less real for its temporary nature. As a result, Lowie insisted that Plains Indians did in fact know something of state power, even though they never actually developed a state. 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.

Clastre They had self-consciously organized in such a way that the forms of arbitrary power and domination we associate with ‘advanced political systems’ could never possibly emerge. he proposed that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so. 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.

The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. This is why anthropologists often have such trouble defining what a ‘ritual’ even is. If you start from the solemn ones, ritual is a matter of etiquette, propriety: High Church ritual, for example, is really just a very elaborate version of table manners. Some have gone so far as to argue that what we call ‘social structure’ only really exists during rituals: think here of families that only exist as a physical group during marriages and funerals, during which times questions of rank and priority have to be worked out by who sits at which table, who speaks first, who gets the topmost cut of the hump of a sacrificed water buffalo, or the first slice of wedding cake. But sometimes festivals are moments where entirely different social structures take over, such as the ‘youth abbeys’ that seem to have existed across medieval Europe, with their Boy Bishops, May Queens, Lords of Misrule, Abbots of Unreason and Princes of Sots, who during the Christmas, Mayday or carnival season temporarily took over many of the functions of government and enacted a bawdy parody of government’s everyday forms. So there’s another school of thought which says that rituals are really exactly the opposite. The really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world.54

some of the extraordinary cultural arrangements that

how did we get stuck?

We might ask why all this has happened. What are the mechanisms that cause human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbours?

Different societies sometimes have radically different systems of value, and what might be most important in one – or at least, what everyone insists is most important in one – might have very little to do with what’s important in another.

sort of universal, objective standards by which to measure equality.

Recall that the American indigenous critique, as we described it in Chapter Two, was initially about something very different: the perceived failure of European societies to promote mutual aid and protect personal liberties. Only later, once indigenous intellectuals had more exposure to the workings of French and English society, did it come to focus on inequalities of property.

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.

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.)

Human beings had many tens of thousands of years to experiment with different ways of life, long before any of them turned their hands to agriculture.

formed the core of a much larger sphere of cultural interaction. People and resources came to Poverty Point from hundreds of miles away, as far north as the Great Lakes and from the Gulf of Mexico to the south.

million cubic metres of soil was moved to create its ceremonial infrastructure, which was most likely oriented to the skies, since some of its mounds form enormous figures of birds, inviting the heavens to bear witness to their presence.

Despite its great cultural reach, there is nothing at all of this commodity culture at Poverty Point.

Most experts today view its monuments as expressions of sacred geometry, linked to calendar counts and the movement of celestial bodies.

anything was being stockpiled at Poverty Point, it may well have been knowledge: the intellectual property

The various configurations of their mounds and ridges adhere to strikingly uniform geometrical principles, based on standard units of measurement and proportion apparently shared by early peoples

Clark’s findings by two specialists in the field, who accept the evidence he presents ‘not only for a standard unit of measurement but also for geometrical layouts and spacing intervals among first-mound complexes from Louisiana to Mexico and Peru,

someone had to convey knowledge of geometric and mathematical techniques for making accurate spatial measurements, and related forms of labour organization, over very long distances. If this were the case, it seems

lack of an agricultural base does not seem to have stopped those who gathered on Poverty Point from creating something that to us would appear very much like little cities which, at least during certain times of year, hosted a rich and influential intellectual life.

A hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state,

‘Archaic’.

flooding of the Beringia land bridge (which once linked Eurasia to the Americas) around 8000 BC, and the initial adoption and spread of maize-farming in certain parts of North America, down to around 1000 BC.

built spaces where hunter-gatherer publics once assembled in their thousands.

many thousands of archaeological sites have been discovered, excavated and meticulously recorded, either as a result of construction projects for roads, railways, housing or nuclear plants or as part of immense rescue efforts undertaken in the wake of environmental catastrophes

irrigated rice cultivation came to Japan from the Korean Peninsula.

strong regional contrasts are evident, ranging from maritime adaptations to acorn-based economies, both using large storage facilities for gathered resources.

Cannabis came into use, for fibres and recreational drug use. There were enormous villages with grand storehouses

large-scale wooden forager art which once produced monuments that presided over northern skies.

And, as we’ve seen, even the major building phases of Stonehenge, long associated with early farmers, are now dated to a time when cereal cultivation was virtually abandoned and hazelnut-gathering once again took over in the British Isles, alongside livestock-herding.

Stonehenge And, as we’ve seen, even the major building phases of Stonehenge, long associated with early farmers, are now dated to a time when cereal cultivation was virtually abandoned and hazelnut-gathering once again took over in the British Isles, alongside livestock-herding. long before Sahlins’s notion of the ‘original affluent society’ Kandiaronk made similar arguments, insisting ‘the Savages of Canada, notwithstanding their Poverty, are richer than you, among whom all sorts of crimes are committed upon the score of Mine and Thine.’36

know precious little of the political systems lying behind a now almost globally attested phenomenon of forager monumentality,

Sahlins’s notion of the ‘original affluent society’

The irony is that, in doing so, they often played into the hands of those who argued that – being blissful and innocent children of nature – they also had no natural rights to their land.

Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature

The entire basis for dispossession, in turn, was premised on the idea that the current inhabitants of those lands weren’t really working. 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.