The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

many other foraging peoples actually had extraordinarily complex and sophisticated conceptions of ownership.

Sometimes these indigenous property systems formed the basis for differential access to resources, with the result that something like social classes emerged.

By all accounts, then, the Calusa had indeed ‘got stuck’ in a single economic and political mode that allowed extreme forms of inequality to emerge. But they did so without ever planting a single seed or tethering a single animal.

Anyone who was still living mainly by hunting animals and gathering wild foodstuffs in the early to mid twentieth century was almost certainly living on land no one else particularly wanted. That’s why so many of the best descriptions of foragers come from places like the Kalahari Desert or Arctic Circle.

This was a pattern repeated on every continent, from America to Oceania, where invariably the most attractive ports, harbours, fisheries and surrounding lands were first snapped up by British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or Russian settlers, who also drained tidal salt marshes and coastal lagoons to farm cereals and cash crops.45

In Hadza religion and the religions of many Pygmy groups, initiation into male (and sometimes female) cults forms the basis of exclusive claims to ownership, usually of ritual privileges, that stand in absolute contrast to the minimization of exclusive property rights in everyday, secular life.

These various forms of ritual and intellectual property, Woodburn observed, are generally protected by secrecy, by deception and often by the threat of violence.50

It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts, or even occasions when humans impersonate spirits; so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property.

such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.

Robert Lowie termed ‘sacra’ when he pointed out long ago that many of the most important forms of indigenous property were immaterial or incorporeal: magic formulae, stories, medical knowledge, the right to perform a certain dance, or stitch a certain pattern on one’s mantle.

sacred bundles (which normally included not only physical objects but accompanying dances, rituals and songs) were often the only objects in that society to be treated as private property: not just owned exclusively by individuals, but also inherited, bought and sold.57 such ownership always carries a double meaning of domination and care. 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). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will. Aranda - Strehlow painfully clear example of how behaviour observed in ritual contexts takes exactly the opposite form to the free and equal relations that prevail in ordinary life. It is only within such contexts that exclusive (sacred) forms of property exist, strict and top-down hierarchies are enforced, and where orders given are dutifully obeyed.62

such ownership always carries a double meaning of domination and care.

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.

If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law.

unruliness of temper which characterized

observed in ritual contexts takes exactly

the indigenous peoples of California, for example, were notorious for their industry and, in many cases, near-obsession with the accumulation of wealth.

Our world as it existed just before the dawn of agriculture was anything but a world of roving hunter-gatherer bands. It was marked, in many places, by sedentary villages and towns, some by then already ancient, as well as monumental sanctuaries and stockpiled wealth, much of it the work of ritual specialists, highly skilled artisans and architects.

Ever since Mesolithic times, the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbours.

Mauss

the question becomes not why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn’t. The answer, Mauss felt, is that this is precisely how cultures define themselves against their neighbours.

both the Northwest Coast peoples and those of California maintained higher densities of population than, say, maize, beans and squash farmers of the nearby Great Basin and American Southwest.

How did a boundary emerge between one extended ‘family’ of foraging societies that habitually raided each other for slaves, and another that did not keep slaves at all?

Yurok were famous for the central role that money – which took the form of white dentalium shells arranged on strings, and headbands made of bright red woodpecker scalps – played in every aspect of their social lives.

In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that – according to Goldschmidt – bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber in his famous 1905 essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

In all these societies of the Northwest Coast, nobles alone enjoyed the ritual prerogative to engage with guardian spirits, who conferred access to aristocratic titles, and the right to keep the slaves captured in raids.

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.

Seen one way, a slave-raider is stealing the years of caring labour another society invested to create a work-capable human being.

Almost all these societies took pride in their ability to adopt children or captives – even from among those whom they considered the most benighted of their neighbours – and, through care and education, turn them into what they considered to be proper human beings.

The simple reality is that there was no shortage of working hands in Northwest Coast households. But a good proportion of those hands belonged to aristocratic title holders who felt strongly that they should be exempted from menial work.

Indeed, the relation between title-holding nobles and their dependants seems to have been under constant negotiation.

The result, from the nobles’ point of view, was a perennial shortage, not of labour as such but of controllable labour at key times of year.

The gardens of Adonis, to which Plato is referring here, were a sort of festive speed farming which produced no food. For the philosopher, they offered a convenient simile for all things precocious, alluring, but ultimately sterile. 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. Then, beyond the public gaze of men and civic authority, began the rooftop rites. Open to women from all classes of Athenian society, including prostitutes, these were rites of grieving but also wanton drunkenness, and no doubt other forms of ecstatic behaviour as well. Historians agree that the roots of this women’s cult lie in Mesopotamian fertility rites of Dumuzi/Tammuz, the shepherd-god and personification of plant life, mourned on his death each summer. Most likely the worship of Adonis, his ancient Greek incarnation, spread westwards to Greece from Phoenicia in the wake of Assyrian expansion, in the seventh century BC. Nowadays, some scholars see the whole thing as a riotous subversion of patriarchal values: an antithesis to the staid and proper state-sponsored Thesmophoria (the autumn festival of the Greek fertility goddess, Demeter), celebrated by the wives of Athenian citizens and dedicated to the serious farming on which the life of the city depended. Others read the story of Adonis the other way round, as a requiem for the primeval drama of serious hunting, cast into shadow by the advent of agriculture, but not forgotten – an echo of lost masculinity.2 All well and good, you may say, but what does any of this have to do with the origins of farming? What have the gardens of Adonis got to do with the first Neolithic stirrings of agriculture some 8,000 years before Plato? Well, in a sense, everything. Because these scholarly debates encapsulate just the sort of problems that surround any modern investigation of this crucial topic. Was farming from the very beginning about the serious business of producing more food to supply growing populations? Most scholars assume, as a matter of course, that this had to be the principal reason for its invention. But maybe farming began as a more playful or even subversive kind of process – or perhaps even as a side effect of other concerns, such as the desire to spend longer in particular kinds of locations, where hunting and trading were the real priorities. Which of these two ideas really embodies the spirit of the first agriculturalists; is it the stately and pragmatic Thesmophoria, or the playful and self-indulgent gardens of Adonis? No doubt the peoples of the Neolithic – the world’s first farmers – themselves spent a good deal of time debating similar questions. To get a sense of why we say this, let’s consider what is probably the most famous Neolithic site in the world, Çatalhöyük.

more Adonis than Demeter. cattle (and boar) were first domesticated 1,000 years before Çatalhöyük was founded, end of the last glacial period, around 10,000 BC, this region developed in two clearly distinct directions. Going with the topography, we can discern an ‘upland crescent’ and a ‘lowland crescent’.

industries were often associated with special ‘cult buildings’ or seasonal lodges, pointing to the control of such skills by guilds or secret societies.

To understand the importance of trade in this process is to appreciate that the lowland crescent was a landscape of intimate contrasts and conjunctures (very similar, in this respect, to California). There were constant opportunities for foragers to exchange complementary products – which included foods, medicines, drugs and cosmetics – since the local growth cycles of wild resources were staggered by sharp differences in climate and topography.

Farming itself seems to have started in precisely this way, as one of so many ‘niche’ activities or local forms of specialization. The founder crops of early agriculture – among them emmer wheat, einkorn, barley and rye – were not domesticated in a single ‘core’ area (as once supposed), but at different stops along the Levantine Corridor, scattered from the Jordan valley to the Syrian Euphrates, and perhaps further north as well.27 Cereal cultivation began in a similar way, as a fairly minor supplement to economies based mainly on wild resources: nuts, berries, legumes and other readily accessible foodstuffs. Cultivation, however, is rarely just about calories. Cereal production also brought people together in new ways to perform communal tasks, mostly repetitive, labour-intensive

Harvesting by sickle yields straw as well as grain. 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 Human populations in the Middle East began settling in permanent villages long before cereals became a major component of their diets.33 In doing so, they found new uses for the stalks of wild grasses; these included fuel for lighting fires, and the temper that transformed mud and clay from so much friable matter into a vital tectonic resource, used to build houses, ovens, storage bins and other fixed structures. Straw could also be used to make baskets, clothing, matting and thatch. 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

Called ‘flood retreat’, ‘flood recession’ or décrue farming, it takes place on the margins of seasonally flooding lakes or rivers.

Any given parcel of territory might be fertile one year, and then either flooded or dried out the next, so there is little incentive for long-term ownership or enclosure of fixed plots. It makes little sense to set up boundary stones when the ground itself is shifting underneath you.

Early cultivators, it seems, were doing the minimum amount of subsistence work needed to stay in their given locations, which they occupied for reasons other than farming: hunting, foraging, fishing, trading and more.

Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity, and may be gendered female even when practised by men. This is not quite an anthropological universal, but it’s about as close to one as you are ever likely to get.

In both medium and message, Göbekli Tepe could hardly be more different from the world of early farming communities. Its standing remains were wrought from stone, a material little used for construction in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys.

Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘schismogenesis’ to describe people’s tendency to define themselves against one another.

Even in the American Southwest, the overall trend for 500 years or so before Europeans arrived was the gradual abandonment of maize and beans, which people had been growing in some cases for thousands of years, and a return to a foraging way of life.