(review by B W)
Almost fifty years ago, a Cambridge archeologist by the name of David Clark predicted that further research into human evolution would show that “The explanations of the development of modern man, domestication, metallurgy, urbanization and civilization—may in perspective emerge as semantic snares and metaphysical mirages.” In their book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity David Graeber and David Wengrow prove Clark’s point—they exhaustively document their arguments with footnotes and references—and in doing so they dismantle the established consensuses, disprove the dominant tropes, and crush the cherished chestnuts about the last 50,000 years of human prehistory and history.
The story that Anne Robert Jacques Turgot told in the 1750s hasn’t changed much with its retelling by Sahlins, Fukuyama, Diamond, and Morris. The story goes that humans existed in small bands since time immemorial, and that it was the invention of agriculture that forced farmers to create permanent settlements near their crops. Agricultural surpluses allowed populations to grow. Ranked societies appeared to coordinate the activities of the burgeoning populations of agriculturalists. Bands exited their initial ‘state of nature’ as they transitioned into tribal organizations—then tribes became chiefdoms—and villages grew into cities—and chiefs became kings that ruled over city states and then empires. Point by point, Graeber and Wengrow demolish that narrative. Along the way, the authors discuss the origins of private property, agriculture, and the state—and they make some fascinating digressions into the intellectual history of Western civilization—one of the most interesting being on how the concepts of liberty and egalitarianism, that captured the imaginations of the revolutionary thinkers of America and France, were very likely derived from native American cultural ideals.
Graeber and Wengrow begin by arguing that modern humans were never ignorant savages and that there was no initial ‘state of nature’ for hunter-gatherers. Instead, they see “the world of hunter-gatherer cultures as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of the bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of [social] evolutionary theory.” The authors show that the current conceptions (or rather the misconceptions) about the pre-literate peoples are ultimately derived from 17th and 18th Century stereotypes. Hobbes’s Leviathan envisioned the lives of people in an original state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” A century later Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, changed the narrative a bit by supposing that humans once existed in an Edenic state of egalitarianism and simplicity. But Rousseau echoed Hobbes in that he assumed savages were ignorant and incapable of bettering their own situations.
The authors write: “…it’s all just an endless repetition of a story first told by Rousseau in 1754. Many contemporary scholars will quite literally say that Rousseau’s vision has been proved correct. If so, it is an extraordinary coincidence, since Rousseau himself never suggested that the innocent State of Nature really happened. On the contrary, he insisted he was engaging in a thought experiment: ‘One must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely as hypothetical and conditional reasoning, better fitted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin…’”
Graeber and Wengrow provide abundant evidence that hunter-gatherers were perfectly capable of organizing themselves into much larger groups to accomplish tasks that small bands were incapable of—such as the mammoth hunts in Siberia 25,000 year ago where hundreds of animals were systematically slaughtered—and the meat processed from those hunts (presumably smoked) would have been capable of feeding hundreds of people through the boreal winters. They show that up until relatively modern times, North American and South American indiginous peoples would coalesce into larger, temporary communities and then they would disperse into smaller bands as the food resources changed across seasons.
And there is nothing controversial about their summary of the Enlightenment views on social evolution—but the biggest bombshell in this book (at least for this reviewer) is that this Enlightenment idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of social evolution was a response to a particular critique of European civilization offered up at the beginning of the 18th Century. They conclude that the social evolution arguments were developed as a backlash to a critique of European civilization offered up by a Native American Wendat (Huron) orator and statesman named Kandiaronk. Kandiaronk was a representative chosen by the Wendat Confederation to represent their interests with the French colonial administration of New France. The authors note in passing that he may have been the same Wendat ambassador who visited the Court of Louis XIV (but the imprecise spellings of native American names by the French, and the fact that native Americans could assume different names for different occasions, make this impossible to verify).
Kandiaronk was very likely illiterate, but the Jesuits serving in New France, observed that Wendat valued orators and thoughtful argument, and they were able to hold their own against the priests who were trying to persuade them to convert. Documents show that the governor of New France and Kandiaronk would have long discussions about practical and philosophical questions. Lahontan was present at these dinners, and he participated in these discussions. After his return to Europe, Lahontan published a series of books about his travels in the New World. All of them went through several editions and were translated into other languages (thus they were widely read across Europe at a time when books about the ‘New World’ were extremely popular). In 1703, he published the third and last volume in his series—entitled Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled. In it Lahontan recounts his discussions with a Wendat sage (whom he calls Adario but who almost certainly modeled after Kandiaronk). Adario proceeds to critique the European way of life—its obsession with property and money and its tyrannical political systems—he criticizes Christianity and the tyrannical nature of God—and he notes the general unhappiness of Europeans. Lahontan’s book was so popular that numerous pastiches of conversations with ‘noble savages’ were subsequently published, and by the mid-1700s the noble savage was a literary trope. According to Graeber and Wengrow conservative thinkers reacted in outrage to Adario’s criticisms, vehemently arguing for the accouterments of their civilization—monarchies, states, money and property ownership, established Christianity, etc.—as the best of all possible worlds. Plato was cited as the authority of the place that agriculture holds in the development of civilization. Their arguments gelled into theories of social evolution promulgated by Turgot.
They write: “By framing the stages of human development largely around the ways people went about acquiring food, men like Adam Smith and Turgot inevitably put work—previously considered a somewhat plebeian concern—center stage. There was a simple reason for this. It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that—at this time—would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labor.”
From the Enlightenment philosophers, the authors then leap into the past 50,000 years of prehistory and what the archeological record has to say about the variety and complexity of human cultures—and they go out of their way to disprove many of the current consensus understandings of how things were in the pre-literate world.
For instance, they point out that non-agricultural egalitarian societies were able to create monuments and cities. The large-scale architectural monuments of the Neolithic, such as Stonehenge, pre-date agriculture in Western Europe. The current archeological data shows that builders of Stonehenge were seasonal foragers and herders. And, although certain individuals merited special burials, overall, there are no signs of social stratification (e.g., larger dwellings—palaces—for leaders, or differential wealth as evidenced by grave goods). The authors make their point by selecting other cultures from around the world. The mound builders in the Mississippi River valley are another example they use. The mound builders were not agriculturalists and although the archeological record shows extensive trade with distant areas, the small luxury goods such as beads found in graves don’t show that anyone lived more richly than their neighbors. Yet another example were the peoples who built large-scale monuments in what are now Syria and Turkey in the 9th Millennium BCE. All these societies mastered projects that required complex logistics and the coordination of hundreds, perhaps thousands of workers, over many years, without any archeological evidence of social stratification.
But the advent of kingship can be clearly seen in the archeological record when suddenly graves are filled with high-status goods, sacrificed servants, and weapons. Around 2800 BCE, kingships started “popping up” (the authors' turn of phrase) in Sumerian cities, and archeological record shows palaces being built, royal inscriptions, aristocratic burials alongside objects of great value, along with defensive walls around cities and militias to guard them. Around 1400 BCE the possibly matriarchal Minoan society was conquered by the Mycenaeans. The open plans of Minoan ‘palaces’ are replaced by walled forts, and the tombs of leaders are filled with grave goods that indicate the new rulers were at the top of the economic and social pyramid.
Another interesting thesis promulgated by the authors is that pre-literate pre-agricultural societies make conscious choices about how to subsist and how to behave. One example is the tribes of northern California (the Yurok and related tribes) who chose to distinguish themselves from the slave-holding Kwakiutl tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Yurok informants made a point of telling anthropologists that they did not condone slavery and that they weren’t status-oriented like their northern neighbors. The authors use the term schismogenesis, coined by anthropologist Gregory Bateson, to describe people’s tendency to define themselves against one another. Examples of schismogenesis run through this work. In the Middle East, warlike hill tribes defined themselves against sedentary city-dwellers and they eventually conquered them and (in many cases) became kings of the city dwellers. In Central America, Tlaxcalans, who had a republican form of leadership, defined themselves against the Aztec imperialists, and they assisted the Spanish in defeating the Aztecs.
A quarter of the book—nearly 150 pages—is devoted to notes and references. Graeber and Wengrow offer up an encyclopedic synthesis of archeological research as a corrective against the myths promulgated by Western social evolutionary thinkers. Not satisfied with popping the bubbles of Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Hobbes, Turgot, and Smith, they take on the modern social evolutionary theorists such as Marshall Sahlins, Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, and Ian Morris. And they conclude it all with an almost revolutionary call to action…
“In developing the scientific means to know our own past, we have exposed the mythical substructure of our ‘social science’—what once appeared unassailable axioms, the stable points around which our self-knowledge is organized, are scattering like mice. What is the purpose of all this new knowledge, if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become? If not, in other words to…create new and different forms of social reality?”
While this reviewer was not fully convinced by some of the alternative hypotheses that Graeber and Wengrow posit for humanity’s various transitions from hunter-gatherers to state-led societies—indeed, their schismogenesis theory seems especially weak—the authors perform a valuable service by conclusively refuting the current social evolutionary narrative. Not only were we impressed by how well they martialed the current state of archeological knowledge, the anthropological literature, and historical record to demolish the established consensus—we were doubly impressed by their audacity in calling for a total rethink of our current political and economic situation.