December 2023
*The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Greaerber and David Wengrow
My book group is reading this. While I find it overly polemical, and prone to rather sweeping statements about what is “commonly” believed, it has interesting material in it, and provokes some interesting perspective shifts. I looked at a couple of reviews, and one concluded by calling it “a glorious mess.” I’d say “interesting mess” is more apropos.
Here is an excerpt that captures a good bit of what I think is correct:
In short, there is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from actual forager egalitarianism.[…]
David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, p.251-252
It turns out the process was far messier, and far less unidirectional, than anyone had guessed; and so we have to consider a broader range of possibilities than once assumed.
[…]
Experts now identify between fifteen and twenty independent centres of domestication, many of which followed very different paths of development…
At the same time, it feels to me like the authors have raised an army of straw men which they are chopping down one by one. It only seems accurate if we go back to the conception of history that I learned in grade school… now, and for the last many decades, I think they paint with far to broad a brush when depicting what most historians believe.
Here are some more impressions, mostly jotted down in passing as I read
- Rather Polemical. After the first chapter I am not finding myself very keen on the book, although I don’t think it will be a waste of time either. It is quite polemical, which, in my view, means that the point of the book is to promote a particular perspective and argument, rather than a more dispassionate examination of history. While I don’t think there is such a thing as an objective history (or anything else), I do think that authors can make an effort to take a balanced approach. Here, I’m noticing a lot of sweeping statements which I find suspect. And also the use of what I suspect are straw man. I also note that a few pages after the authors criticize other historians for cherry picking data and using annecdotes, they themselves use anecdotes, and don’t seem at all critical about their conclusions.
- An example of the lack of rigor on the authors’ part. The case in point is their argument that when people were kidnapped by Native Americans, most choose to stay with, or left and then returned to their former captors. The authors use this to buttress their claim that indigenous societies were superior in terms of quality of life. But there are many objections the could be raised (and ought to be raised by someone trying to address the question with any degree of rigor. One is the anecdotal nature of the evidence. A second is that with kidnappings, it seems likely there is a sampling bias: a kidnapped person who returns to his or her captors is news; kidnapped persons who return to their birth families and cultures are not nearly as newsworthy. It is also the case that kidnapped people were most likely (as I understand it) to be adopted into the families of high ranking members of native societies, and that not having the concepts of race that euro-americas society did, that may have left them in a relatively privileged position; it is also the case that in returning to their birth-societies the former kidnapped may have had to contend with stigma due to being raped, being married to natives, etc.
- Influence of Indigenous Cultures on European Thinking. One of the interesting points that has been made is the claim that Europeans were strongly influenced by reports and descriptions of the Indigenous North American cultures, and particularly the degree of independence and autonomy they had. There were quite a few lengthy accounts of such cultures in wide circulation, and also — in the 15th, 16th and 17th C’s — Europeans were much closer to (if not still embedded in) the notion of hierarchy and the divine right of kings. Reports of socieities where this sort of organization was not prominent may well have had an impact. Very interesting.
- Humans have been intelligent, innovative, etc,. throughout their entire history. One of the recurring themes in the book — with which I am in agreement — is that ‘primitive’ peoples were every bit as intelligent, creative and diverse as people are nowadays. The idea that hunter gatherers stumbled around in a semi-conscious state scrabbling for roots and berries seems, for the most part, quite diverse.
- There has been a great diversity of social arrangements. Another claim that is being made — though I so far don’t see much hard evidence for it — is that there were extremely diverse social arrangements. While I am willing to believe that there were early societies — e.g. early agriculturalists — that did not have centralized rulers and embedded elites, and while I’ll certainly buy there were many modes of social organization, it has not yet been shown that decentralized societies could manage the large scale infrastructures needed to support life in many areas. Nor has it been shown why a hunter-gatherer culture in a land of plenty would not tend to expand beyond the carrying capacity of the land, and then be forced to develop agriculture and related infrastructure.
- Foraging bands can come together into temporarily more complex groupings. Interesting evidence is presented that forager bands would come together in massive encampments (e.g., in the Mississippi valley) to engage in various sorts of exchange, but without accompanying evidence of agriculture or permanent settlement or centralized governance. At the same time, it is not clear that the lack of evidence for, say, palaces or temples or administrative complexes necessarily means that some form of centralized control was not operative.
- Schismogenesis. They argue for the notion that cultures, particularly adjacent cultures, may take their form because they are trying to distinguish themselves from other cultures with which they differ. This argument is made, pretty effectively in my view, with regard to indigenous cultures in California (primarily dependent on tree crops) and the Pacific Northwest (‘the Fisher Kings’) and their differing approaches to social hierarchy, slavery, and wealth.
- No agricultural revolution. There appears to be pretty good evidence that in the ‘fertile crescent’ the shift from foraging to agriculture took 3 millennia, even though, in terms of cereal crop adaptation it could have taken no more the 3-4 generations…. The claim is that for a long period, cultures that pursued foraging and hunting along with a little bit of cultivation and perhaps herding were the norm.
- Ignoring Climate Change… “” This ignore the fact that there was a medieval dry period that impacted southwest North America and would have impacted the irrigation=dependent civilizations…
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