In Search of Deep History
Finding early 21st century woke tropes
This book promises a lot. It promises to turn upside down the reader’s understanding. It promises to reveal hitherto concealed facts about early human civilization. It promises to undercut the conventional understanding of the history of early human civilization. It promises to tell us how we got “stuck.”
“Stuck” is a favorite word of the authors. “Stuck” is used 16 times. “Stuck” is a kind of criticism of modern Western society, as the authors imagine it. For example, they write the following:
Second, we’ll start answering the question we posed in the last chapter: how did we get stuck? How did some human societies begin to move away from the flexible, shifting arrangements that appear to have characterized our earliest ancestors, in such a way that certain individuals or groups were able to claim permanent power over others: men over women; elders over youth; and eventually, priestly castes, warrior aristocracies and rulers who actually ruled?
— The Dawn of Everything (p. 121)
So, how do they do?
This should have been a “gosh-wow!” book that stunned the mind with the idea that time is vast and the past is a different country. Unfortunately, because Graeber and Wengrow filter “deep history” through an “Occupy Wall Street” agenda, my answer is: “not very well, in my opinion.”
What got me interested in the book was the promise to reveal human “deep history” — history before the last approximately 7,000 years. Scholars can sketch out a trace of human history up to around 5,000 years BCE. Before that time, things get sketchy. For example, Jericho appears to be the oldest such community that we have evidence for. We know that Jericho has been more or less continuously occupied since 9400 BCE. [1] By 8000 BCE, with about 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants, Jericho could be called a “town.” The age of Jericho means that by the time the “ancient” Hebrews allegedly arrived at the walls of Jericho around 1200 BCE, Jericho had a history that went back a further 8,000 years.
In other words, by the time Jericho shows up in the Bible, Jericho is already almost twice as old as all recorded human history.
Ponder that.
History is deep.
Jericho’s history is dwarfed by still deeper human history. Prior to the founding of Jericho, humans had been wandering the landscape of the region for a further 40,000 years.
What were they doing? [2]
I purchased this book with the hope of finding out. Unfortunately, Graeber and Wengrow are less interested in telling us about what science has to say about the deep human past than in using an imagined past — both deep and far more recent (substantial attention is paid to the attractions of North American Native culture during and after the 18th century) — as a foil against modernity.
For example, the book begins with a critique of Rousseau and Hobbes’ notion of the “state of nature.” Neither philosopher intended the idea of the state of nature to be historical. Rather, they used the state of nature — a hypothetical condition of equality that existed before human communities — as a way of critiquing their cultures.
Similarly, Graeber and Wengrow critique Rousseau to argue that the idea of a primitive condition of human equality is a mistaken quest. Although they acknowledge that Rousseau didn’t think such equality ever existed as a matter of history, the authors spend a lot of time and effort arguing that we won’t find such equality in the past.
As an attack on a strawman, they win the point.
However, they go on to create their version of an ur-condition of human equality, but this time “equality” is labeled “freedom.” They write:
Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck? If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?
— The Dawn of Everything (p. 519)
So, we are now “stuck” but previously we were not “stuck.” What did things look like before we became “stuck”? They write:
Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
— The Dawn of Everything (p. 503)
It is hard to see where Rousseau would disagree with this new formula.
Where is the evidence for this formula? How do we know that Og the Mammoth Hunter on the glacial steppes of Ukraine had the freedom to shape entirely new social realities?
Good question. If you aren’t paying attention, you might think that Graeber and Wengrow have provided an answer. They offer a lot of anthropological examples which give the impression that they are marshaling evidence. They offer examples from the Wendat, California versus Northwest Indians, Egypt, Sudan, Gobekli Tepe, etc., etc.
This isn’t hard for them to do since they have all of human history to cherry-pick. What they don’t offer are counter-examples that prove their point or some logical demonstration as to why these three freedoms are basic and actually existed in deep history. [3]
It seemed to me that while Graeber and Wengrow were criticizing other anthropologists for projecting their biases into their theories, they were doing the same. In spotting this, it is worth noting that Graeber was heavily involved in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. I didn’t know this until after I had finished the book. However, there were red flags throughout the book that made me suspect that this book was aiming at indoctrination rather than objectivity.
One such “tell” was the resurrection of Marija Gimbutas’s hoary The Goddess and Gods of Old Europe (1982). While Gimbutas has always been popular among the feminist left and people who want to feel smart in having their biases confirmed, her theories that Europe was occupied by matriarchal Goddess-worshippers until the nasty Indo-Europeans invaded an imposed patriarchy and Sky God were rejected by anthropologists.
Graeber and Wengrow attempt to rehabilitate Gimbutas via “recent research” on DNA that shows that there was an influx of invaders into Europe. What they don’t explain is how this proves a matriarchal society was overturned. No one, to my knowledge, ever denied that there were population invasions. Long before DNA research was possible, no one disputed that the intrusion of the Indo-European language family into Europe meant that a new population had arrived.
What’s going on here is that Graeber is, and Wengrow may be, a man of the left. As a leftist, Graeber owns fairly conventional post-modern attitudes about feminism, colonialism, the evils of patriarchy, and the rest of the social imaginary package that constitutes the evils of modernity. The authors also know that they are going to score major points if they beat the feminist drum. All that is missing is some evidence of this matriarchal culture. [4]
It is confirmation bias as far as the eye can see. Thus, they offer the example of the Iroquoian longhouses being run by a council of women. This may be surprising to the average person but I read anthropologist Marvin Harris’s excellent Cannibals and Kings back in the 1970s. Harris described the Iroquois as an exception because their men were often away from home on raiding parties. In other words, there was a reason for this exception. They don’t mention this, and I suspect that we will find similar reasons apply to the scant other examples they mention, such as the Hopi, Zinu, and Minangkabau, “a Muslim people of Sumatra.” [5]
By the way, what do these examples have to do with Gimbutas’ thesis? Nothing. We can’t infer from a handful of exceptions to an unknown group as if it were a matter of deductive reasoning. This point is particularly germane when the reader understands that it is a key part of Graeber and Wengrow’s argument that social forms are not determined; rather, social forms just happen (perhaps because the intelligent hunter-gatherers tried one form, disliked it, and moved to another form, and sometimes because we got “stuck” for some reason).
Graeber and Wengrow also offer the Cretans as a matriarchy based on Cretan paintings depicting women as larger figures and smaller male figures as bowing toward them. What this shows is aristocracy. According to other sources, in Minoan art, both male and female figures are depicted as larger than the other figures who are serving the larger figures.
Could Crete have been a matriarchy? Sure, but my problem is that this sounds like a lot of anthropology I read as a child in the 1960s that depicted the Mayans as peaceful. Later anthropology revealed the bloodletting, wars, and human sacrifices of the Mayans. It is not the case that Western scholars are always projecting racially inferior stereotypes into non-Western culture. A lot of anthropology involves using the imagined non-Western culture as an example of a utopia that the West missed out on having.
Sort of like what Graeber and Wengrow are doing in this book.
Graeber and Wengrow are particularly obnoxious on this front when they fall for the Kandiaronk hoax. Kandiaronk was a “Wendat Philosopher-Statesman” — an Indian chief — who befriended the French in approximately 1683. A Frenchman named Baron de la Hontan (Lahontan) purportedly transcribed conversations between Kandiaronk and the Governor General. Surprisingly, Kanriaronk turns out to have been the very model of the Enlightenment philosopher, with piercing comments about inequality and money.
Graeber and Wengrow discount the possibility that Kandiaronk was what moderns would call a “sock puppet” used by Lahontan to put his ideas into circulation, but this kind of thing was an established industry at the time. Lahontan’s account may be accurate, but if that were the case, it would have been exceptional in that regard. David Bell, who teaches on the French Enlightenment at Princeton, has this to say:
The error that Mann makes — and that Graeber and Wengrow uncritically repeat — is in some ways an understandable one. It can be very tempting to mistake Western critiques of the West, placed in “indigenous” mouths, for authentically indigenous ones. The language is familiar, and the authors know exactly which chords will resonate with their audience. Genuinely indigenous critiques, coming out of traditions with which people raised in Western environments are unfamiliar, can seem much more strange and difficult. The reductio ad absurdum of this mistake comes when people take as authentically Native American the words of Pocahontas, in the Disney film of the name: “You think you own whatever land you land on / The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim…”
The error is also — of course — deeply political. It fits what Graeber and Wengrow describe in their conclusion as a principal aim of the book: to “[expose] the mythical substructure of our ‘social science,’” and to reveal, contrary to what social scientists insist, that humans still have “the freedom to shape entirely new social realities.” Many Native Americans in the time of Kandiaronk still possessed this freedom, they claim. European societies, meanwhile, were incapable of real self-criticism. It took the wise Huron to open Western eyes to the possibility of a genuinely revolutionary politics. Graeber and Wengrow themselves now want to play a similar role.
Unfortunately, if their treatment of the Enlightenment is any indication, in pursuing this goal they are willing to engage in what comes perilously close to scholarly malpractice. I don’t have the expertise to comment on Graeber and Wengrow’s arguments about matters other than the French Enlightenment, but the quality of their scholarship on this subject does not bode well for the remainder of the book, to say the least.
Other scholars offer searing criticism in their area of specialty. For example, Graeber and Wengrow claim that Europeans, unlike Indians, would often stay with the other culture when given the opportunity. This claim — which will bury itself in many minds like a virus or earworm — is based on a doctoral dissertation that says that there was no difference between the cultures — no matter what culture the person came from, they wanted to go home.
The treatment given to Karl Marx is noteworthy. Graeber and Wengrow argue against economic determinism but they never call out Marx on that point. Instead, he gets treated with deference as one of the people with the courage to say “slightly ridiculous” things. This is the “dog that didn’t bark” since most anthropology is “Marxist,” not in the sense of advocating “from each according to the ability, to each according to their need,” but in the sense of a willingness to correlate cultural developments to economic realities. Marvin Harris, whom I mentioned earlier, falls into this category.
But Graeber and Wengrow have nothing to say about how their discipline got “stuck” by adopting Marx?
And what is this “stuck” anyhow? Apparently, in the past, people could boldly re-imagine their society and make changes if they chose.
We can’t do that, which is why slavery was not abolished in America in 1865, serfdom wasn’t abolished in Russia in the 1850s, and a virulent form of social organization that subordinated everything to the State didn’t collapse in Europe in 1989. It’s also why no one has ever tried to form communes, some of which have been successful for decades.
What the bleep are Graeber and Wengrow talking about?
This is not to say that there are no virtues in this book. There are nuggets of information. I didn’t realize that California Indians did not rely on the “three sisters” form of agriculture, for example. It is clear that the idea of an “agricultural revolution” leading to sedentary communities is not entirely accurate — although there may still be a positive correlation between the two. James C. Scott, who is given deferential treatment by the authors, has a lot of interesting things to say about this in Against the Grain.
The idea of “schismogenesis” may be a useful addition to the anthropological lexicon:
Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘schismogenesis’ to describe people’s tendency to define themselves against one another.
— The Dawn of Everything (pp. 56–57)
On the other hand, I can see where it applies to direct interactions, but the authors apply it to explain the differences between California Indians and Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Most Indians in these two “cultural areas” would never interact with each other. Why didn’t this effect lead to a checkerboard pattern of cultural differentiation?
But on the whole, The Dawn of Everything didn’t address my interest in “deep time.” When the book moved into things I knew, it was wrong or overly simplistic.
I cannot recommend this book
Footnotes:
[1] Jericho was not alone during this period. The “megalithic enclosures” at Gobekli Tepe were raised around 9,000 BC and then “modified over the centuries.” The construction of such megaliths implies the cooperation of a large number of humans over an extended time, which implies that there was a community at Goblike Tepe for a lot of that time, albeit the community may have been seasonal.
[2] Mostly, they were wandering around as hunter-gatherers, although, as with Gobekli Tepe, there appears to have been other Ice Age settlements in Ukraine where enough mammoth meat was processed to feed “hundreds of people for around three months.” These were not settled communities, but they should erase the notion that before agriculture, humans never congregated in groups of more than ten to twenty people. That said, the authors don’t tell us how common these larger congregations were, or whether the typical Ice Age human would have experienced even one such gathering in their lifetime. It may be prudent not to overstate the significance of this evidence.
[3] And, really, would they be basic? As Aristotle pointed out in Politics, families are more basic to shaping humans than states are. Does anyone experience these three basic freedoms inside the family? Why would we imagine that people shed the structures they are “stuck” in within the family and can boldly reimagine themselves as socialist anarchists? It is only with the wealth and security provided by modern Western states that such a thing can be imagined.
[4] Instead of evidence, they play the Mote and Bailey game with Gimbutas’ argument. You may think that she was talking about Goddess worshipping matriarchs (the Mote) but really she was just talking about far less, namely whatever evidence implies that women had any role in society (scurry back to the Bailey.)
[5] This is an example of cherry-picking. Graeber and Wengrow imply that these are illustrative of their points when in fact they exhaust the examples. They are the exceptions that prove the rule.
