My review: the main story and ideas of the book are great, and the many small stories of the book are great too. I have read many of Graeber's books, and it is full of novel ideas.
But, the book could have used a bit more editing. As the arc is coming to an end, many new examples are hastily introduced that don't seem to lead anywhere. The book has a great first half, but the second half is lacking.
I feel like it has all the raw material of a masterpiece, but it is missing the polishing, possibly due to Graeber's unfortunate early passing.
There is an often heard comment that they provide too few data. I find that of little importance. I value novel perspectives on history a lot more. I kind of agree with Graeber that the focus on data succombs to paradox that if you focus on what you can measure, you will automatically look at history with today's eyes, as today is metric-focused.
My understanding was that they published a pile of papers to establish the skeleton of the narrative before it made it into the book. David Wengrow's publication history has a number of papers which rhyme with things in the book, like this one: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1519520/1
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History also has a strong bias towards the status quo. If a new theory is proposed which explains the available evidence with equal ability, the pre-existing idea will typically remain the accepted version of the story. The net effect is that we're prone to get stuck with versions of history originally proposed by phrenologists and worse... When common sense fills in the blanks in the story, you might get stuck with some very bad version of common sense, completely alien to the historical people it's being applied to.
We really should approach history with a bit of the spirit of Rashomon. When we look at it with a too narrow lens, we wind up underestimating the breadth of what's possible.
We know that we don't know virtually anything about ancient history, but yet we still believe that our completely flawed (and often made up) theories must be "challenged" by an insurmountable amount of indisputable evidence.
It is not necessary.
I'm reading the book right now, I'm not an English native speaker so I'm being a bit slow, but I've watched several videos about it (that's how I knew about the book, thanks YouTube) and the first thing that got me excited was that, for the first time since I remember, this theory is not patronizing towards ancient civilizations.
All our building blocks are based on the concept "they couldn't possibly be capable of", while it is now evident that not only they could, but they did.
The second thing I liked about Wengrow was that he acknowledges that questions such as "was there an advanced civilization before the Sumerians?" are legitimate questions, historians and archeologists should embrace that mentality and answer the questions, not try to disprove wild theories proposed by amateurs and sometimes plain crooks. It doesn't necessarily follow that it was the aliens of course, but, AFAICR, at school they taught me that "it was impossible", not that we don't know, but that humans were, in layman terms, "too stupid to even think about it" and in the end the unanswered questions, the fact that people see that the evidence do not add up, lead to the success of people like Graham Hancock, instead of leading people to trusting the hard work on the field of historians and archeologists. It's a vicious circle that I hope this book will break.
As this article points out, most the best environments for humans in the deep past would have been along seashores. These seashores are now about 100 metres below current sea level, so much of the information we need to characterize how those people's lived is beyond reach or accessible only at great cost and effort.
For me the biggest mystery is how and when did language progress because this is what allowed a group of humans to effectively operate as a pseudo single organism. The ability throw stones accurately and with force would also have been critical in defense. Probably even before (pre)humans learned to make sophisticated stone tools.
> For me the biggest mystery is how and when did language progress because this is what allowed a group of humans to effectively operate as a pseudo single organism
Language evolves very early in species. Pigs are known to have ~150 words. And the 'dialects' differ from herd to herd. The words probably start from the expression of or reaction to natural states, desires, situations and motives, and then develop in complexity as the species evolve and its activities become more varied.
We also see primates and chimpanzees act in certain, superstitious ways - throwing things into a certain cave/hole in certain days of a season, arranging objects in certain ways without any utility being present etc. These are thought to be the predecessors of religious beliefs that evolve in later stages of the evolution of a species.
At this point its important to note that species learn from each other as well - some orangutans in some regions apparently have learned how to fish using spears by watching humans, and they are now doing it themselves.
This would mean many primate species likely have learned from each other and exchanged many things, concluding that the evolution of human species was not something that is clear-cut, neat and certain like how the late 19th century science told it in a way that is uncomfortably too close to the Christian dogmatism and certainty.
Its more likely that different species of primates including human ancestors have been using tools, fire and different technologies and practices by learning them from each other by seeing or through actual interaction/coexisting, and the spread of technolog was not instant like how its being implied in our existing perspective. Instead even among the same species of human ancestors its likely that different groups had differing levels of tool use, language use and other practices, whereas other groups have either did not adopt those, were slow to adopt those or outright could have rejected those.
So great variety in the levels of technology among the human ancestors' societies should have been possible. And many more things, really, because our perspective of human history still has not broken out of the late 19th century mold...
"Pigs are known to have ~150 words": Citation needed. I very much doubt that pigs have any words, in the sense that words are known in human languages (repeatable, pretty much the same from human to human in any given language group, discrete, not to mention usable in sentences).
I didn't bookmark that specific reference, but there are many other investigations that approach the topic in different ways and end up with the same result.
I'm about halfway through and it's fascinating. I love a "here is how the dominant paradigm is an over-simplification of reality" story and I also love pre-literary history so I'm finding a lot to enjoy.
It's kinda light on evidence for some things, which isn't great when we're talking about someone they describe as an "activist" challenging mainstream history. For example, it just drops assertions like "The authors also show that the earliest cities in Ukraine and Mesopotamia of the 4th millennium BCE were egalitarian and organised without the presence of kings, temples or royal palaces."
But why are we to believe these societies were "egalitarian"? I mean, the usual understanding of that means a lot more than just living somewhere without a king or a temple. I can imagine a lot of ways for a city without any of these as such to be far less than what most people think of as "egalitarian" and they really need to flesh this idea out a lot more by going over why we should think that and to what degree, because there's a big gap between the modern understanding of the word "egalitarian" and the evidence provided.
Maybe the book does better, if so I'd like to hear that part, but the article is a bit scant here, which is bad when the only thing it is clear on is that this was written by an activist with political motivations.
> But why are we to believe these societies were "egalitarian"?
I haven't read this book, but my understanding is this is usually ascertained from looking at burial grounds, and building remains. Lack of distinction between high status and low status burials is indicative of a society with less stratification. Lack of specialized ceremonial and ruling buildings another.
In the case of the Cucuteni-Tripolye civilization & associated cultures in Ukraine & the Danube, though, my understanding is that there really aren't many graveyards or human remains because they didn't bury their dead, at least not in graveyards. Not until the Yamnaya culture (Indo-Europeans) intruded/conquered/took-over/became-dominant later on. So, I dunno.
But in that culture the lack of palatial buildings and so on does imply the lack of a kingship system. Plus they didn't build walls around their settlements, and there's few artifacts that imply weaponry until much later.
> It's kinda light on evidence for some things, which isn't great when we're talking about someone they describe as an "activist" challenging mainstream history.
I agree. I find it interesting that Graeber makes the same mistake he admonished so many others for - the interpretation of small amounts of historical data through their specific lens with minimal evidence - however, since his perspective is unique compared to much of the mainstream his view feels novel, interesting, and ultimately should open reader’s minds to the idea that their view of the past is exceptionally biased by the paradigm we live in today.
There are alternate paradigms, and the same evidence can be interpreted entirely differently to challenge many preconceptions.
This puts it in a weird place because if you interpret the evidence in light of the theory, it's not really usable as evidence that the theory is right, because it ends up begging the question of why we should believe the theory in the first place.
That said, agriculture did radically transform society, as several other technologies have done since then. I do think this is worth highlighting, it just comes off better when it's not coming from someone trying to sell you on an ideology.
Because I bet that their idea of 'egalitarian' only includes castes like priests and kings, but not men & women, and we know those groups were quite different all over the world until the technology of birth control upended things.
Same. I had read most of it ahead of a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, a state with a strong indigenous presence and a lot of within 3000 years human archeological sites. Although Graeber was writing about a much earlier period, having read the work made it much, much easier for me to build a sociological mental model (wrong, sure, but interesting) to appreciate the sites and artifacts we saw.
What is the value of that model if it's wrong? Just make up your own "paradigm" to fit your 21st century political views, throw in a disdainful mention of "neoliberal" something or other, straw-man centuries worth of history writing you skimmed over in college, and Bob's your uncle.
More to the point, I really like a quote from the Rupert Murdoch character on "Succession"- "The future is real. The past is...all made up."
Even the most carefully documented histories are more or less fiction. Those fictions are retold over the years as old narratives are discredited, and new ones emerge that fit known evidence and are realigned to the gestalt and updated mental models of the time.
The history I had included nothing about pre-historical peoples and their societies which of course existed in spectacular complexity but about which there was really no narrative starting point. Graeber's book creates that.
Just like the history of trade I learned focused on ideas like barter being the basis for economic engagements (rather than credit), a juvenile fiction that Graeber addressed in Debt.
What Graeber did in both works was create a vividly imagined holistic and narratively compelling fiction- with some factual bases- that serves as a useful and improved mental model for non-specialists. Useful even if it is wrong.
I like the overarching argument and continue to recommend the book to people, but it's worth noting that the book really struggles with its factual basis. The authors aren't experts in most of the examples they discuss and their lack of familiarity really shows.
But yes, they definitely take an interesting stance that's worth reading in its own right.
In a sense the fundamental takeaway is: not only history, but also prehistory has been "written" by the subsequent "winners" (interpreting scarce evidence to fit a desired narrative).
It seems very plausible yet it would be really satisfactory if we could piece a more complete picture of these long gone eras
That's why we don't automagically assume "that particular indoeuropean tomb is probably from a male warrior chief" nowadays, and actually do some interdisciplinary research, because we used to assume a lot in the early 20th. And sometimes the "male chief" have female bones. And the "warrior" lance point was probably the rest of a priest baton.
But most archeology we learn come from schoolbooks that are built on those old, often pretty much falsely interpretted discoveries, and pretty much all good research you have to read academia (or look at serious archeology youtube channels, some exists !)
So is the crux of 'critical theory' to not make generalizations? How does critical theory propose to understand general patterns and trends? Ancient tribal societies were (almost?) always led by male warrior chiefs. Critical theory apparently says to focus on the rare exceptions, but won't that just give you an unrealistic view of history?
Inasmuch as critical theory actually causes us to not "assume 'that particular indoeuropean tomb is probably from a male warrior chief'" doesn't that do us a disservice? The tomb __probably__ did belong to a male warrior chief.
> Ancient tribal societies were (almost?) always led by male warrior chiefs. Critical theory apparently says to focus on the rare exceptions, but won't that just give you an unrealistic view of history?
It's sounds like the argument is that this generalization doesn't have lot of basis in evidence, given that it's based on potentially inaccurate identification of remains. If you start with the conclusion that the generalization is correct, then yes, of course it would be silly to ignore it. The question seems to be whether those generalizations are worth assuming at all or not.
Nah, the crux of critical theory is the time, environment and culture of the society that made a discovery influenced said discovery.
That's why we have made so much progress in how we view Celts and different Celt cultures. We use to saw them through a Christo-latin prism, ignoring the fact that they had concubinage contract, could divorce at the initiative of the woman, who get her dowry back in that case. That also had an impact on how we saw their weapons and their woodworking/metalworking, and how their education worked. By the way, Celtic education also have implication about where the "Witch" imagery really came from but i don't care that much about the late antiquity/low middle ages, so i can't tell you much about it.
I was just giving a low-level example of critical theory, but we improved our understanding a lot now that we don't just copy our understanding to people of the time. I think it helped quite a lot our understanding of Neanderthal.
Totally, I agree; huzzah for yt-dlp and appropriate data retention. Still though - if I want to consume relatively digestable archaeological video content, where do I go?
>Totally, I agree; huzzah for yt-dlp and appropriate data retention. Still though - if I want to consume relatively digestable archaeological video content, where do I go?
A fair point. Given the current online media ecosystem, I don't have a good answer for you. :(
From a longer-term perspective, high-speed symmetric consumer internet links can enable decent, distributed/decentralized content without rapacious scumbags like Alphabet.
But it remains to be seen how long that might take to happen.
Until then, (fortunately) there's yt-dlp and its ilk.
One of my favorite works of fantasy is the Malazan Book of the Fallen which was written by an archeologist and it very much shows. I doubt there’s another series in which the word “potsherds” appears more frequently.
I'm about halfway through this book. While it's full of fascinating ideas and information, it's badly in need of an editor. To me, it often reads more like a stream of consciousness than a structured essay. Also, I'm not particularly well-versed in the subject matter, but even I can recognize some of the massive logical jumps that they make based on the evidence that they present.
Had this simply been a book to exhibit new ways of understanding and exploring the merits of prehistoric societies, perhaps it would be more fitting of its title "The Dawn of Everything." I could see this working better in a format more like Charles Mann's 1491. Instead, it attempts to tackle a number of broader questions about modern society while slinging mud at every author in the last five hundred years that's touched upon them. Overall, my impression so far is that Graeber and Wengrow bit off more than they could chew. I want to keep reading for the information they present, but it's been a struggle to stay focused.
I've got 25 pages left to read. It has taken me longer to read than any book in recent memory. It's not badly written, but particularly at the end it looses focus, and consequently I have too. I hope to finish it by the end of the month, but I've been saying that for more than 7 months.
Yep, I started the audio book back in August and just finished it earlier this week... 5 months may be a long time but it's probably shorter than the reign of most chieftains.
Honestly I really disliked the audiobook. The reader was dreadfully drab, even with his impeccable English. Also the book ended up costing me $60 ($15 / mo Audible subscription), even I technically got to listen for free. Most expensive history lesson I've ever paid for.
Does anyone know about an expert, non-partisan (whatever the parties are in the field of pre-history) review of Dawn of Everything? Someone who can summarize the strengths and weaknesses, claims and critiques, etc.?
Not sure exactly, he's done some level of anthropology, but isn't currently an academic as far as I can tell, not sure if he used to be one. His channel is about politics from an anthropology angle.
Daniel Quinn (author of Ishmael) wrote about this sort of thing in a non-scientific sort of way. More from a philosophy standpoint.
But anyway one point he makes that really stuck with me, is that in a hunter gatherer society, you might get a tribe leader or chief or something. But if you dont like what they're doing, you can just leave and be a hunter gatherer somewhere else. No one is depending on any centralised place for food. So you can get complex social structures if thats what everyone wants, but hierarchies are difficult to maintain by force. People will just quit if they dont like it.
Whereas in an agricultural society, you get specialisation of skills which helps towards the sort of thing we now think of as 'progress' but you can also have hierarchies enforced by force because someone or some subgroup ends up in charge of the food and can lock it away, and peoples option to just leave and go and fend for themselves is less feasible and so they get stuck being subjects of some ruler.
TLDR: You dont have to think of hunter gatherer societies as simple or backward. But they are less likely to have deep hierarchies and specialisation
That's a very traditional argument in anthropology and it parallels arguments by people like Boehm. The problem is that studies have repeatedly emphasized just how much more successful we are as social organisms and that resources are not evenly distributed across the landscape. If you go look at modern foragers, what happens is exactly the opposite: if someone start acting like a jerk/despot, people stop sharing resources and make the jerk go fuck off in the forest until they're willing to be more cooperative.
Hierarchies are heavily part of human behavior. The concept of leaders and rank is so ingrained in behavior it's hard to think it didn't exist even in hunter and gatherer societies.
Right now we have enough wealth such that everyone can live comfortably. But a lot of people still fight tooth and nail in the rat race all for what? For wealth partly but mostly for Rank. The higher your rank the better it's a huge driving force emotionally... especially for men. Desire for high rank is an inborn biological instinct. This is confirmed in psychology across all cultures. All men are emotionally more satisfied the higher their rank.
For women it's also a huge driving force for mate selection. Women marry up. They have a strong desire to marry the highest ranking man.
I would imagine in hunter and gather societies rank is maintained by two things. Brute force and social proof. Bigger men have more brute force to maintain leadership (hence why a lot of women are attracted to height) and social proof and respect insures that other men trust you and are more likely to listen to you.
That being said coercion to build things like pyramids or grand multi-year projects of vast scale requires someone to own wealth. This type of serfdom like heirarchy is much stronger then the hierarchies that existed in hunterer gatherer societies. Definitely more stable since wages and survival required someone to stay at their hierarchical post.
Either way hierarchies DID exist in hunter gatherer societies. It's just the tribe leader doesn't have enough power to coerce all men into building a pyramid. That being said I believe the article is disputing this part of what I'm saying but I don't think hierarchies are disputed.
I think the tendency to follow is part of human behavior. The tendency to fight against others telling you what to do is also heavily a part of human behavior. We clearly have both aspects to our nature from a very early age.
There's a lot beyond the tendency to follow that I think of when I read the word 'hierarchies', so it's not clear how strong a claim you intend to make here.
> The concept of leaders and rank is so ingrained in behavior it's hard to think it didn't exist even in hunter and gatherer societies.
Rank, leadership and authority are different things. I've read accounts of rank and leadership without authority, of leadership without rank, of rank without either leadership or authority, of authority without rank (when executing the decisions of a tribal council), etc.
It is indeed hard to imagine that any society didn't have acknowledgement of expertise or impartiality and a measure of deference to it in its own sphere (therefore leaders), and even in a 'egalitarian' society there would be differences in wealth, family size, influence (and therefore 'rank'). But that doesn't necessarily mean a full throated 'hierarchy', at least as I would use the word.
So yes. I was right. everything I'm claiming is opposite of what the book proposes.
Perhaps I'll read it. I will say that what I'm "claiming" is what's claimed by academia. It's the status quo. If DoE doesn't agree then I don't think it's widely regarded as good by academia.
The forward of the book stated this about one of the authors:
"He was an activist and public intellectual of international repute who tried to live his ideas about social justice"
I worry that this book may be under the same light as creationism. An attempt to retrofit evidence such that it forms an awkward scaffold that maintains an existing belief about social justice. The authors clearly have a bias against the academic status quo the same way a Christiaan has a bias against the same thing.
Clearly modern anthropology does run against the grain of what a lot of social justice warriors claim to be true about human nature, so such a hesitation is not out of place.
Nevertheless, a social justice background does not necessarily preclude someone away from unbiased analysis. I will read.
Hierarchies are not, in fact, "heavily part of human behavior". They appear in certain circumstances, and dissipate when the circumstances do. G&W point out that we are brainwashed otherwise. I see it as a case of learned helplessness.
It is deeply evident that big construction projects have often not required hierarchy beyond deference to an architect. The architect need have no coercive authority over anybody for this to work.
The vast majority of modern forager groups are generally considered "egalitarian" and the traditional narrative is that virtually all human societies before the neolithic were relatively egalitarian. That's not to say that they're perfectly egalitarian (it's a spectrum after all), but it's the word you'll find if you open any introductory anthropology textbook that discusses the subject.
Tribes still have leaders, elders, priests and what not. Similar to how apes have alpha males and females with a pecking order. Members of the group have a certain status in the hierarchy, even if resource access is mostly egalitarian. But what happens when you start having a bunch of tribes living nearby on a regular basis? Then you have emergent leadership across tribes. It could be by force or democracy or by whatever means. But human civilization is an emergent phenomenon once you have dense enough populations regularly living in a region.
Those positions don't always exist and even when they do, they'd don't necessarily convey any meaningful benefits of hierarchy. Take the !kung for example [0].
That said, I suspect you'll find that answer unsatisfying. Part of the issue here is that there isn't a single answer to give or a single ivory tower consensus to speak to. If you only want the anthro 101 description you'll find in most textbooks, I already gave it: Modern forager societies are described as "relatively egalitarian". It's not perfect (what simplification for undergrads is?), but it communicates the broad strokes.
If you want a deep, comprehensive dive into the literature, there are dozens of distinct and nuanced perspectives that refine that oversimplified model for particular groups, regions, periods, etc. I have one perspective, DoE advocates another, etc. I'd recommend "Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers" as an introduction to that topic, but really you're going to have to put in a few months of reading to get a good sense of the literature because there ultimately isn't a single framework or even a single set of frameworks that everyone uses. Another good introduction to this question more specifically is Boehm's "Hierarchy in the forest". It's not comprehensive either, but it's sort of a landmark work on the topic.
> Aboriginal people had no chiefs or other centralized institutions of social or political control. In various measures, Aboriginal societies exhibited both hierarchical and egalitarian tendencies, but they were classless; an egalitarian ethos predominated, the subordinate status of women notwithstanding.
There are those that would quibble even with "the subordinate status of women notwithstanding" as being laced with an particular European PoV, the later sentence:
> Women were excluded from the core of men’s secret-sacred ritual activities, and areas of privilege were further defined by graded acceptance of youths and adult men as they passed through rites of learning.
doesn't reflect the reflective reality of women's secret-sacred ritual activities and acknowledged privilege in their rites. )
That's interesting, but the article does say there were also evidence in some areas of male leaders. I guess the question is how typical aboriginal social organization without leadership was of pre-historic humans and whether this still led to emergent leadership among denser populations, like what agriculture would end up supporting.
Easily answered - here is a map of Australian Aboriginal language groups [1] - less "tribes" more large extended family groups with central language and common tongue for neighbours around about ... as you can see there are many.
The article acknowledges that a few specific areas (more toward the PNG and Torres Strait) are more hierarchical but the thrust is clear, few exceptions aside, the bulk were not.
> pre-historic humans
Aboriginal social groups have long oral histories and a number maintained upkeep on some of the oldest rock art known on the planet .. and groups such as the Pintupi Nine that made first contact with "modern civilisation" in the mid 1980s are certainly not "pre-historic" as we have video, interviews, their artwork, etc.
> like what agriculture would end up supporting.
Quasi nomadic "hunter gather" groups have a regular circuit and a deep knowledge of the animals and plants in that area which they tend to in decisive knowlege based manner - it's not "agriculture" as European grain harvesters for winter storage may know it, but it is absolutely agriculture in the sense of tending to plants in order to eat from them and use their products (and the animals that rely upon them) in later seasons and years to come.
Valid. I will say the article states there were still hierarchical tendencies in the societies and leadership is mentioned in that society.
Other then that, How do we know that whether or not Aboriginals in Australia are the norm? Are they the norm or are they the exception. From my perspective the vast majority of societies have hierarchies and by virtue of being the majority it's strong evidence for hierarchies to be the more natural paradigm. Especially when paired with the biological evidence associated with serotonin and hierarchies.
> From my perspective the vast majority of societies
Your perspective as a visitor to many of the 190+ countries across the globe, from speaking to people from many non European language groups, from talking at length online to people with internet connections, .. that experience?
Not from an anthologists perspective. Obviously my perspective is not as in-depth as that. I'm coming from a more general laymans perspective.
If you're saying a more detailed anthropologist perspective can change my viewpoint then I'm open to changing it. However I can't change viewpoint just off of being told that my viewpoint is inaccurate. Even so I think what I say is still true. From both viewpoints it is a fact that the vast majority of modern societies have hierarchies. Is there nuance about this fact that you want to elaborate on?
Also a bit of a branching; Do you know of refutations from the biological and evolutionary perspective? Serotonin and ranking? Primate societies with no hierarchies?
My understanding from listening to anthropologists talk about this sort of thing is that some cultures do not have either fixed leaders or priests. By "fixed leaders", they mean someone who is the recognized leader in most any community operation. Instead, a good hunter may be the leader for a hunting expedition, a good house builder may be the leader when it comes to house building, a good fisherman for a fishing trip, and so forth.
And of course some cultures were so divided that there was no one who spoke for or led the community as a whole. The Waorani and Shuar of Ecuador might have fallen into this situation in the past, possibly less so now.
I have less often heard whether elders are generally recognized as leaders. I suspect that a good hunter is someone who over the course of his life has brought back a lot of meat. That would probably be someone older.
You think the existence tribal leaders, elders, priests and alpha males/females are "doctrine"? Because I'm pretty sure those are factual observations. Maybe you mean to argue they are not necessary or always present in humans or apes. Fine, present evidence this is so and the frequency of such exceptions.
Presidents, popes, and dictators-for-life exist, too. That does not mean that every organized group of people needs one. If you want examples, read the book. It is right there.
But what does a doctrine widely taught have anything to do with whether it's true or false? Clearly you think it's false but do you have evidence? Please present evidence if you do. Examples in biology, similar species or specific civilizations function as good evidence.
There have been myriad societies that consciously chose to dispense with hierarchy, others where hierarchy applied only to one sphere (e.g. religion) and nowhere else, ones where different hierarchies applied in different spheres, and many where hierarchy comes and goes, with no continuity with previous hierarchies.
To be human is to have the power to consciously choose behavior.
Almost every single group I've been part of had leaders. They may have been elected by the group, or more often, appointed elsewhere. The ones that don't have leadership tend to be temporary and disorganized. In situations where this is less temporary, leaders often emerge naturally, as that's how humans typically organize themselves.
We have conscious choice, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that we're part of larger systems that we only have some influence over. It also doesn't change the fact that conscious choice is somewhat biologically driven.
First, I suspect that every group you've been part of has been composed of mostly or entirely white people around your age who speak English. The contention of the book, and from what I understand that of many anthropologists and archaeologists, is that this is atypical, or at least not all that typical.
Also, the book makes a point about ephemeral leadership, either leadership (and the corresponding organization) that is seasonal according to the needs of the time of year, or temporary for a particular task (house building, field clearing, hunting...). Which may be what you're saying in the first paragraph about temporary groups, but they're saying this is the normal--or even only--situation in some cultures, and that furthermore it works just fine.
As for biologically driven choices, I suspect the authors would say that the range of choices is far greater than you might think.
Only English speaking white people tend to be hierarchal? What BS is that? Have you ever been to Asia (or most of Europe)? You think Africans, Middle Easterners or South Americans don't have hierarchies? You think only white people tend to select leaders in groups without one? That's ridiculous and simply wrong. And civilization didn't begin in Europe anyway, it was the Middle East, and then cropped up in five or six separate locations across the globe, including the Americas.
The "past few thousand years" is a tiny fraction of the human timeline. And, the overwhelming majority of even the "past few thousand years" is obscured. What remains is a poster example of selection bias: hierarchical organizations depend more on writing, so the written record is of hierarchical societies.
How many of these groups were of people who did not grow up with fixed hierarchies, and so had developed organizational skills that did not rely on one?
A hierarchy is the laziest choice among ways to organize.
Hierarchies are places where one relies on many. That is the point of a hierarchy... so that a few can control and rely on many. It is the most unfair way to organize.
It is thus very, very convenient for the few that people are conditioned from childhood to believe it is the only way to organize, and announce it freely in print.
A child is well aware of the parent-child hierarchy that is more or less universal across all modern cultures. You've been conditioned by this book to follow a fringe belief.
I think those societies are rare and observations of those societies are inaccurate. There must be hierarchies in those societies, it's just misreported.
This sort of argument--that those reports must be inaccurate, because--well, I'm not sure why you you think these reports are inaccurate, except that you think they must be. And that's not a reason.
I'm also pretty sure any linkage of serotonin to hierarchy is unproven.
>This sort of argument--that those reports must be inaccurate, because--well, I'm not sure why you you think these reports are inaccurate, except that you think they must be. And that's not a reason.
This is just an educated guess. If you provide actual sources I can verify what the academic community thinks of these reports or findings, and really that's the only best available metric I can go off of.
>I'm also pretty sure any linkage of serotonin to hierarchy is unproven.
Science cannot prove anything. Be very careful with your language. Especially in the social sciences where things are less quantitative... proof is fundamentally impossible. There is only evidence in favor of and evidence against.
>Hierarchies are not, in fact, "heavily part of human behavior". They appear in certain circumstances, and dissipate when the circumstances do. G&W point out that we are brainwashed otherwise. I see it as a case of learned helplessness.
I realize Jordan Peterson is controversial but what he talks about here is factual.
Hierarchies are not only observed in modern human societies but in ALL primate societies. From gorillas to chimpanzees. The idea that humans are an exception is very unlikely and categorically False.
Right this is a possibility. More likely though is that he's in a school of thought and you are in another school of thought because Jordan Peterson Clearly isn't the only academic who believes this.
Most schools of thought have valid arguments. I have presented evidence for my school of thought.
If we are being truly unbiased here, you will note you have not presented any evidence to forward your argument. At most you have told me about a person who agrees with you but no real evidence that is in favor of your argument and you have attacked my evidence as false (a statement with also no evidence). If you were truly unbiased and If I was more biased then you then you should have noted this deficiency.
The most unbiased and logical way to rectify this situation involves two possibilities: Present evidence so we can continue the discussion. Or make a statement about how it's not worth your time or some other excuse and the conversation ends with me presenting evidence and you presenting none.
The topic is a book called "The Dawn of Everything". Not reading the book, and then insisting that all the examples presented in the 692-page book do not exist, is not a good look.
What is the point of coming onto this thread other then to see if the book is worth reading or not? It's fair to assume a lot of people on this thread haven't read it.
I never Denied examples didn't exist. I stated your arguments of "you're wrong" prove nothing without evidence. YOU didn't present evidence on this thread; I Did; That's all I said.
I'm sure it's not a "good look" to people who've read the book, but your attitude guarantees that you alienate people on the other side. It is not only a good look to people who believe in the anthropologic status quo, but it's the one look that should matter. I mean are you here just to toot your own horn? This is essentially what I'm seeing from you: "I read the book, you do it too because you're wrong." I came seeking reasons from people like you on why this book should be read.
This book is obviously more of a fringe perspective on anthropology so it does not do you any good at all to project that attitude.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. You did that repeatedly in this thread. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
My opinion is the status quo of anthropology. Your claiming that the opinion is wrong and not inline with reality? Do you have evidence other then something along the lines of "read the book or your delusional?"
I can tell you other people reading this thread who also believe in traditional anthropology aren't liking what your presenting.
At the very least offer something from the book. Wow. Just wow.
Read it or don't. If you don't want to read, look it up on youtube. You are not obliged to educate yourself, but pretending to education you haven't will reliably solicit unwelcome responses.
No one is obliged to do anything. I am saying your attitude makes it so that other people who haven't read the book are less likely to read it when they read your words. You are actively making your viewpoint less popular. You are not obliged to correct or change your attitude. Keep it if you want.
You are also not an educated or unbiased source. There are posts under this topic that lend genuine controversy around the authors of DoE. Your complete and utter failure to acknowledge alternative viewpoints and dismissing questions as uneducated leaves a bad taste in everyones mouth. Especially for some other reader on HN who might've read this book otherwise.
Be real. You can convince people to read a book without having to copy all 600 pages here. Saying that you're incapable of doing so when every book on the face of the earth has summaries, snippets and reviews to promote themselves is just plain dishonest. It's so obviously dishonest that it's, in fact, a form of trolling. I'm sorry, but this conversation is over as this type of thing is against the rules here.
Yes, hunter/gatherer societies routinely lack hierarchies. But settled populations, throughout prehistory and history, have very often also lacked hierarchies, including in places historians insisted otherwise. And, hunter-gatherer societies have sometimes had hierarchies despite the apparent impossibility.
The noble savage is a trope represents the innate goodness of humanity when free from the corrupting influence of civilization. If anything, it's Graeber propagating the noble savage myth. Societies that are smaller have have less stuff are obviously going to have less material inequality. That doesn't mean that they lacked hierarchies and selfishness.
We need not pretend Graeber advanced any notion that hierarchies have never existed in undocumented populations. His point is that they were often lacking in circumstances historians routinely assume, and vociferously insist, hierarchy must have been unavoidable.
Graeber cites example after example, from throughout history and prehistory, of complex societies that displayed no evidence of permanent, pervasive hierarchical organization. It is very common for historians to insist none of that is possible, or just silently assume it without thought.
I keep confusing this book with "The Dawn of The New Everything" by Jaron Lanier. When people started to talk about it on Twitter, I got excited that Lanier's excellent book was having a mini resurgence. Made for an awkward argument with a friend because we had vastly different opinions on the quality of "this" book, until I admitted "maybe I'm just a Lanier fan", to which he replied "who's Lanier?"
All history has a political agenda. “Non-partisan” itself serves to further the legitimacy of Western academia, itself born in service to colonial and neo-colonial projects.
The work of Sylvia Wynter, Ngugi wa Thiong o, Edward Said, Walter Rodney among many others are probably good jumping off points.
Nah. That's just the story the partisans like to construct to make the task of straw-manning competing narratives of history easier. Everyone has some combination of biases, but there are plenty of historians who don't have a political agenda, and they tend to be the good ones, the ones who spend time researching and synthesizing an informed and informative viewpoint, rather than trying to push their ideology though the back door, treating the reader like an idiot who doesn't notice. The latter is a hallmark of both left wing and right wing politicisation of history, equally.
i guess back in those pre-resource-accumulation days, they managed to kill all the charming psycopaths before they became tyrants. Maybe it was the teenage mothers and high infant mortality rate that did it?
Hmm, i don't see how the vitriolic and largely unsubstantiated attack on Harari (where does he even remotely suggest that neoliberal capitalism is the pinnacle of civilisation?!) does the work of Graeber any favor.
In addition to being unsubstantiated, the criticisms of Harari completely mischaracterize his position. The overriding point of the chapter on agriculture in Sapiens is that farming was a huge step back for humans compared to the hunter gatherer lifestyle.
I suspect the the authors of this piece really object to Harari’s framing of agriculture as a step on the path of “human progress”. It would have been more honest to stick to a purely moral and ideological critique in that case, instead of misrepresenting his factual points.
It explained that agriculture allowed people to live in cities, and that for agriculture to work, people had to avoid eating their seeds in the long winter.
Or, as it got lodged in my mind
--
Delayed gratification is the root of civilization.
--
Which saying has been impressively valuable in my life
This is the main topic of James C. Scott's Against the Grain.
James C. Scott and David Graeber are both anthropologists and anarchists. David Graeber might have a lot good mind opening ideas but overall I was less convinced by his narrative.
I just started reading this. I'm hopeful but the forward and the first chapter don't look good.
First off at least one of the authors is into social justice. Social Justice tenants run completely counter to many of the findings of anthropology. It's a source of bias.
Second the first chapter comes from the perspective of introducing a better anthropological narrative given a lack of non-depressing stories of human civilization. I'm here for the truth, I'm not looking for narratives that are good or bad. Literally the book goes into "political implications" of alternative "narratives". I quote:
"HOBBESIAN AND ROUSSEAUIAN VERSIONS OF HUMAN HISTORY HAVE DIRE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS."
all caps literally first chapter. Why even bring up politics at all? Let's talk about truth. The consequence of the truth is irrelevant to the truth.
It could be the authors built this book with a pre-existing agenda.
Whatever, if it has this many accolades I'll read it.
I finished the book earlier this week, and can say it does distance itself from the initial chapters pretty quickly. They are important frames of reference, and I can definitely understand the authors reasons to include those ideas so prominently. Anthropology was developed as a western oriented study, and carries along with it many of the biases and assumptions that only Europeans could have endowed.
The political climates that existed during the colonization of the Americas played an important role in the evolution of modern cultures. The book is filled with examples of different societies and how they formed, and politics has played a role in ever single instance. Regardless of if you agree with the authors’ ideologies or not, they do a pretty good job of remaining neutral when examining historical evidence. I found it a nice change of pace from the typical “westernized” explanations of how civilizations (especially Native Americans) were structured.
Overall I think it’s an excellent read, well worth the investment.
You have to understand the rationale behind the narrative.
If you’re describing a period of 50 years of history, which had 49 years of peace, and 1 year of war, but you’re only focusing on the war. You’re not lying, but are you telling the truth?
And there might be a good justification, in the sense that maybe a lot of sudden changes happened during this period, but you’re still leaving a lot aside.
This view of history although it might present itself as the truth because it’s the status quo, it’s a narrative as it the ones who might succeed it.
And you might not like it, but also had, has and will have political implications.
I feel that the main thing I got from the book is that it made me settle and accept that there is no truth to be had. That the main narratives are much less truthy than I expected. There really is much more diversity in how humans were structured than we can phantom, or reliably reconstruct from the evidence. That is why having a wider spectrum of narratives is more important if you want to learn from the past.
While I knew many of the points and facts in the book, somehow that realization had never stuck before.
History was written be the victors, pre-history even more so. The first chapters have a good point, which gets clearer later on in the book. Much of the historic narrative has been coloured by the way Eurasia thinks in the last 500 years.
And it is stuff I kind of knew or suspected, now I really internalised the idea because of the book. The main idea is obvious in retrospect.
> There really is much more diversity in how humans were structured.
There was diversity, but given behavioral modernity and a sufficient resource surplus, complex social organization seems to have been something close to a human universal. Graham Hancock has pointed out that prehistoric people were capable of large-scale infrastructure projects the remains of which have survived in some form to the present day - and that implies some combination of effective hierarchical organization (required to coordinate the effort of significant numbers of people, well beyond the scale of a single band or troop) and long-term time orientation.
Every time I read a review of this book when it came out, the review author would say something like “wow! great! So exciting, EXCEPT in this area *where I am an expert*, the authors got X, Y and Z badly wrong.”
There were reviews like that when it came out from people in a bunch of disciplines, certainly in anthropology and prehistory included.
Graeber’s prior book about Debt has been widely criticized in my own field. As a result I haven’t felt like it was worth the time to invest in this one even though the topic and the idea seem extremely interesting.
It seems like the authors have an axe to grind and a story to tell and whatever evidence they find against it is either ignored or misinterpreted.
Not sure I trust a book which has activism against the current economic system as a goal. From the sound of it, the book does have some interesting ideas about prehistory that might turn out to be at least partially correct. But then to turn that around and use it as an attack on modern society stops being historical and becomes polemical.
> Not sure I trust a book which has activism against the current economic system as a goal.
Thinking about this, I don't know a single book that has an economical and/or political focus that doesn't in some way or another criticize the status quo or at least challenge our understanding of it. In fact I doubt such a book would be worth reading at all.
I would find such a book worth reading, I think. I came to this book expecting to learn about pre-history. I did learn some of that, but I also got a heavy dose of what seems to me to be ax grinding, along the lines of "Most people other than us have gotten pre-history and its accompanying interpretations of politics etc. wrong." That's interesting, doubtless important (assuming other experts don't succeed in shooting down those interpretations), etc., but it's not the book I was looking for. For me, the interesting part was about 25%, and the other 75% more or less got in the way.
Meaning a critique of capitalism/neoliberalism and hierarchical societies as an inevitable outcome of civilization progressing. So basically, there's other ways to arrange societies, both politically and economically, because pre-historic people did that, and our current global civilization is just one way, that came about because things went a certain way (contingent), but they could have gone other ways.
Therefore, we should reconsider the current setup in favor of alternative models.
So the altenrnative is the idea that capitalism and hieararchical societies is an inevitable outcome of civilizzation progressing, and there are no other ways to arrange societies?
While this is still a popular idea in society at large, I don't think this is in fact an idea supported by mainstream archeology/anthropology/history/whatever other fields would comment on this.
It's not in fact a big outrageous thing for the authors to be challenging this, it's very normal mainstream scholarly consensus. If anything, I think they are getting too much credit for being responsible for something groundbreaking in that basic challenge.
But I agree with your summary of their basic thesis/organizing narrative approach right there. I think it's curious that you first summarized that as an "attack on modern society" though. You feel that to suggest the way society(ies) are organized now was not teleologically foreordained and could have gone other ways -- is to attack modern society?
I think almost anyone writing an account meant to be popularly accessible like this one has __some_ narrative agenda, a point of view on the overall big points or organizing principles.
To compare to Harari... yeah, it would be hard to argue that he has less of agenda, or sticks more to facts over his preferred narrative or ideology.
Graeber was an activist and anarchist, so his motivation is definitely to critique modern society with the hope of it eventually being replaced with something more to his liking. My understanding is that modern society in general (not the specifics) is the most likely outcome of human development over time, in that some sort of technologically advanced global civilization with governments, global trade and militaries was probable once modern humans spread out and colonized the planet, providing no extinction event happened before then. It was just a matter of time before population density and technological advances led to civilization as we understand it, whatever detours that may have taken, and however different it might have played out given various historical contingencies.
My guess is that if there are any technological alien life out there, it likely follows the same general development, at least up to this point (given we don't know how the future plays out and of course just using our history so far, and also allowing for significantly different biologies or climates and geologies leading to divergent outcomes from ours).
> My understanding is that modern society in general (not the specifics) is the most likely outcome of human development over time... It was just a matter of time before population density and technological advances led to civilization as we understand it.
I think most contemporary scholars, definitely in anthropology the discipline that Graeber and Wengrow are operating from, would call that "teleological thinking" and warn strongly against it -- the idea that the way things turned out is the only way they could have turned out, that everything was necessarily leading to this. There is actually nothing particularly innovative or unusual about arguing against it, it's quite mainstream to reject that kind of teleological thinking -- if it's a bias or agenda, it's one that is shared by mainstream scholarly disciplines.
I understand you disagree, but what you are proposing is not a current mainstream anthropological or social science way of seeing things, and to challenge it is in fact quite mainstream.
So again, I think in fact one error is giving Graeber and Wengrow too much credit for being groundbreaking here. They are not being innotivate or unusual in disagreeing with you that "it was just a matter of time" until society wound up as it is -- and scholars don't need to want to make an "attack on modern society" to disagree with you here!
That sounds to me like "most contemporary scholars" are suffering from a misunderstanding of what "teleological thinking" would be (or else it's setting up a straw man). Teleological thinking would mean that there was a goal--either a goal of human beings, or a goal of God, or a goal of some thinking being(s). It's hard to see how a non-religious person could think of history as having a goal.
What those scholars instead seem to be arguing against--assuming I'm understanding your explanation correctly--is that history has directionality, in the same sense that biological evolution has some directionality (thereby creating creatures that are better adapted to their environment, at least until that environment changes). Darwin's idea was to separate the two kinds of directionality, and provide a plausible mechanism for the one.
Same in population density and technological advances leading to "civilization" (the point you're responding to). This is not teleology, this is a sense that hill climbing will eventually lead to a certain outcome (and maybe further outcomes in the future that we can't conceive of now). Whether this is true is, of course, a different question. But calling it "teleology" is missing the point.
I'm not claiming there is a goal to history or evolution. I'm talking about emergent systems. Ecologies are an example. So are ant colonies (particularly the super colonies) and human civilizations. Nothing planned them, they just emerge under the right conditions, which humans created by migrating all over the world, developing more sophisticated technologies, and transferring that knowledge to future generations and other connected groups via trade, warfare, etc.
> I understand you disagree, but what you are proposing is not a current mainstream anthropological or social science way of seeing things, and to challenge it is in fact quite mainstream.
I'm not aware that they disagree with the idea that more complex social structures emerge over time. Of course it doesn't have to happen, say if an extinction event had occurred or a permanent ice age prevented the right conditions from coming about.
Having read the book:Pro:It's a great question and mission.I'm sympathetic to their general critiques and main points e.g.:
- prehistoric human were just as smart and creative as us
- there's a ton to learn from them.
- there is not enough evidence to accept an inevitable path to a state with ever growing power.
- prehistoric people tried a bunch of different societal types we can hardly conceive of.
- We should strive to be as experimental and playful.
- There is interesting new evidence in there (e.g. about potentially non-authoritarian per-historic societies)
Con:
- Evidence / word ratio very low
- Authors have a HUGE Ax to grind. even if I like some portion of that axe, I can't afford to trust them, they are more biased than the folks they attack (not that I like Yuval Harari so much either...)
- Poor reasoning processes: 1)X is conceivable 2) Y might be evidence of X, 3) (Much later) As we demonstrated: X is True
- Super repetitive
So net, I'd say read a few reviews (e.g. Tides of History) and skip the actual book, and hope we can find some better avatars for this mission.
Go listen to some Mike Duncan podcasts.
> prehistoric human were just as smart and creative as us
This. The educational system, willingly or just incompetently manages to instill a sense that human intelligence somehow grows monotonically with historical time. Maybe thats because it is conflating it with knowledge accumulation and never bothering to make a clear distinction.
In fact its very plausible that 30000 years ago some homo sapiens had a discussion around a campfire that was as intelligent as your average HN thread :-)
I agree with your sentiment, but I think you're under-emphasing the power granted our reasoning ability from knowledge (theoretical concepts) and writing (seekable communication).
Part of what I know about basic statistics I got from an old book. I would not be able to draw on those concepts and present a coherent argument if my experience and communicative tools were limited to what they would have been 30,000 years ago.
That said, they may have had very intelligent and nuanced discussions about specific topics, like immediately human experiences such as illness, politics, fashion, love, etc.
The starting point is that our brain was (probably) more or less as today, hence in principle capable of cognitive tasks of similar "quality" or complexity. But there is no doubt that what these capabilities were applied to might feel very exotic or even uncomfortable to us. E.g., Graber makes this point in particular in relation to social relations. A lot of modern society would probably look like totally brain damaged to them in terms of emotional / social intelligence. We have also the examples of very elaborate religious / theological discourse, which seems to have been a major preoccupation for the longest time.
On the other hand there are definitely cultural inflection points (like writing or numeracy) that seem to have reshaped the ability of a trained brain in a very short period of time. E.g. if you compare writings from the same civilization / region just several hundred years apart (Homeric poems vs Classic Athenian philosophy) its hard to believe its even the same species...
Politics emerges naturally when a group of people in constrained by time to perform only a subset of a large selection of activities; children are political about what to play.
For as long as there has been humans, there has been politics.
> I agree with your sentiment, but I think you're under-emphasing the power granted our reasoning ability from knowledge (theoretical concepts) and writing (seekable communication).
The 2 party corrupt form of politics that is the mainstay in US does not require reasoning ability beyond the ability of a 30'000 Homo Sapien?
It might my definition of politics but I doubt very much that what our ancestors were practicing 30k years ago wasn't politic in any sense that we could understand.
Communally sharing knowledge about watering holes and what the next door tribe was doing was probably more along the lines of what was discussed.
Societal informational interchange isn't politic. Politic is, for me, a group of people coming together (I.e. The ruling class) and deciding what the group as a whole (i.e. Everyone else) should be doing.
I detect a parallel with the monotonic, cumulative evolution depicted in the typical image that has man at the apex of a pyramid of evolution. As pointed out in "Wonderful Life" (about the Burgess Shale), evolution has been very different from this.
> The educational system, willingly or just incompetently manages to instill a sense that human intelligence somehow grows monotonically with historical time.
Grade inflation has a lot to answer for. It's a serious problem in the UK but understandable, all statistics are designed to bolster the image of the organisation producing them.
Not individual human intelligence as in capability, but certainly in terms of culture, the knowledge has grown exponentially since then. 30,000 years ago people weren't sitting around the campfire talking about deep learning models, quantum mechanics, or how long the ancestors of Native Americans lived in Beringia.
>This. The educational system, willingly or just incompetently manages to instill a sense that human intelligence somehow grows monotonically with historical time.
Several remarks here. It is growing with time. Average IQ grows every year such that they have to re-normalize it all the time. This is on a very short timescale though.
Second, there is logic behind an actual theory that prehistoric humans were actually SMARTER then modern day humans. A human back in the day had much more to deal with in order to survive. Nowadays you can get away with working at menial and repetitive jobs. This implies that there is less recent evolutionary pressure for maintaining high intelligence indicating at the possibility of humans becoming stupider in modern times.
Like I said in another comment, I'm only halfway through. I'm not sure what the denouement is going to be or where they are going to take the evidence that there have been urban civilisations that were not ruled by kings or other hierarchical power arrangements and resolve it with the present, but their goal to show how the Hobbesian and Rousseauian views of human history are not supported by evidence only needs a single counter example and I feel they've supplied plenty.
I think their mission of puncturing the grand narratives of the evolution of human society is a good one, and I think they have the evidence, but I'm not sure it's going to have any effect in the long run.
The Christian often sees the Devil around every corner.
The socialist sees capitalism.
The capitalist sees socialism.
Something like that....
Being so fashionable to bash on capitalism these days, I can't help suspecting that it is an opposing ideology, rather than truth or facts, driving the bus.
Interesting to consider pre-Athens democracy.
I'm not so sure Gobekli Tepe overthrows the idea of an agricultural revolution. It just changes its texture. We are, after all, all agriculturalists now. And 3000 years is _not_ a long time for an anthropological "revolution"!
But, the book could have used a bit more editing. As the arc is coming to an end, many new examples are hastily introduced that don't seem to lead anywhere. The book has a great first half, but the second half is lacking.
I feel like it has all the raw material of a masterpiece, but it is missing the polishing, possibly due to Graeber's unfortunate early passing.
There is an often heard comment that they provide too few data. I find that of little importance. I value novel perspectives on history a lot more. I kind of agree with Graeber that the focus on data succombs to paradox that if you focus on what you can measure, you will automatically look at history with today's eyes, as today is metric-focused.