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.
