The pretentious title to this fat paperback (526 pages +150 pages of notes) does not suit what it is really about. It is not about “dawn”, the planetary phenomenon, nor is it about every thing because it is about how humans have formed communities and states. Its subtitle is “A New History of Humanity”. I bought it because for some time now I have been following the archaeology of early humans in Africa, specifically at Sibudu near Durban. So, I expected something more about the migrations and material culture of early humans. Instead, I found a provocative book of comparative anthropology which challenges accepted notions of the human march of “progress”.
The early pages point to alternate versions of the human story: each basically explain why humans mess up. The first is the Biblical myth that once we lived in the garden of Eden until tempted to sin. The second goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754) who argued that we moved from being happy savages (hunter-gatherers) to living in coercive states (with armies, taxes, cruel potentates). Anthropology and Archaeology fill in the details of the easy living of hunter-gatherers and of the impressive monuments left by past potentates.
A fall from innocence
The story (eg Guns, Germs and Steel by J Diamond) is that once people had clumped together for agriculture, they needed armies, bureaucracy, defensive walls and got plagues too. As they increased trade and industry, they also got the grime and grinding work-hours of the industrial revolution: indeed, a fall from innocence. The third story, as argued by Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) is just as pessimistic: primitive living was “nasty, brutish and short”, and progress is only possible through forming strong states, a view which fits “the Big Man” view of history, for monarchists and fascists.
This book argues against all three, and points to evidence of alternative versions of civilised society. Interestingly, the first argument for this comes from the encounters between the French (Jesuits and colonial governors) and native Americans, specifically the Wendat, from the 17th century in Canada (New France). The source is “Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense,” a memoir (1703) of the French colonial Lahontas reporting on the arguments of Kandiaronk, a Wendat diplomat, who summarised criticisms of French society.
Property rights
“Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery…in the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as look at silver?”
In other words, this Wendat sage had spotted that property rights are the basis of European societies. The book even hints that Kandiaronk’s arguments, specifically, were an influence on the Enlightenment thinkers, the philosophes, whose writings eventually provoked the French Revolution.
One of the writers of this book, David Graeber, was notorious for his anarchist arguments – against the inequalities of societies of property owners protected by strong government. (He is rumoured to have lost his professorship at Yale because of his political support for the Occupy movement.) However, his arguments stack up with lots of evidence from recent research into pre-colonial American societies, both those like the Aztecs and Inca empires recorded in history and in their massive buildings, and those more equal societies like the Wendat and others that emerge from archaeological digs.
Schismogenesis
There is a whole discussion on the contrast between the tribe of the North West coast of America, the Kwakiutl, and those of the Californian countryside, the Yurok. The coastal people, salmon fishers, are famous for their dazzling ornamentation and display, conspicuous consumption (the potlatch feasts), vying chiefs, and slave-raids. The Yurok were farmers with a strong work ethic, keen on equality, and avoiding money. From this, the book develops the concept of schismogenesis as an explanation for social organisation. In contrast to an explanation that is basically materialistic (technology pushes humans into certain types of social organisation), schismogenesis assumes that humans are intelligent agents who can argue about and plan for different modes of living and government. The Yurok thus organised themselves to be different from the Kwakiutl. The book then points to more evidence of schismogenesis in other societies around the world.
There is also an interesting take on the story of the Neolithic agricultural revolution, with evidence from the zones of the Fertile Crescent. The popular simplification is that once humans realised how to produce surplus food by cultivating fields and keeping animals – hey presto, civilisation was on the march, with towns, armies and empires eradicating the simple savages. But research shows that for centuries small human communities were “play-farming”, where selective foraging slid into gardening (probably led by women), without ploughs, on seasonal wet-lands. Meanwhile in the hills or mountains nearby other (male-dominated) tribes continued their hunting and slave-raiding – in schismogenesis with the plains people.
Global range of evidence
The writers’ range of evidence stretches around the globe. One of them, David Wengrow, is a professor of comparative archaeology at University College, London. It is pointed out that palaeolithic culture areas, for example aboriginal tribes in Australia, cover a huge range of territory. Even in Mesolithic and Neolithic eras people traded and had hospitality obligations over huge zones. Cultures contracted with the growth of cities, from about 6,000 years ago.
What is surprising however is how different these cities are: there is not one mode of civic government or of ranking of housing.
Archaeology from Ukraine has revealed differentiation. On the one hand, there are the treasure-laden tombs of warrior kings and on the other the “mega-sites” occupied for eight centuries. Why are they not called cities? Because, say the authors, they are less “complex”. They show no evidence of central administration, communal storage, fortification, monument or temple. Their houses, more than 1,000 in one case, are all of the same size, but individually decorated. Their society was by no means simple: they cultivated, kept animals, traded and avoided deforestation. But there is no evidence of ranks, of government, of bureaucracy. The suggestion is that they governed themselves in a circular arrangement, similar to that still evident in Basque villages, rotating tasks with neighbours to the right and left.
Who is more civilised?
Here in the latter chapters of this book, the Graeber’s anarchist philosophy comes to the fore with his thinking about what features contribute to government, analysed as sovereignty, administration and charisma. Various historic civilisations had different combinations of this trio: some had charismatic strong leaders, sovereigns without much administration. Others had writing and started to tally the tax revenue. In a “coda” on civilisation, it is pointed out that it is odd that the term is always applied to societies that “were deeply stratified, held together mostly by authoritarian government, violence and the radical subordination of women.” But the evidence in the book is that all over the world small communities formed civilisations in that true sense of extended moral communities. There is then a page-long list of inventions and developments that originated in these small egalitarian communities. Who is more civilised? The village is the engine of human progress, not the empire.
Egalitarian small societies
The book is a deeply engaging read for the way it overturns assumptions made by European thought-leaders (under the influence, be it noted, of the imperialistic empires of their own times, about human progress). It is on the side of Kandiaronk in the critique of goldrush property-prizing societies. But I am unsure how the village-up thinking can be applied to the complexity of modern economies and supply chains.
Sad to say, one of the author’s, David Graeber, died during the Covid epidemic, so we will not see another book with his unique blend of wide, and deep, grasp of worldwide archaeology combined with respect for the ability of humankind to organise themselves into egalitarian small communities.
