Graeber was an anarchist and anthropologist, who just passed away, and Wengrow is an archaeologist. They combined to write this big book that seeks to overturn much of the commonly assumed narrative of humanity’s progress through the ages. Graeber and Wengrow make a convincing case against the Whig theory of linear history. “Most people who write history on a grand scale seem to have decided that, as a species, we are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves.” Instead, Graeber and Wengrow argue that humanity’s evolution was full of contingency and active choices made at individual points of time by actual humans, not a preordained path through successive stages of development. “There is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian — or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents, or even bureaucracies. Statements like these are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even laws of history.”
Graeber and Wengrow first deal with the history of inequality. “‘The origin of social inequality’ is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve…. The terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World…. What we’re going to suggest is that American intellectuals — we are using the term ‘American’ as it was used at the time, to refer to indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere; and ‘intellectual’ to refer to anyone in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas — actually played a role in this conceptual revolution.”
Graeber and Wengrow begin way back. “What the existence of similar patterns in the Paleolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities…. You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.” Graeber and Wengrow suggest that social groups, throughout prehistory, consciously divided their politics, often as seasonal changes demanded and, often, with checks and balances and/or polycentric spheres of order to regulate and curb grabs for power. Some “had self-consciously organized in such a way that the forms of arbitrary power and domination we associate with ‘advanced political systems’ could never possibly emerge.”
Graeber and Wengrow give agency to the prehistoric humans who made active choices about how to organize their own social lives. “One important factor would seem to be the gradual division of human societies into what are sometimes referred to as ‘culture areas’; that is, the process by which neighboring groups began defining themselves against each other and, typically, exaggerating their differences. Identity came to be seen as a value in itself, setting in motion processes of cultural schismogenesis…. It is among such Mesolithic populations that we often find not just the multiplication of distinct culture areas, but also the first clear archaeological indications of communities divided into permanent ranks, sometimes accompanied by interpersonal violence, even warfare. In some cases, this may have already meant the stratification of households into aristocrats, commoners and slaves…. [But] periods of intense inter-group violence alternate with periods of peace, often lasting centuries, in which there is little or no evidence for destructive conflict of any kind. War did not become a constant of human life after the adoption of farming; indeed long periods of time exist in which it appears to have been successfully abolished. Yet, it had a stubborn tendency to reappear, if only many generations later.” Graeber and Wengrow describe an alternative that was also lived by some prehistoric peoples for centuries. “The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence — all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors.”
Graeber and Wengrow insist that it is also important to realize what actual hunter-forager societies were not. They were not filled with Rousseau’s noble savage, living in a state of paradise, free from want. “Since there was no Eden-like state from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of social rank, inequality or private property.” Graeber and Wengrow, again and again, hammer the empirical case for diversity and experimentation among the plethora of populations spanning the globe.
Currently, there are huge gaps in our early history as a species. In “northern Syria, the cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC. Yet in these same regions, the biological process of crop domestication (including the crucial switch-over from brittle rachis to tough) was not completed until closer to 7000 BC — that is roughly ten times as long as it need have taken…. We need to understand this 3,000-year period as an important phase of human history in its own right. It’s a phase marked by foragers moving in and out of cultivation.”
Graeber and Wengrow cite play both as a discovery tool and as a keeper of knowledge. “For most of history, then, the zone of ritual play constituted both a scientific laboratory and, for any given society, a repertory of knowledge and techniques which might or might not be applied to pragmatic problems.” Social realities, for much of prehistory, were fluid. Graeber and Wengrow suggest that the first urban zones could have shrunken from more remote cultural commonalities. “We are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities — but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.” Graeber and Wengrow make the case that some kind of authority was often first established using some combination of styles of power. “Sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics are magnifications of elementary types of domination, grounded respectively in the use of violence, knowledge and charisma.” The control of violence, the control and dissemination of information, and individual personality are used as bases for political power grabs. “Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together.” There was nothing magical or necessary about the formation of the State. “Cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, and their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a ruler’s actual power…. If ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.”
What might have finally brought about the need to domesticate crops on a massive scale? When did the masses stop simply laughing and walking away from their leaders? Graeber and Wengrow have a guess, “Do ancestors get hungry? And if so, what do they eat? For whatever reasons, the answer that gained traction across the Nile valley around 3500 BC was that ancestors do indeed get hungry, and what they required was something which, at that time, can only have been considered a rather exotic and perhaps luxurious form of food: leavened bread and fermented wheat beer, the pot-containers for which now start to become standard fixtures of well-appointed grave assemblages. It is no coincidence that arable wheat-farming — though long familiar in the valley and delta of the Nile — was only refined and intensified around this time, at least partly in response to the new demands of the dead…. It was not ecological circumstances but the social requirement to provide bread and beer on ceremonial occasions that allowed such divisions to become entrenched. This was not just a matter of access to sufficient quantities of arable land, but also the means to maintain ploughs and oxen — another introduction of the late fourth millennium BC.”
Graeber and Wengrow insist that the path of human history was contingent, not preordained. We, as a species, made choices and we can do so again. “What if we were to take that approach now and look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken? After all, those things really did exist…. Much of this book has been devoted to recalibrating those scales; to reminding us that people did actually live in those ways, often for many centuries, even millennia.”
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