GRABER AND WENGROW YET AGAIN

As I make my way slowly through Graeber and Wengrow’s marvelous book (I am up to page 347), I am reminded of an experience I had 60 years ago at the University of Chicago. I checked and discovered that I had told the story six years ago on this blog.  Since that is a millennium in the blogosphere I will start today’s comment by repeating the story.

 

In 1961 I left Harvard for an Assistant Professorship at the University of Chicago, to teach, among other things, in the big required second year undergraduate survey course on the Social Sciences [thus continuing a career of teaching things I had never formally studied.]  The course was taught in sections, but several times during the year all of the students assembled in a big lecture hall for a guest lecture.  One day, we trooped into the hall to hear a report on some research being carried out by a Professor of Anthropology and his graduate students.  

 

The speaker that day had been leading his students on some field work in the sub-discipline of Urban Anthropology.  They had been pub crawling the up-scale bars in the part of downtown Chicago known colloquially as the Near North.  Now he was reporting on their findings, and in one of the most brilliant tours de force I have ever witnessed, he conceived the idea of straight-facedly recounting their adventures in the standard jargon used by cultural anthropologists to describe the "primitive" peoples they have gone off to investigate.   The effect was startling.  All of the students in the lecture hall [and even many of the professors] were quite familiar with the venues being described, but in the language of cultural anthropology they were unrecognizable.  Without once breaking tone, the lecturer managed to convey the idea that standard anthropological field reports were almost certainly distortions of the lived experiences of the subjects.  The men and women of New Guinea would no more recognize themselves in the journal articles published about them than the students recognized themselves in the accounts of the bars where they spent their weekends.

 

Graeber and Wengrow are, I find, extraordinarily successful in talking about the people of the countless villages, towns, cities, empires, and foraging territories whose lives have been recaptured by archaeologists in the past 50 years or so. Working with the materials excavated by countless archaeologists – tools, eating utensils, masks, ornaments and jewelry, mud huts, stone monuments, and all the rest – they imaginatively bring their owners and makers to life and enable us, the readers, to see them as real people living as much as 5000, 10,000, or 20,000 years ago. Unlike the students at the University of Chicago, who did not recognize the bars and coffee houses and restaurants they had actually visited in the descriptions of the graduate students in the anthropology department, I think that those people, long gone now, might actually recognize themselves in the accounts given of them by Graeber and Wengrow.

 

One of the ways in which standard archaeological accounts can mislead us is by using language that makes it sound as though a culture, and hence the thoughts and expectations and plans and beliefs of the people constituting that culture, remain essentially unchanged over periods as long as 1000 years or more. Now if you think about it, it is just plain implausible that people will get their food, reproduce, go to war, worship, have festivals, or engage in political debates more or less in the same way for a thousand years.  If they are real people, not stick figures in an anthropological classificatory system, as time passes they will argue, speculate about alternatives that might be available to them, try things out to see whether they work, talk about what it was like in the old days, and in general behave like people. No sensible person would suppose that a woman living in Paris in the year 1143 would act and think and hope and fear and love in exactly the same way as a woman living in Paris in 648 or 1954.

 

As I have already suggested in previous posts and will try to summarize when I have finally finished plowing through the book, Graeber and Wengrow have a quite contemporary political agenda, which they are openly pushing in this book.  But whether you are sympathetic with the agenda, which as it happens I am, or are opposed to it, the book is a delightfully lively and detailed account of the doings of endless groups of people whom I personally had never heard of before I opened its pages.