Judging from the comments on this blog, I am almost the only person on this site who has a real interest in the Graeber and Wengrow book, but since I am having such fun with it (I am almost done with it now) I am going to go right on writing about it.
The book is chockablock full of fascinating accounts of
things dug up (literally) by archaeologists over the past 30 or 40 years
concerning the remains of human settlements from all parts of the world dating
back as much as 9000 or 10,000 years. Quite often, the authors describe an
excavated settlement as occupying a certain number of hectares, and since I
have only the vaguest notion of how big a hectare is, I went to Google and
learned that a hectare is an area equal to 10,000 m² or 1/100 of a square
kilometer. Well, I know there are 640 acres in a square mile and I know roughly
the relationship between a square kilometer and a square mile so I managed to
figure out that there are about 2.67 acres in a hectare. Quite often, the authors describe an ancient urban settlement as covering 200 hectares or even 400 hectares. Which is to say, an area somewhere between two thirds of a square mile and 1 2/3 mi.². Not all that big, when you think about it.
Along about page 465, the authors spend a good deal of time
talking about a very important urban settlement called Cahokia, which was
located along the Mississippi River. The authors report that after A. D. 800,
there was a “veritable urban explosion with its epicenter at the site of
Cahokia, which was soon to become the greatest city in the Americas north of
Mexico.” Its area swelled to six square miles (this revealed by the
archaeological excavations, of course) with a population of 10,000 or more and
another 30,000 in the surrounding areas that bore some sort of subordinate
relationship to this huge city.
Six square miles with a population of 10,000 or so. Well, since
I taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for 37 years and lived
for 30 of those years either in the nearby college town of Northampton or in
the tiny suburb east of Amherst called Pelham, I have a pretty good idea what
life in Amherst was like between about 1971 and 2008. I checked with Wikipedia
and Amherst covers roughly 26 square miles and has a population of about 40,000
(not counting the 30,000 students at UMass in North Amherst.)
So Cahokia, the largest urban settlement in the Americas
north of Mexico, was at its height one fourth the size of the town of Amherst
with one fourth the population. That gave me some pause. I mean, if you are an
archaeologist you dig and you make do with what you have dug up. It is clear
from the accounts of Graeber and Wengrow that with some imagination you can actually
infer a very great deal from what you dig up, even in the absence of written
records (although the authors talk a good deal about the fascinating use of
knotted strings in the pre-literate period to preserve rather precise geometric
and other calculations). But it does not surprise me as much as I think I am
supposed to be surprised that in an urban settlement with a population one
fourth that of Amherst, Massachusetts, all manner of interesting experiments in
collective decision-making, and other forms of social and political
organization that do not meet the customary definition of a state, might appear
and fluctuate and flourish over hundreds of years.
I shall report in again with a more organized and systematic
summary of the thrust of the book when I have finished the last chapters.
15 comments:
Professor Wolff,
I'm not a regular commenter on the blog, but I've enjoyed following your summaries. I can report that, at least among my small circle of friends who are younger academics and graduate students in the humanities, the book is causing quite a stir. Your thoughts are very much appreciated!
Please don't stop. I'm just an old fart trying to maintain his engagement with explanations.
On the other hand, perhaps the negative comments -- if that they be -- are coming from those who are beyond fun, being shaken or stirred. Or open to alternative views about our past.
You get old enough and alternative explanations, I assure you, are what you hope for.
I'm enjoying your commentary as well, I'm reading the book slowly but surely (only about 70 pages in). As someone who grew up in Montana next to one of the largest reservations in the US, I absorbed all kinds of questionable and outright wrong narratives about the native indigenous people who were here before Europeans arrived. This book has been refreshing to say the least.
Ditto all the above. While comments may be sparse, this may not reflect the level of interest. Thank you for taking the time to do it.
I read "the Graeber and Wengrow book", paused, then realized "hey, that's the book I'm reading ". I will have to go back and read your thought pieces. And perhaps comment.
Ditto. One ought not to infer from the quantity and content of the comments what most of your readers are interested in. You have no doubt noticed dozens of times that the bulk of the comments seem to have drifted in from a different blog, perhaps one entitled 'Boy Do I Have a Bone to Pick with You' . . . My own experience suggests that academic-based philosophy professors take little notice of the book. Graeber's book Debt is pretty much overlooked, though its opening 120 pages seem to me one of the most interesting recent works in moral philosophy. And in my own area of special concern, the philosophies of the arts, there is vanishingly little professional work that so much as notices the great works in the anthropology of art starting with Boas, and nothing at all that I'm aware of in the intellectually path-breaking work of Alfred Gell, nor of more recent such work by Carlo Severi, Philippe Descola, and Tim Ingold. It's as if philosophy professors' interest in anthropological material was exhausted by pondering the alleged irrationality of the Azande's witchcraft as described by Evans-Pritchard. It's one of many signs of your philosophical openness and rare intellectual freshness that you are so gripped by the book.
I will not read this book for much the same reason that I have never finished a book by Michel Foucault:
They seem to be "scientists" who are all- too- willing to make their case for some genuinely interesting thesis by ignoring the actual empirical evidence that bears upon it one way or the other.
Convince me otherwise..... and maybe I'll buy the book.
Add me to the list of 'regular readers, irregular commenters' who are interested in your remarks on the book. I'm only 175 pages in, but, like with Debt, find the work interesting for how it aids one in imagining societies with different social arrangements than one's own.
For those who may have forgotten and for those who never knew, Crooked Timber did one of their book review sets of responses to Graeber’s “Debt.” It’s at:
https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-seminar/
It strikes me that Neville Morley’s response to that book raises some points of the sort some have raised in this thread:
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/the-return-of-grand-narrative-in-the-human-sciences/#more-23391
PS. Morley’s remark—no.17—echoes RPW’s complaint, that no one seems to want to talk about the book he’s talking about.
David Zimmerman and others,
It's almost impossible to determine how people in prehistoric societies actually organized their daily life and so what Graeber and Wengrow say is mostly informed speculation.
However, that doesn't seem to be a reason not to read it. First of all, all other accounts, including the received wisdom about prehistory that one finds in Harari, is also just informed speculation, the result, no doubt, of Harari's conscious and unconscious political and ethical opinions just as that of Graeber and Wengrow is of their conscious and unconscious opinions.
If one only reads books which are based on confirmed scientific facts, one's reading choices are going to be severely limited. In addition, Graeber and Wengrow's alternative readings seems a way of opening one's minds to new possibilities in social organization that are worth considering, worth pondering.
Dear Professor,
I continue to read your reports with great interest and am already looking forward to your summary. When I went to school for the first few years, the cultural history that was considered essential began with the cultures between the Rivers Euphrates and Tigris. More or less everything before that did not belong to culture but to the natural state of man. Today anthropologists and archaeologists learn already as students that they will be forced to draw the maps of the history of human development constantly new. The tools they can use (e.g. genetics, climate research, geology, medicine, etc.) are so powerful in relation to those of 50 years ago, that not only the macroscopic view of the big connections, but also the view into the dense network of everyday relationships, becomes more and more clearly visible. If this is also well communicated by capable scientists, criticism is perhaps only the narcissism of the small difference or the necessary incentive to put the best arguments forward.
Still weighing the opportunity cost of reading the book after reflecting on the review that was referenced in a post below and remembering the Apple Computer fiasco as well as reading the free part on Amazon. Do they deal with settlements that date from around the same time in the Southwest (Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, etc.)? Both the Mississippian and Puebloan communities were agricultural (three sisters) which would seem to follow the late Neolithic development of agriculture leading to concentrated settlements that waxed and waned over time due to climate change, warfare and environmental degredation.
When I reflect on large and largish groups of humans living close together, the first thing that comes to mind is how squalid those settlements likely were up to some point in the recent past. I doubt the inhabitants of Cahokia had a quality of life not all that different from Paris or London or some now abandoned ghost town in the American West.
aaall: "Do they deal with settlements that date from around the same time in the Southwest"
Briefly. They also mention in a footnote that they intend to deal with those cultures in greater depth in future work. The book is already 700+ pages.
Graeber and Wengrow tacitly admit that their book is "informed speculation" and the result of their "conscious and unconscious political and ethical opinions." On p. 3, for example, they say this:
"As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they 1. simply aren’t true; 2. have dire political implications; 3. make the past needlessly dull."
If someone said that my account of the course of human history was flawed because it was dull or had dire political implications, I would think they were putting me on. Only (1) matters if one is trying to do serious anthropology.
I haven't had too much to say about the Graeber/Wengrow book because I haven't read it and am unlikely to do so. That said, I've enjoyed your commentary on it. I do think that the commentary (especially this above, as well as the point noted by GJ just above my comment) makes me less interested in reading it rather than more, although that's also of some value.
On the point of the post, it reminds me a bit of some arguments by one of my favorite thinkers - Kropotkin. Kropotkin was, of course, an anarchist, like Graeber. He argued that the ideal social form was something like the medieval Russian free city. I'll admit that never seemed very plausible to me, but more relevantly here, they were similar in size to the cities noted above. More relevant to my thinking, though, is that even if these were "ideal" in some way, and even if they were in some ways better for human flourishing than modern life (again, I'm pretty skeptical), there's no obvious path from here to there, so it's not that clear what moral we should draw from it, especially when there's very, very good reason to think that whatever was good about such societies can't be replicated in anything like the societies we have or could have now.
On a more methodological point: I've recently been reading the Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law. I think it's at least plausible that we know more about ancient Greek law than we know about cities and civilizations 10K years or more ago. And yet, one of the big take-aways I get from the book is how slim a reed many of the claims made about ancient Greek law rest on - often very large claims will be based on (say) two or three contracts and a few other partial fragments we have, scattered over several dozens (or hundreds!) of years. Literally no one working on contemporary legal interpretation would think this sort of evidence was enough to base even the most tentative claim about a contemporary legal system on. And yet, the historians will make very strong statements about it. (Especially the German ones! It's amazing, really.) No doubt we all work with the material we have, but the lack of qualification and hesitation in the published work is surprising and not especially encouraging to me. It also makes me pretty hesitant to believe that the claims of the archaeologists are as well founded as they sometimes suggest.
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