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Friday, December 3, 2021

A QUICK RESPONSE TO SOME COMMMENTS

A number of the comments to my posts on Graeber and Wengrow have been quite helpful, particularly that of DJL  I want to respond to S. Wallerstein’s rather puckish remark:Did the hunter gatherers sitting around the fire discussing the fine points of political theory include the women or were they washing the dishes? “

 

I neglected to point out that the authors devote a great deal of time in their book precisely to talking about the role of women as it is reflected in the archaeological evidence. They call attention to the many societies in which women have played significant or even dominant roles. This is inferred both from the artistic representations of men and women that are revealed by the archaeological digs and also by the burial practices (if you are an archaeologist, you obviously make do with what you have, but as an amateur in the area I confess I find it a little odd to read so much about what people put in graves, but maybe that is just me).

 

Another interesting fact revealed by the bones dug up is that there is a good deal of evidence that people tens of thousands of years ago took care of members of their community who were injured rather than leaving them to die, as most animals do. How do we know that? Well, the archaeologists and paleontologists find the bones of people who have suffered fractures of their legs or arms which have healed. This can only mean that during the healing process, which might be weeks long or even longer, they were fed and cared for by their fellows. This is just one example among many of the sorts of inferences one can draw from the available remains – inferences that I for one would not have thought to make.

10 comments:

s. wallerstein said...

Thanks for clarifying what Graeber and Wengrow have to say about the role of women.

aaall said...

In the Pacific Northwest plots of certain perennial crops were passed on maternally, mother to daughter. Some plains and southwest tribes had some social and economic functions (e.g. planting) controlled by women and others - e.g. planning and conducting hunts - by men. Back in the Mission days an indigenous revolt at Mission San Gabriel was led by a woman.

Anonymous said...

Beside the point, and maybe you already know about this:

https://bostonreview.net/articles/in-pursuit-of-racial-justice-the-life-and-thought-of-charles-w-mills/

Achim Kriechel (A.K.) said...

The cave paintings in Altamira, Chauvet or Lascaux. When I first saw these representations, I was thunderstruck. I was perhaps 20 years old and asked myself the question, what does the German expressionist Franz Marc, whom I admired very much, have to do with painting that was created 25000 years before our time in the south of France. Since Franz Marc died in the hell of Verdun, it was very unlikely that he took any notice of it. Picasso knew the cave in Altamira. Altamira was considered a fake by many scientists of its time when it was discovered in 1868. The ignorance persisted for almost 50 years.

Art creates perception, says Gilles Deleuze. Maybe without Picasso, Marc, maybe Stravinsky, we would still be blind and deaf. Isn't it interesting that art was so far ahead of science?

jgkess@cfl.rr.com said...

Art, at its best, improves one's empathy for the sublime. Science rather depresses the matter. Philosophy. on the other hand, is neither one way or the other.

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Tony Couture said...

Prof. Wolff has been making many interesting observations and comments about The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Because David Graeber is now dead, for readers who are interested in more, his survivors have given access to his archive of writing at this address: https://davidgraeber.org/

There are many short pieces that illustrate Graeber's amazing dialectical abilities. Another very interesting item is David Graeber's 2014 long form interview with the progressive English musician Brian Eno that is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBpOXGLn_o&ab_channel=Artangel

The Dawn of Everything is a book that should be read with Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Graeber and Wengrow are able to develop a modest or reasonable degree of objectivity in interpreting the dirty side of human history, the buried story that might be truer than the exposed account that the winners of history (Europeans) wrote for their subjects and which we all swallowed whole in primary schools run by the descendants of colonialists. It should not be dismissed as merely more informed speculation, because it is dialectically useful in opening the closed Western mind. The Dawn of Everything is another critique of "the jargon of authenticity," but this time about the jargon/language choices which academics used to undermine their duty to be truthful and remain captive to a picture of the world, bewitched by our own language games, as Wittgenstein often observed.

Graeber argues from the tradition of practical anarchism (the direct action of confronting any unnecessary authority in one part of social life, dismantling such authority, or finding a way to live without it) which is radically more modest that the ideal theory of anarchism (the impossible ideal of unanimous direct democracy and absolute moral autonomy for a whole society, rather than just in one part of it such as in its comedy or arts) found in the classic, A Defense of Anarchism, by R.P. Wolff.

Chomsky is also better described as a pragmatic anarchist than not an anarchist at all, because he thinks (like I do) that Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer was a much better book than A Theory of Justice by John Rawls because Walzer put pragmatic democratic politics at the center as opposed to idealized Kantian dreams of justice and purity of heart like early Rawls. See also James C. Scott's work

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