Wednesday, December 1, 2021

GRAEBER AND WENGROW, PART ONE

Okay, I have now completed my reading of Graeber and Wengrow and in this first of several long posts I will try to pull together my thoughts on the book and summarize what I learned from it. Let me begin by making several things very clear. First of all, I am not trying to persuade anybody to read the book. God knows the world is full of good books so if you are not interested, just move along. Second, I assume it is clear that I have absolutely no professional competence to judge the accuracy of anything said in this book. In my long life, which in four weeks will encompass 88 years, I have not spent a single day doing anthropological or archaeological research (except for the time when Susie and I were visiting an ancient site in South Africa that had been excavated and, seeing a very small stone arrowhead – a microlith as I believe it would be called – half sticking out of the wall of the cave, I surreptitiously plucked it and stuck it in my pocket, thereby presumably violating all manner of laws.) So why am I writing about the book? The answer is simple: reading it was fun, just about the most fun I have had reading a book in a very long time, and I want to talk about it.

 

Like all really good long apparently complicated books, this one is at base fundamentally rather simple. As I see it, the authors have mobilized an enormous amount of anthropological and archaeological research in support of three fundamental claims. The first claim is that the standard story, about the pattern or course of development that led human beings from their earliest origins to a modern world dominated by national states, is wrong. The second claim is that contrary to the explicit or implied supposition in historical, anthropological, and archaeological writings that so-called “primitive” peoples were by and large unreflectively determined in their development by the more or less inevitable consequences of the development of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, the evidence shows that everywhere we look we find people 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, even more than that, thinking about, reflecting on, making choices with regard to how they lived, how they responded to the possibility of agriculture, whether they chose to develop state institutions or deliberately chose to reject that possibility, and in general exhibiting a degree of intelligent self-awareness about their situation that even sympathetic authors have tended to deny them. The third claim, based on these first two, is that even now, living as we do, we have more choices than we imagine and are not compelled by history, by economics, or by institutional structures simply to go on living as we have been living.

 

Before I begin talking about each of these ideas, let me just say that I think the authors were wrong to start out talking about Rousseau and then to end up talking about Rousseau and Montesquieu. What they say about these two authors really has nothing at all to do with the rest of their book and since what they say is in some ways clearly wrong, it has given reviewers who only know about Rousseau and such a hook on which to hang negative critiques. I was very favorably impressed both by the liveliness and charm of the exposition and by the authors’ rather winning openness about the scantiness of the archaeological or anthropological record and the necessity therefore to make a series of guesses and leaps.  The book is full of qualifying phrases, hedges, and admissions of uncertainty which one does not usually find in academic works. I rather liked that.

 

The first point is the most important so let me explain what is at stake here. Paleontology reveals that Homo sapiens has been on the planet for 200,000 years plus or minus. Everybody understands that that estimate can be changed any time someone digs up a femur or a skull that can be dated to an earlier time. Everybody also agrees that roughly 10,000 years ago in a variety of places human beings began to engage in systematic agriculture. I think, although I am not certain, that the general view has it that agriculture developed after the last Ice Age at least in part as a consequence of physical and climatic changes that made agriculture possible. The story that has been told – a story I learned and believed and have repeated many times in classes and in my writings – is that the hunting and gathering and foraging existence that human beings engaged in for the first 190,000 years did not produce the sort of physical surplus that would make it possible for some people not to forage or hunt or gather but to engage in other forms of activity. Once the physical surplus provided by agriculture appeared, and wherever it appeared (an important addendum), some people were able to appropriate the surplus and use their control of it both to support the activities of individuals not directly engaged in farming or hunting or gathering and also to establish what we would recognize as political control over an entire community. Combining this with the domestication of animals, we then had the building blocks for cities and then states to appear in which there were kings or princes or rulers, priests or shamans,  scribes, artists, and all the rest. In effect, the story went, once this happened there was no turning back, no alternative to armies and law courts and churches and princely residences and all the rest of human history. Eventually, maybe 6000 years ago or so, writing was invented, records were kept, and it became possible for modern researchers not merely to dig up remains and try to infer from them the social structures that had generated them but also to discover the appropriate translations of those ancient writings and to begin producing what we now think of as historical accounts.

 

As the authors indicate, there are two versions of this story, one optimistic, positive, and celebratory, the other sad, doleful, and depressing, depending on whether one likes or does not like the way the world is now. But both versions of the story are based on the fundamental premise that political structures, kings, emperors, bureaucracies, democratic states, or what have you are an inevitable consequence of the appearance of agriculture.

 

Drawing on vast quantities of anthropological and archaeological evidence assembled by huge numbers of researchers in the last 30 or 40 years, the authors argue that this story is just plain false. A great deal of the book is devoted to telling the story, derived from this research, of peoples who either considered adopting agriculture as a source of subsistence and rejected it, choosing to persist as hunters, fishers, foragers and gatherers or else chose to alternate agriculture with hunting and gathering, going back and forth from one to the other. The authors, for example, tell the stories of Native American peoples of the West Coast of the United States who were clearly, on the available evidence, in regular contact with agricultural populations but who chose to continue hunting and gathering rather than transitioning to agriculture.

 

Equally important is the evidence the authors put forward of large numbers of human settlements in which, prior to any evidence of agriculture, huge construction projects were carried out that involved systematic planning, the mobilization and direction of the efforts of large numbers of people, and the use of sophisticated forms of mathematical calculation and astronomical observation (think Stonehenge, for example) all without any of the usual evidences of rulership, systematic differentiations in wealth and power, or the concomitant abilities to compel the labor of large numbers of people.

 

These evidences, drawn by the authors from research done virtually around the world, fundamentally call into question the standard story about the development of recognizably modern political states. (Remember that the authors are anarchists and, unlike my anarchism which is for the most part conceptual and theoretical, are committed to finding nonstate and antistate ways for people to live.)

 

There is an enormous amount that I am simply not attempting to summarize, but this is as I see it the central argument of much of the book.

 

Tomorrow I will move on to talk about the second and third theses.

 

 

9 comments:

  1. Does their thesis question a Marxist view of stages of development conditioned by conflict by economic and social structures? Or can Marxism be reconciled?

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  2. The simple answer is, yes it does question that view. But the matter is more complicated and I will talk about it later on.

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  3. Have you written anything besides your book on anarchism that would explain what you mean when you write "my anarchism ... is for the most part conceptual and theoretical"?

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  4. This thesis must have been in circulation since the early days or at least hey days of Anthropology. Some armchair genius with a massive library or some adventurer must have had the bright idea and someone finally proved it

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  5. "The authors, for example, tell the stories of Native American peoples of the West Coast of the United States who were clearly, on the available evidence, in regular contact with agricultural populations but who chose to continue hunting and gathering rather than transitioning to agriculture."

    That wasn't in the cards. On the coast they built sea-going canoes for trade and fishing/hunting. On the southern part of the coast acorns and pine nuts as well as other edible plants were abundant and only required regular burning) something Native Americans did in many areas). In the Pacific Northwest starchy crops like camas and wild onion as well as all sorts of berries only required intermittent attention. I believe that in at least some areas plots of these crops were passed down matrilineally so ownership was a thing.

    If your diet was abalone, clams, mussels, oysters, lobster, all sorts of fish, as well as seals and whales for protein as well as acorn meal (keeps quite well) and pine nuts (check out the price at Whole Foods)
    what would be the incentive to adopt an agriculture that requires metal and draft animals which they lacked?

    In the south water was also an issue. They were trade routes between the coast and the Colorado river and beyond. The Three Sisters were easy to grow if there was regular water (e.g. Colorado River) but busting the prairie without iron plows and draft animals wasn't going to happen. Easier to plant maize, squash, and beans near a river and go hunting the millions of bison the prairie supported.

    In large parts of the American West attempting a dependence on agriculture would have been a bad idea as folks found out when they tried to farm the short grass prairie a century or so ago. Absent electricity and pumps, drought will always win.

    For the most part nation states and patriarchy is the business that was chosen for us long ago. That isn't going to change by forming circles and talking or drumming. Occupy Wall Street was a dead end while the Tea Party wasn't.

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  6. Achim Kriechel (A.K.)December 2, 2021 at 8:45 AM

    I find aaalls comment interesting because he,
    for me, also a bloody layman, the question raises, how one can conclude at all a standard with the development of the Homo sapiens. Even if one admits that the importance of the so-called Neolithic revolution was not small, nevertheless, this enormous diversity of the living conditions shows which complexity a standard model would have to have, if it should be at all only minimally plausible. Along questions like: how was the climate, over which period of time was it like this or like that, how was the weather, wind, rain, how the differences of the seasons, which animals could be hunted with which success, how was the soil, how the access to water, was there wood, which ways did one have to go until one met a trading partner, how big or how small was the local population, and so on.

    I can't think of a better example that fits the term complexity so well.

    On the other hand, I find it very difficult to draw effective conclusions for our present from all the observations and the more or less plausible explanations that can be gained from them. If one assumes that the living individuals, just like we do today, have adapted their behavior only when the immediate pressure of suffering became too great, and that whole populations have probably taken the risk to change their survival strategies only when, besides the individual suffering, the infant mortality became too great, then one could say that our present, with almost 8 billion people, is the sum and the result of all the avoidance strategies that have been tried, adopted or discarded from generation to generation.

    Isn't that what Marx says when he speaks of the factual dependence (sachliche Abhängigkeit) in capitalism and distinguishes it from previous dependencies among persons and nature?

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  7. aaall: "For the most part nation states and patriarchy is the business that was chosen for us long ago. That isn't going to change by forming circles and talking or drumming. Occupy Wall Street was a dead end while the Tea Party wasn't."

    Was that last paragraph a separate thought, or were you drawing a conclusion based on the preceding five paragraphs? If the latter, I don't see the connection.

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  8. Achim Kriekel: "If one assumes that the living individuals, just like we do today, have adapted their behavior only when the immediate pressure of suffering became too great"

    "Adapted their behavior" is really quite broad there.
    Individual people, and larger groups of people, from families to clans and tribes, etc., often adapt their behavior just because they feel like a change. Thus we see language constantly evolving. Same with dance styles, grooming habits, clothing fashions, cooking recipes. Even aspects of religious practice, over time. While the Puritans may have left England only because their suffering there had become too great, there were many other Europeans who set out to explore and settle in the "New World" simply out of a sense of adventure and the hope of making a fortune.

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  9. Achim Kriechel (A.K.)December 3, 2021 at 8:04 AM

    @eric
    ""Adapted your behavior" is really quite broad there."

    Eric, you are absolutely right. One must remember in interpreting the few artifacts we find that they show only a minimal range of a bulging microcosm.

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