David Wengrow

The Dawn of Everything was added to my TBR by a well meaning (and possibly intoxicated) librarian friend during a recent house party after she sorted through my shelves, saw my (apparently unacceptable) level of anthropological literary representation (it is, admittedly, just Harari at the moment), and decided to intervene. Reader, she was correct to do so.

This book is a dense but genuinely fascinating rethinking of human history, challenging the neat, linear narratives we’re often taught show more about civilization, hierarchy, and progress. It’s ambitious, wide-ranging, and occasionally a bit of a slog—there are moments where it wanders or leans heavily into academic theory—but the core argument is compelling: things did not have to turn out this way, and they still don’t have to.

I didn’t agree with everything, and it can feel a bit sprawling at times, but I loved the scope of it and the way it opens up new ways of thinking about society, freedom, and possibility. Infuriating (in a good way), thought-provoking, and absolutely worth the read—my TBR saboteur wins this round. show less

Where to begin reviewing a book weighing in at nearly 700 pages from title page to end of index?

We open and close with a lot about freedom. Our first section is totally arresting, as we delve into how the Americans who preceded Europeans on this continent viewed European culture: with disbelief and disdain at our lack of freedom. While we Eurocentric people have always tended to view ourselves as being quite free, our "formal" freedoms were as nothing compared to the "substantive" freedoms show more found in America.

More on that in a moment, but notice my avoidance of terms like "indigenous people" or "Native Americans". They were Americans. They lived here. I love the radical respect that the authors give to those people who lived in this place before us. And those Americans who engaged in thoughtful substantive debate with their European interlocuters, they rightfully refer to as philosophers, even "philosopher-statesmen".

So about those freedoms: we theoretically have the right to travel, but if we haven't got moolah, we effectively must stay put. Many of the earlier American societies had kinship networks far and wide, and people really could travel whenever and almost wherever they wanted, knowing they would have kin that would have their backs. We formally have the freedom to do whatever we like, but we have authorities we must obey. North Americans the Europeans first contacted often did not. Their chiefs had no real authority to make anyone do anything. In a great turn of phrase, the authors say "the Wendat [Huron tribe of native Quebec] had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms."

And so the book continue with more of its radical upendings of our typical outlook on things. Pre-historical societies experimented with vast, vastly different ways of self-organizing. We weren't just "bands" (they always put that word in quotes) of ape-like hunter-gatherers, living in one particular default way, until bam, finally agriculture changed everything. We weren't always all the same and agriculture didn't all of a sudden change everything everywhere.

One item I couldn't help but bookmark: "There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don't like their families very much." I'm sorry, why isn't this called out more often? Most of us, given the slimmest of chances, will get as far away from our families as the train tracks will take us. Not that I have an axe to grind on this particular topic.

I'm sorry I can't do justice to more of the book, because there is much, much more. But these were my takeaways. show less

For 350 years, it has been common knowledge that Man went from bands of hunter-gatherers, to pastoralists, to farming, to industry. In parallel, Man lived in families, in tribes, in villages and then in cities, as technology improved. Technology, the third parallel, took us from the stone age through the bronze age and the iron age to the industrial revolution. All neat, tidy and clearly separable. David Graeber and David Wengrow claim there is no evidence for this. In The Dawn of show more Everything, they show proof of an unbelievable variety of living styles, governance and intellectual activity all over the world and throughout time. It was never a straight line progression. It was never the result of technology. And possibly most stunning, the larger the population was did not also mean more restrictions, more crime, more laws, or more inequality. This is an important book.

The concepts the authors describe are so different that many don’t even have names. For example: “What do you call a city without top-down governance?" There simply are no words for this and numerous other concepts. They found far more variety right here in our own history than scientists have dreamed for alien civilizations in the galaxy. It is astonishing what we have tried, and succeeded with.

The misinformation all began in the mid 1700s, when a man named Turgot, a 23 year old seminary student, wrote to the author of Letters of a Peruvian Woman. He corrected her vision, insisting that the freedom demonstrated by native Peruvians (savages) was not a positive thing, but a reflection of their poverty. Only when technology permits people to live together in large urban settings does the poverty alleviate.

Turgot kept at this idea, eventually lecturing on it. With friends like Adam Smith, his ideas got repeated so often and so widely they became the standard truth. All societies started as hunter gatherers and progressed through specific, required stages to live in urban environments, thanks to farming and technology. It couldn’t work any other way.

Ah, but it can. And it did. One of the unsung positives that came of the Spanish and French invasions of the Americas, was the priesthood that accompanied it. These Catholics wrote everything down, learning the language of every tribe they encountered, absorbing all the structures and nuances of how they lived among themselves as well as with other tribes, and how they governed. Apparently no one has ever compiled all this ethnographic data before The Dawn of Everything. It shows stunning sophistication, different approaches to everything, and seemingly no two societies alike. We have a huge amount to learn from what has been tried, completely unrestricted by Turgot’s supposedly inescapable progression of society and hierarchy. Sadly, we have gone the opposite way, locking in Turgot’s dull theory, while dismissing everything to do with native societies as too primitive to learn from. You could drive trucks through the gaps in the literature.

A common theme among the tribes was equality. For many, there was no hierarchy, no police, no authority. Anyone could refuse to do the bidding of the chief, whose home was always open to all, who took in widows and orphans, and who often had to defend his position by giving the better speeches. Everyone was free to come and go and speak their mind.

Of the numerous whites who were captured and adopted, many found “the virtues of freedom in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of the constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth. Others noted Indians’ reluctance to ever let anyone fall into a condition of poverty, hunger or destitution.” They were honor-bound to take in travelers who came upon their villages and camps. The authors say that “Insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom.” This is a concept totally alien to the world today.

It is well known that many white abductees chose to remain, and many others, having returned to civilization, abandoned it and made their way back to live out their lives in the tribe. The reverse was never true; there are no cases of Indians wanting to return to live among whites in their cities.

Although the book has numerous examples of societies from all over the world, the most documentation comes from the Americas. One native in particular, a Wendat (Huron) Indian from the Michigan area called Kandiaronk, was a brilliant intellect, who drove the priests and soldiers crazy contradicting their religion and their society. They spent hours debating with him, and one French soldier turned his dialogues into a book (which I immediately tracked down. My review: https://medium.com/the-straight-dope/illiterate-savage-crushes-noble-european-in... ).

Here’s how the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia threw criticism back at the French: “They consider themselves better than the French: ‘For’, they say, ‘you are always fighting and quarreling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread, we share it with our neighbor.’ What seemed to irritate (chronicler) Biard the most was that Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as a result, ‘richer’ than the French. The French have more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.”

Far from being “noble savages”, incapable of being analytical or erudite, and being subhumans to be killed on sight by whites, the natives proved to be able to argue the invaders into the ground. The priests had a terrible time trying to convert them to Catholicism. They refused to know their place in the hierarchy of European values. Nonetheless, the stories that came down to us all portrayed the natives as ignorant, incapable, naive savages to be converted or eliminated.

The authors conclude “There is no ‘original’ form of human society. Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making.” Throughout history, there were bands, families, villages, towns and even cities with populations in six figures, all at the same time. It was not a linear progression. It did not reflect evolution. It did not reflect technology. And it did not reflect farming.

People formed societies in conjunction with three basic freedoms: freedom to move (away and live alone or join another group), freedom to disobey and ignore commands, and freedom to create or transform social relationships (make commitments to others). It is the administrative abuse of this last freedom that began the long slide to inequality, the authors say. Inequality is not a result of farming, technology or cities.

An important segment of the book deals with farming, because until now, social science believed it to be a focus and a goal of Homo sapiens the world over, and mastering it is what enabled cities to form.

Homo sapiens does not like to farm. It took thousands of years to domesticate wheat, a process that should take years, not millennia. People always look for the easy way out, in this case, taking wild wheat from hillsides and planting it in flood plains. Flood-retreat farming takes advantage of all the deposits from spring flooding, leaving the equivalent of plowed fields when it recedes. It is far less work than farming whole fields of wheat. It is the philosophy of farming-by-observation, maximizing the yield as nature does the necessary work. ”This Neolithic mode of cultivation was, moreover, highly successful,” the authors point out. Farming therefore took off much more slowly than we currently believe, and was not a prerequisite for the founding of cities, which had sprung up all over the world, three thousand years before farming became an industry. And when feasible, natives abandoned it altogether: “Even in the American southwest, the overall trend for 500 years or so before Europeans arrived was the gradual abandonment of maize and beans, which people had been growing in some cases for thousands of years, and a return to a foraging way of life.”

The result was an easier life, with time for sports, festivals and feasts. And arts. The Kwakiutl of the US and Canadian west coasts are world famous for their fantastical abstract art, from giant totem poles and canoes to tabletop artwork and jewelry. Many other native societies are recognized for their artistic achievements all up and down the Americas. Their system of governance produced a leisure ethic, permitted by respect for and working with nature to provide sufficient food and clothing and not be chained to accumulating material possessions.

Still at it a hundred pages later, the authors say “The underlying assumption was that these (Shang Chinese) were pretty much the same as Neolithic farmers were imagined to be anywhere else: living in villages, developing embryonic forms of social inequality, preparing the way for the sudden leap that would bring the rise of cities and, with cities, the first dynastic states and empires. But we now know this is not what happened at all.” What happened was that all forms of societies existed at the same time, often beside each other, without cross pollination.

As the authors say: “To say that cereal-farming was responsible for the rise of such states is a little like saying that the development of calculus in medieval Persia is responsible for the invention of the atom bomb.”

This sort of acidic comment is typical of David Graeber, who was direct, and stingingly so. Here’s another: “All this begins to make the anthropologists’ habit of lumping Yurok notables and Kwakiutl artists together as ‘affluent foragers’ or ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ seem rather silly: the equivalent of saying a Texas oil executive and medieval Egyptian poet were both ‘complex agriculturalists’ because they both ate a lot of wheat.”

And last but not least: “Who was the first person to figure out you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can almost be certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered ‘white’ if she tried to immigrate to a European country today,”

The lazy or labor-saving attitude toward farming is reflected in many other aspects of life in the Neolithic. Ceramics were invented long before the Neolithic, not for pottery, but for figurines of animals, people and spirits. Greek scientists developed the steam engine not for manufacturing, but to make temple doors magically open and close. The Chinese invented gunpowder for fireworks, not rifles. Mining was not about better weaponry, but pigments for decorating. Though Amerindians never employed the wheel for transport or work, they used them in toys. In plain English, our common knowledge is completely wrong.

There are three factors to governance from the anthropological view: sovereignty, administration (bureaucracy) and heroic/charismatic politics. Different cities and states exhibited one, two or three of these factors that differentiated them from their neighbors in other societies. The book shows it by examining the structures of societies in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica and China; it’s a valid approach globally. And this kind of society building was going on 3000 years before writing appeared, further burying the notion that farming and technology tilted the gameboard. Rather than evolve with farming as their basis, cities have come into being throughout history, flourished for sometimes a thousand years, and faded.

Societies might form around charismatic heroes - or not. Some formed around women, notably in Crete, where women ran everything. For American Indians, women were equal to men, period. Leaders could be chosen by sports or by eloquence. They could just as easily be deposed. Nobles were not permitted to intermarry. They had to marry commoners, precisely to prevent an elite class from forming. Farming was a communal task; no one fenced off fields and claimed No Trespassing. Some societies employed slavery. Severe justice was for aliens; tribal members treated their own as precious. Some societies had councils, some had corvées, where everyone right up to the chief had to labor on common projects. Some built mounds and pyramids. Some cities were famous for their parties and attracted residents from hundreds of miles around. Many cities ran peacefully without police or guards.

Still, there were angry tribes, empires, kingdoms and autarchies where live human sacrifices occurred regularly, but they were mixed right in with near total democracies or no leadership at all. There was a fully formed and stunning variety of systems in place globally 3000 and even 30,000 years ago, with far more variety than we see today, and many of them far less restrictive. Yet we have repressed this knowledge and learned nothing from it, thinking our ancestors were little more than erect apes, clubbing their way to survival. That’s why The Dawn of Everything is important.

While seriously monumental, the book also doesn’t take itself too seriously. I particularly like all the subheadings, written in a nineteenth century style, centered, large type, bold, far too long and all in capital letters. They appear every two or three pages. Here’s a typical one:

IN WHICH WE OBSERVE HOW GRAND
MONUMENTS, PRINCELY BURIALS AND
OTHER UNEXPECTED FEATURES OF
ICE AGE SOCIETIES HAVE UPENDED
OUR ASSUMPTIONS OF WHAT HUNTER-
GATHERERS ARE LIKE, AND CONSIDER
WHAT IT MIGHT MEAN TO SAY THERE
WAS ‘SOCIAL STRATIFICATION’
SOME 30,000 YEARS AGO

(The princely burials refers to archeologists always managing to find burial sites, with well-dressed skeletons surrounded by jewelry and cultural artifacts. When the authors thought about this, they realized this was not the way these societies buried their dead. Many people, if not most, weren’t buried at all. These particular burials were, judging by their skeletons, outliers. They were dwarves or overly tall, had physical disabilities and other markings setting them apart as special, beloved or appreciated far more than average. It was how humans honored their celebrities. They collected valuables to add to their graves out of respect, not because they belonged to the person.)

This is the fourth book of David Graeber’s that I have reviewed. With the others, Debt, The Democracy Project (Occupy Wall Street) and Bullshit Jobs, Graeber proved himself to be so widely read, so insightful, so challenging and in so many widely dispersed domains, it was a major crime that he died weeks after finishing The Dawn of Everything. He died last year at the age of 59, depriving the world of another three decades of his no-holds-barred attacks on misconceptions, misinformation, errors and outright lies in so much of modern life. He was a bad boy in the way Noam Chomsky is a bad boy, slinging discoveries and truths left and right regardless of how they might offend the establishment in government, military or academia.

David Wengrow spent ten years working with Graeber on this book. They clearly had too much fun. The research is, as I hope I’ve transmitted, phenomenal. I have not read any of his other books (mostly on archaeology), but this book is so well done, he is now on my list going forward. Together, they found so much that is new, so much that needs correcting and so many gaps where nothing is written at all, that this would have been the first of a shelf of books that would have rewritten the social sciences completely. We can only hope.

David Wineberg show less

Sprawling and fascinating, though already subject to challenge on questions like “did whites captured by Native peoples routinely decide that Native ways of living were better?” The core of the book is the argument that there is no natural evolution from farming to autocracy to (hopefully) democracy/republican government. Instead, lots of governance formations have been possible and tried over the course of history, and sedentary farming is not correlated with the rise of kings in the show more way we casually learned in school; matters are far more contingent and complex, though raider-kings are often seen on the periphery of settled cities. “Roughly 6,000 years stand between the appearance of the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of what we are used to calling the first states; and in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything remotely like those states.” Different peoples seem to have rejected authoritarian politics, or allowed them at some times of the year and not at others. Some forager cultures valued leisure over hard work; others did the opposite (e.g., in Northwestern California). The domain of ritual authority, which enables claims of exclusive ownership—of secret knowledge, usually—has regularly contended with egalitarianism in other areas of life. We are not as stuck as we think. Even the use of torture to cement a community can play out in different ways—in Europe torture showed the power of the sovereign over everyone, but in Wendat cultures in what’s now America, torture was applied to non-member warriors to highlight that violence was entirely unacceptable within the community.

They survey lots of different periods and kinds of evidence, finding plenty of cities without kings in the historical record. Part of this is about asymmetrical standards of proof: “Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority.”

Among the fascinating claims: Archaeologists now treat mass killings “as one of the more reliable indications that a process of ‘state formation’ was indeed under way.” At a ruler’s death, members of the royal household would be slaughtered in “the first few generations of the founding of a new empire or kingdom,” and then the process would fade to nothing or to symbolism. This assertion of power over the household was a process of “turning violence into kinship,” related to slavery (where people who cared physically for other people were defined as property) and to the way that “all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household.” They speculate that monarchy’s appeal
has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time. The king is both the ultimate individual, his quirks and fancies always to be indulged like a spoilt baby, and at the same time the ultimate abstraction, since his powers over mass violence, and often (as in Egypt) mass production, can render everyone the same. It is also worth observing that monarchy is probably the only prominent system of government we know of in which children are crucial players … [I]nfants, pure objects of love and nurture, are only politically important in kingdoms and empires.
If you like this kind of thing, you might like the book. There’s also an extended discussion of the development of bureaucracy and accounting, which can be tools against inequality or for it. “[R]educing everything to numbers … provides a language of equity–but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas.” But that doesn’t mean they have to be expelled from the community—consistent with Graeber’s anarchist leanings, they suggest that, “[a]s anyone knows who has spent time in a rural community, or serving on a municipal or parish council of a large city, resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair.” Only large-scale sovereign power “and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it’ … allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.”

There’s also a fascinating discussion of specialization. Although “it is often simply assumed that states begin when certain key functions of government–military, administrative and judicial–pass into the hands of full-time specialists,” they argue that almost no early states were actually staffed by full-time specialists; they didn’t have standing armies. Still, “[i]f ‘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.”

Despite its length, the book could have used more development of its claims about women’s work and women’s power. It argues that the key technologies of early civilizations— “fabrics and basketry, the potter’s wheel, stone industries and beadwork, the sail and maritime navigation, and so on”—were likely women’s technologies, and that the concentration of power in individual hands was “accompanied by the marginalization of women, if not their violent subordination,” but doesn’t give as much attention to whether this, like other aspects of society, was actually flexible. Still, I liked the discussion of Minoan civilization, which seems to have involved a lot of female power, despite scholarly interpretations that downplay it “as clearly different, but ultimately impenetrable (a gendered sentiment if ever there was one).”

I haven’t even gotten into the discussion of whether the freedom of movement—the freedom to leave a situation you don’t like—is the foundation of all other freedoms and the thing that, once gone, often leads to autocracy. Or the question of how Native thinkers in America influenced Enlightenment thinkers in Europe, filtered through their preconceptions but also challenging their claims of moral authority. There’s a lot here, is what I’m saying. show less