From Inference Review
Book review by Lawrence Rosen, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and of Law at Columbia University.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 704 pp., $26.00.Look carefully at a man’s sport coat. Now look again as if it were an artifact that survived into the distant future, unattended by any form of written, oral, or visual communication, and that you are an archaeologist trying to understand our long-dead culture. You would notice there are buttons on the sleeves, but no adjacent buttonholes. And that there is a buttonhole on the lapel, but no buttons opposite. Since buttons have been found on other objects that align neatly with available holes you might assume that the sleeve buttons were fastened to the lapel buttonhole. Not all your fellow scholars share the same interpretation. Some assert that the arm was crossed to allow for the sleeve button to be fastened to the lapel hole as a form of ritual act, while others are equally insistent that the arm was affixed straight up as a form of salute. Indeed, because some coats have four buttons on the sleeve while others have only three, there were few who dared to deny this was a mark of rank.
Ridiculous? Certainly. But is it any more speculative than a certain amount of archaeology?1 The real question is not just one of standards for proving the unprovable, but appreciating that what one brings to the material remains may overshadow what one takes from it. Europeans seeing a rhinoceros for the first time portrayed it as armored like a medieval charger, and the Victorians, who felt compelled to medicalize all aberrant behaviors, considered kleptomania a form of “ovarian insanity” to explain why some middle class ladies might “go a-thieving” in the newfangled department stores.2 Archaeologists and social historians have undoubtedly learned an enormous amount about our species, and thoughtful conjecture is vital to forming useful questions. But caution should always be exercised when the standards for interpretation are not clearly expressed, or the theory used to read between the lines is not itself the subject of careful self-criticism.
In recent years, writers such as Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker have become well-known for their broadscale syntheses. These overviews of human nature have occasioned both praise and pause. The hesitation comes when Diamond relies on theories of geographical determinism and cultural evolution disowned by the very people he cites, when Harari claims without support that early human organization simply replicated that of chimpanzees and bonobos, and when Pinker cherry-picks archaeological examples to make the claim that we are far less violent than our ancestors.3 This is not to say that their interpretations are misleading in all respects. Nor is the problem solved by the occasional, not altogether convincing, admission that the issue is somewhat conjectural. The possibility that the narrative has overrun the facts is no less worrisome for the most recent of the grand schemas: that put forth by two University of London scholars, anthropologist David Graeber, who died suddenly last September, and archaeologist David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
Carried by its attractive presentation and nimble writing, two central themes stand out in Graeber and Wengrow’s account. First, human social and cultural development, far from following an ineluctable trajectory, has always incorporated a broad array of viable alternatives. Just as we have come to regard the evolution of our species as more like a bush than a tree and history as much more than a story of ever-greater Whiggish improvement, so, too, in the social realm we have always had multiple models that have not pointed in a singular direction.
The second theme follows from the first. It asserts that, since our history is not one of narrowing alternatives, we need not think of ourselves as inextricably tied to one or another means of social organization. On the contrary, it is precisely in the alternatives that salvation from Leviathan may be sought. The social history of our kind, the authors conclude, is one in which enacted alternatives and resistance to states show how it is possible to live without any central governing institutions, and that freedom has thrived in such circumstances. And this, readers are assured, is also the proper way to read the archaeological record. When Graeber’s personal advocacy of anarchy and Wengrow’s speculative archaeology meet, a new interpretation of human history becomes possible—anarchaeology.
The authors’ new history of humanity goes something like this: Throughout the ages when they subsisted predominantly as hunter gatherers, human beings were great experimenters.4 They worked their environs with great ingenuity and exploited time through the seasonal variation of their social arrangements. Dispersing to harvest widespread foods in one season, they could gather in another when resources were more consolidated. When they began what the authors call “play agriculture,” permanent settlements and state structures did not inevitably follow. Six thousand years transpired between the appearance of part-time agriculture and settled cultivators. It is thus an error
to treat whole populations of “complex hunter-gatherers” either as deviants, who took some kind of diversion from the evolutionary highway, or as lingering on the cusp of an “Agricultural Revolution” that never quite took place. … It is [their] ecological flexibility that tends to be excluded from conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as a point of no return.5In this longue durĂ©e of seasonal organization, our predecessors are said to have enjoyed three key freedoms:....
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