There are a lot of things to dislike about this book. While Graeber and Wengrow mercifully avoid writing like your typical academics, this doesn't necessarily make for an easy read. Beyond its density of detail, which one can choose to see as a bug or a feature, the real problem with their writing is a tendency towards digression so severe that it frequently swamps their entire argument. I often found myself spending a lot of extra time reconstructing the overall shape of what they wanted to say (and what they probably thought they said) by stitching together the scattered points of several long-winded and not well marked tangents. Nevertheless, the wealth of anthropological and archaeological information they provide was for me so novel and interesting, and their main points so cogent and important, that I decided to make the detailed summary you'll find below. While it's strange to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and yet can't think of anyone I would recommend it to.
1 -- Farewell to Humanity's Childhood
Graeber and Wengrow originally set out to write another book about "the origins of inqeuality", only this time one backed up by anthropological and archeological evidence, rather than arm-chair philosophizing. Along the way, however, they discovered that the very form of the question revealed more about the present than any straight-forward answer would reveal about the past. Because the question only makes sense if you believe from the outset that: 1) we are unequal now, 2) that this is, in principle at least, a bad thing, even though it may have been a necessary evil for various reasons, and 3) that there was some moment in the past where we were equal. While our current economic and political arrangements make 1 pretty obvious to everyone, the other two assumptions are less clearly fulfilled.
While many might consider it perverse to take issue with 2, G&W deny precisely this assumption, though in a quite subtle way. These guys are honest to dog anarchists, not merely libertarian
posers who whine to the government every time they might lose money. So they do
not make the classic libertarian argument that inequality is not a bad thing because equality always effectively means an equality of
poverty. That argument in fact exposes precisely the problem of how, regardless of our moral evaluation of it as good or bad, we take the organization of our current world to be
inevitable, and go on to project this inevitability into the past, a problem G&W set about trying to correct. Like most folks, the libertarians too concede that equality is a
good thing
in principle, but they place a much
higher value on being
rich. And, since it's mostly rich folks making this argument, they, quite correctly, think that more equality would mean less wealth (for them). When they extrapolate this inverse relationship into the past they conclude that there
must have been a time when we were all equal, but that our lives then were, as Hobbes' said, nasty, brutish and short. Instead of arguing that being
rich is more important than being
equal, G&W effectively argue that what we really want is to be
free. In their eyes, equality is not something that society should, even in principle, strive towards. What makes inequality problematic is not that people are different and some have more stuff, but simply that, in our society, the people with more stuff get to
order everyone else around, and these orders are ultimately enforced by the state's monopoly on violence. While this perspective is obviously not
pro-inequality, it's more fundamentally pro-
freedom. As a result, it robs the question of "the origins of inequality" of all its interest, and instead forces us to ask how it was that we constructed societies where unequal
property arrangements lead directly to unequal
political treatment. In other words, their question becomes, "what are the origins of unfreedom"? Just how far back does slavery (taken in the broad sense) go?
2 -- Wicked Liberty
Turns out, someone has already answered this question. Rousseau famously thought that humans began in a blessed state of nature characterized by equality and freedom. Then they fucked it up by inventing agriculture and private property. G&W spend chapter 2 exploring the intellectual history that led Rousseau to invent the "noble savage" in his 1754 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, and then try to understand why this idea has been so influential.
On one level, the answer to the latter question is fairly simple, and the logic of it is worth elaborating since it's central to their whole goal in writing the book. Rousseau provides a variation on the myth of Original Sin and the Fall from the Garden of Eden. Thus he forms a romantic rejection of the liberal (in the classic sense current at his time) position we saw associated with Hobbes in chapter 1. In both cases, however, the inequality and unfreedom of the modern world appear as inevitable side effects of development or progress. As a result, the implication is that we just have to put up with these aspects of our society, because, after all, it would either be worse if we tried to change anything, or, alas, it would be as impossible as returning to the womb. So it seems that the idea that humanity began in a simple, uniform State of Nature is like the mirror image of our belief in the inevitability of the Present. If we like the current system, we imagine the trajectory arcing up, and if we dislike it, we imagine history as a fall from grace. But in either case, there's nothing we can do to change how we live, since history unfolds lawfully along a straight line between alpha and omega. By way of contrast, this logic highlights the most valuable thing that The Dawn of Everything offers us-- a sense of the contingency of history, of the role of human political agency in it, and a corresponding sense of the possibility of change in the present.
However, the bulk of this chapter is actually devoted to an interesting, though to my mind not totally convincing, intellectual history of the Enlightenment ideas that led up to Rousseau's famous essay. The story is motivated mainly by G&W's own journey in writing the book. If, as we saw, the question of the origin of
inequality is something of a distraction from the more fundamental question of the origin of
unfreedom, then how is it that we came to be so obsessed with the former? I won't detail their whole, quite complicated and somewhat dubious, answer to this question. But the bigger picture is fairly clear. They claim that the Enlightenment actually began due to the revolutionary intellectual impact of Europeans encountering (indigenous) Americans. The completely different and much more free political organization of many American societies -- and those society's decidedly negative view of the unfreedom of European society at this time -- allowed free thinkers like Voltaire et. al. to critique their own society by adopting this outsider's perspective. So they tell an interesting story about the impact of people like
Kondiaronk on intellectual history, which has the effect of making it appear as if the Enlightenment were originally a sort of anthropological sci-fi. But of course, in the end, "
society must be defended", and the Europeans, instead of taking the American critique as that of an intellectual equal, invented the story of the inevitable stages of human history, beginning with the Fall, and culminating in ... well, in late-Enlightenment Europe. This allows someone like Rousseau to simultaneously take on board the indigenous critique of Europe, but also to defuse it. The Americans are right; their own society is much more free than Europe. But that, Rousseau will argue, is the price we pay for our Original Sin of agriculture and development. What, after all, can modern Europe really learn from a bunch of children still living in the Garden of Eden? Like I say, as a history of the shifts in intellectual currents during the Enlightenment it's not terribly compelling. But it does at least outline a way the politically explosive question of how European society got to be so
unfree can be transformed into a more manageable, almost technical, question about how it got to be so
unequal. In Rousseau's story, we were only free back when we were all equals. In our inevitable Fall, our society lost both of these attributes simultaneously. Positing a State of Nature binds up these two variables so that we can only imagine freedom by imagining a simple, undifferentiated, and egalitarian society. But since "
everybody knows" we can't go back there, the best we can do is manage these to be a little less bad.
3 -- Unfreezing the Ice Age
Next, G&W proceed to tackle some of the odd and not well-founded assumptions we tend to make about human life in the ice ages. These assumptions are congruent with the idea that a single, simple, uniform, State of Nature characterized all early human populations. Since homo sapiens emerged roughly a million years ago, and we usually imagine this original state dissolving only with the Neolithic Revolution of agriculture and permanent settlement (after the end of the last ice age ~10,000 BCE), this period dominates the bulk of humanity's existence as a species. This long pre-history leads to what they call the "sapient paradox"; if modern humans evolved from apes so long ago, why did we continue living in tiny hunger-gatherer bands -- in other words, like apes -- until fairly recently? Sure, some folks choose to model these bands on the cooperative egalitarian bonobo of Rousseau, and other on Hobbes' nasty, brutish chimpanzee, but everyone seems to agree nothing much was going on over this incredibly long period. If we were humans, why weren't we doing, you know ... human stuff?
Their response is simply to deny that this paradox exists. No matter how far back we look, they claim, we find no evidence that most humans were organized exclusively into the small nomadic hunter-gather bands that we expect to find in the State of Nature. They discuss a
variety of
new archaeological
evidence that suggests an ever-earlier inception date for large, politically complex groups that are nevertheless still hunter-gatherers. All of these sites seem to point to the fact that humans have been organizing themselves in a self-conscious political fashion (unlike our ape ancestors) for much longer than we usually credit ourselves with. In this context, they bring up a very interesting hypothesis -- perhaps pre-historical political structures varied dramatically by
season. There's archaeological evidence, for example, that the monuments at Göbekli Tepe were used only seasonally for ritual purposes. And then there's a host of anthropological examples of groups (like the Nambikwara, the Inuit, the Kwakwakaʼwakw, and some of the Plains Indians) who have dramatically different modes of living and political structures depending on the time of the year. In some periods, these groups are effectively anarchists; no one can coercively order anyone around. In other periods, they have leaders with near absolute power. And these different organizations don't seem to map onto variables like the size of group or abundance of resources in any clear way. If this seasonal variation was a pretty common (and it's hard to imagine it wasn't once we left the area around the equator) it suggests some fascinating implications. Not only does it suggest that people may have organized into large groups long before we normally think, but it suggests that they regularly had experience with
different political structures. If you live in a small band during part of the year and a large group during another part, and the rules of conduct are different in the two cases, it's going to be pretty hard not to reflect on the fact that political structure is a
choice, and precisely
not something inevitable. Self-aware 'savages' with multiple complex political structures obviously blows up the whole theory of the State of Nature and the inevitability of 'human development'. Which of course, once again transforms the question G&W are interested in. If there
never was a State of Nature, then it makes no sense to ask about the origins of inequality, or even of unfreedom. Humans were equal in some parts of the year and free in others, and the two things didn't have much to do with one another. Instead, the question becomes how we
lost the freedom to switch between these types of structures. "How did we get stuck?"
4 -- Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property
This chapter begins by recapitulating their now familiar idea that what humans really want is not equality, but freedom. Societies which from the outside we call 'egalitarian', are, from their own perspective, simply focused on preventing the emergence of a system where some people become able to permanently boss other people around. These societies may still have inequalities along all sorts of axes like sex, ceremonial status, and wealth, but these inequalities are not permitted to disturb the fundamental equality of effective autonomy for everyone. So, how did we lose this autonomy?
When we look around at our own society, the answer seems obvious. It's the way our society is geared towards the continual accumulation of private property that gives some people the leverage to tell others what to do. If we didn't have to
work, we'd be free. If the basics of life were readily available and we just didn't want so damn much
stuff, then we'd mostly do whatever we want without listening to bosses or governments. This is the story that Marshall Sahlins tells in
The Original Affluent Society. Those hunter-gatherers had it made. They only worked a few hours a week to get food and spent the rest of the time enjoying life. While G&W are supportive of Sahlins' basic claim that a good foraging ecosystem can keep everyone fed relatively easily, they point out that the 'original affluent society' thesis is yet another morality tale about the Fall. This time, it's our own
greed that drives us out of paradise and into the chains of forced labor. The story assumes, once again, that there was an original state where human life was simple, where there was nothing much going on beyond the minimum subsistence. And, once again, G&W deny that there ever was such a state. This time they discuss various monumental early Holocene sites like
Poverty Point and
Sannai-Maruyama where these contented hunter-gatherers for some reason decided to work their asses off building huge monuments in their 'leisure' time. Apparently, the idea that 'affluence' involves nothing more than big drinks with little umbrellas is not universal. If these societies were free (or at least seasonally free) then it cannot be simply the emergence of new (biologically useless) desires alone which ends up trapping us in the endless monotony of work and domination.
It turns out that they don't actually offer an alternative explanation of how we get stuck in this chapter. They do, however, conclude with a pretty interesting take on the origins of private property -- it begins with the
sacred. They compare the characteristics of private property to the Polynesian idea of
tabu -- 'not to be touched'. It seems that many of the hunter-gatherer monument complexes (and other surplus burning activities like potlach) may have chiefly served ritual purposes. This sacred context is precisely the one in which elaborate prohibitions are made on the possession of various secret artifacts or knowledge.
5 -- Many Seasons Ago
The main argument of this chapter is a bit convoluted, and doesn't really advance their question of "how we got stuck". Instead, they return to a question they mentioned in passing in the previous chapter -- how did we evolve so many distinct cultures? To my mind, this question itself is somewhat at odds with the perspective that G&W have been developing. They claim there's lots of evidence for a single ''cosmopolitan' culture during the last ice age. As if there were a uniform 'human culture' that somehow allowed all the hunter-gatherer groups to interact over long distances. But the only evidence they give for this is that rare resources like obsidian and such can end up a surprisingly long way from their source. Which doesn't seem strong enough for such a broad conclusion. In addition, wouldn't this 'cosmopolitan forager' culture constitute exactly the original culture of humanity that they've spent so much time arguing does not exist?
This hypothesized undifferentiated state is needed because they want to argue that cultures differentiate by defining themselves in contrast in a process of "
schismogenesis". The goal is clearly to develop some theory of cultural change that does not rely on simple
drift, but requires the active
agency of the people involved. While they don't do an amazing job of arguing for the explanatory power of this theory, they do give an example of the process which provides lots of interesting information about the Americans who inhabited the Pacific coast just before white people showed up. It seems that the native groups of the Pacific Northwest, could not have been more different from the Californian groups, even though both groups were foragers who had rejected the agricultural society long common in other parts of America. In WA, the "Fisher Kings" ate mostly fish and had a hierarchical society not dissimilar to feudal Europe, where the lords were constantly boasting and competing with each other other for status their potlach gifts. In CA, the "Protestant Foragers" chose to live mostly on acorns, and had an egalitarian society that valued thrift and hard work. In WA, wealth took the form of unique and in-exchangeable family heirlooms, and there was no real private property. In CA, they used shell money and everything belonged to someone. And, crucially, the WA tribes all practiced slavery, whereas the institution appears nowhere in CA. It's hard not to see these two cultural areas as in some sense
deliberately choosing polar opposite lifestyles. G&W imply that the crucial element that distinguishes the two cultures is their position on slavery, though it seems difficult to separate just this one dimension from the whole political and ecological constellation of a society. But their broader point is simply that humans are (at least partially) free agents making self-conscious decisions about what type of society they want to live in.
6 -- Gardens of Adonis
In this chapter they tackle the origins of farming. Did farming began primarily a means of food production? Or was it more a form of ritual
gardening meant to produce a little food alongside its more important role in providing other materials (like straw) as well as a collective work context? As you might guess, G&W argue for the latter interpretation, citing evidence that much of the farming around
Çatalhöyük was 'flood recession' farming, where you just throw some seeds on the river bed at the appropriate time of year, and then come back a few months later for the harvest. This is no way to farm if it's your major source of calories. in addition, it seems that the length of time between the first signs of crop domestication and the move to full time farming is much much longer than can be explained simply by the slowness of genetic modification of crops through selection. In other words, for a long time, people farmed merely as a supplement to their -- free or at least 'unstuck' (seasonally free) -- forager lifestyle. Clearly this sort of dabbling in farming makes any history which posits a 'agricultural revolution' that leads inevitably to private property and states and relations of social dominance much less convincing.
In addition to arguing against anything like a neolithic revolution, they also argue against the commonplace idea that agriculture must have been bad for women. In fact, they suggest that this long slow adoption of gardening was actually driven by, and established new-found respect for, women. Men, of course, continued to hunt, but women's detailed knowledge of plants became increasingly important through this slow process of domestication. While intriguing, the evidence they cite for this proposition is pretty thin. Basically, all they have to go on are the presence of large numbers of statues of corpulent women in lower Mesopotamia. These contrast strongly with the terror inspiring imagery of dangerous animals carved into the pillars of Göbekli Tepe (located in the 'upland' part of the fertile crescent). So perhaps there was some sort of war of the sexes playing out in this period?
7 -- The Ecology of Freedom
If there wasn't anything like a single agricultural revolution, and if the adoption of some limited agricultural production (basically, gardening, or as G&W call it, "play farming" or "the ecology of freedom") does not lead inevitably to hierarchical city-states, we are left with the difficult task of tracing the more complex actual form of the long slow spread of agriculture through human populations. In this chapter G&W begin to discuss recent revisions to the archaeological picture which now seem to indicate that there were 15-20 independent centers of crop and animal domestication scattered all over the world. The spread of agriculture from each of these centers was quite different, but they suggest that there are some commonalities in the stories we have unearthed so far. As examples, they discuss the spread of farming from a Chinese center across Polynesia, as well as the spread from the fertile crescent into what is now Germany, and into the Nile Valley. They conclude, from comparing these 3 cases, that 'serious' farming actually spread as a sort of marginal activity that supported populations on land that was not already heavily occupied by forager groups (who had naturally chosen the best spots already). And, in the case of Germany, this marginal life style even apparently underwent a dramatic collapse around 5,000 BCE, perhaps due to a tendency towards mono-cropping. They contrast these stories with a discussion of the way that Amazonian groups long 'played' at farming, without ever committing themselves to the exclusive cultivation of just a few crops or animals. The goal is to tear down the image we normally have that, love it as a symbol of progress or hate it as the means of our enslavement, farming is an obviously superior strategy to foraging.
8 -- Imaginary Cities
So fine, maybe hunter-gathers periodically got together in large groups of their own free will, and maybe for millennia most of humanity played at farming rather than exclusively committing themselves to its back-breaking labor. Still, look around. Eventually, agriculture won. And however and whenever that happened, it must naturally have led to increasing population, and from there to the founding of cities and their inevitable class divisions and rulers, right? G&W devote this chapter to disproving the inevitability of what we usually just call 'civilization' -- the trajectory that leads from agriculture through urbanism to specialization and centralized administration of the state. Turns out, some of the earliest cities were probably republics in their first phase and in most places there seems to be a gap of nearly 1,000 years between large urban settlement and the appearance of princes and kings.
G&W compare and contrast the histories of 3 famous ancient cities -- Uruk in Mesopotamia,
Talianky (et. al.) in Ukraine, and Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan. These are all fascinating stories, and I won't go into the details other than to say that G&W make a decent argument that their early history is nothing like what we imagine should happen when lots of people live in the same space. Instead of immediately needing a king to organize them, these people seem to have formed unique types of self-organizing collectives. Since these organizations seemed to last for hundreds or even sometimes a 1,000 years, G&W speculate a little as to how they might have worked. Talianky may have been organized on a circular principle where various duties rotated through the city on a monthly basis. Uruk seems to have been a kind of worker collective, where the temples each produced a standardized product. And Mohenjo-daro might have been organized into a (paradoxically) harmonious caste system run by precursors to the brahmins who spent most of their time taking ritually purifying baths. What's more, each of these cities (along with
Shimao, which they also discuss briefly) has a long and complicated history where periods of self-governance alternated with dynastic control. Questions can certainly be asked about whether G&W are exaggerating the level of democracy in any of these ancient cities. But they do enough to make you feel like the ingrained assumption that any large group requires some form of coercive leadership like a king is just a prejudice on our part.
In passing, G&W also provide an interesting theoretical rejoinder to the common assumption that the increasing
scale of society
must result in a shift towards authoritarianism, or at least in some dramatically new social organization. Following
Canetti, they observe that people have long belonged to
imaginary groups that stretched far beyond those they interacted with on a daily basis. The Clan of the Cave Bear or other neolithic 'culture zones' may have stretched over an entire continent. And as Canetti pointed out, the first cities may have been the 'invisible crowds' of the dead, to which the living belonged only through imagination. Similarly, even in a modern city, our
habitual routes may bring us into contact with a very small slice of life, and yet we can still identify as 'New Yorkers' or 'Angelenos'. The point here is to question the seemingly inevitable connection between population density and social organization. Humans have been living with the
idea of larger groups since the dawn of time, which may mean that our mental outlook needs to change less than we imagine when we begin to live in these groups in
fact.
9 -- Hiding in Plain Sight
At this point G&W move on to consider more recent, and more complicated, urban histories. They also shift locations, and in this chapter discuss two Mesoamerican cities:
Teotihuacan and
Tlaxcala. While they admit that some of the history is a little speculative, they argue that both of these cities had long democratic or republican phases in their history.
Teotihuancan is particularly interesting because its self-governing era would have overlapped precisely with the classical height of the Mayan empire. Here again, they suggest that the city may have distinguished its own culture from that of the nearby Maya in a process of schismogenesis similar to the one they described in chapter 5. One example of this opposition was their decision (perhaps as a result of some sort of social revolution in roughly 300AD) to stop building monumental pyramids and instead devote resources to building 'palatial' stone homes for just about the entire population.
Tlaxcala they discuss mainly because it was one the cities that allied itself the Spanish conquistadors in their overthrow of the Aztecs. While there's a certain amount of speculation about just how Tlaxcala was organized when the Spanish arrived, the various Spanish accounts do seem to repeatedly point to the fact that its was
not governed by a king.
One account even records a public debate worthy of ancient Athens that occurred between city elders charged with deciding whether or not to join the Spanish. It's an interesting reversal of perspective to consider that, at the time of the discovery of the 'new world', some of the indigenous American population knew more about practical democracy than the Europeans had forgotten.
10 -- Why The State Has No Origin
By this point in the book, it's not difficult to guess what G&W will make of the question of the origin of the state. Like the other origin questions they've dealt with, it too involves a myth-making projection of the present into past, the search for an unavoidable starting point that will inevitably evolve into the modern state we are all familiar with. So their overall conclusion is that this creature we call the modern state is entirely contingent. The evolution of The State is not governed by any law of scale or population density or social complexity. Ancient forms of power have not been secretly leading up to a single 'natural' type of political organization that we know as the modern nation state. Instead of searching for origins, G&W set out on something of a survey of past large political organizations. What they find is that different people have constructed different regimes of power at different times. Their discussion of a whole heap of different examples is the most interesting part of this chapter.
But, not content, to leave us with the impression that history is just
one damn thing after another, G&W do organize these examples into a simple framework. They argue that there are three possible ways to control people and create a hierarchy of political power: 1) Control of violence 2) Control of information 3) Personal charisma. And these three principles of social control lead to three possible types of political control: 1) Sovereignty 2) Bureaucracy 3) Charismatic Politics. When they first introduced this abstract framework it didn't seem terribly compelling to me. While it seems pretty obvious how you can control people with the fact or threat of violence, how you do so with information or 'charisma' is less obvious. Then too, why are there only these
three principle of domination? Can't you also control people by effectively
brainwashing them? Or by isolating them and pitting them against one another (separating from what they '
can do' as Deleuze puts it)? Are these possibilities somehow subsumed in the other three? It seemed like a somewhat arbitrary framework. But it begins to make more sense when you see how they apply it to historical examples of large scale political organizations. In the course of reading these applications of the framework, it slowly occurred to me that G&W had perhaps skipped a step in its exposition. Underlying all three of these forms of control is a single principle they don't explicitly mention. The key to controlling someone is in make sure that something they
value depends on
you, as opposed to being something within their own individual or collective power to realize. As 'master', you don't necessarily get to control
what it is that people value (though we can imagine feedback loops here where control of a valued object eventually leads control of what object has value). But to be in charge, you have to control people's ongoing
access to whatever it is that they
do value. Violence seems like an obvious way to control people only because we consider it obvious that everyone fears death values their own life. Relax that assumption and, as in so many Zen stories, violence ceases to have any power. How can a ruler achieve anything by killing us all? In this same context, control of information begins to make more sense as a principle of power. If you value money, or certain ritual goods, or a priest's absolution, then someone who can permit or deny these things to you is in a position of power over you, despite the fact that they may never threaten you with physical harm. They have set themselves up as a power that
administers the valued thing, typically according to a byzantine set of bureaucratic rules. And finally, if you are really really impressed with people who play
football well, or are great liars and
baby kissers, or have
armadillos in their trousers, then you might let do
all kinds of things for them that you wouldn't do for anyone else. Thus 'charisma' can also be a source of power over others because the charismatic performer controls access to some
affect that you value. Seen in light of this question of values, perhaps the framework begins to look less arbitrary. We value our lives, or some quality we
ourselves can possess, or some quality we admire in
another, but can't have for ourselves. Do these options cover all the bases?
As I say, the framework made more sense to me as I saw them apply it to specific examples. Their concept is to classify historical 'states' as operating according to one or more of their three principles of control. So they begin with examples of 'first-order' regimes each dominated by just
one of the principles. 1) Charisma -- The
Olmec, they claim, built a sort of 'charisma empire' based on the idea that politics was a kind of sport, similar to their famous
ball games, in which the important thing was to beat the other team. People let themselves be 'ruled' by the victors, at least insofar as they contributed the labor required to carve all those stone heads. But these rulers created no administrative apparatus, nor did a single one of them come to dominate and impose themselves as the only legitimate source of violence. 2) Information -- By contrast, they interpret the images found at
Chavín de Huántar as mnemonic devices for recording psychedelic induced shamanic journeys. Since these images are found across a large region but are concentrated at Chavin, they interpret the whole civilization as an 'empire of images' that controlled the flow of valuable esoteric information. Like the Olmec though, they didn't develop either of the other principles of control. That is, they didn't legitimate their power either through a competitive politics or the threat of violence violence. The idea is that we're looking at a power structure similar to a formal religion like Catholicism. There's no open competition to be Pope. And (these days) the Pope and his heavies don't turn up threatening to break your thumbs if you're late for mass again. Nevertheless, the Pope exerts a powerful control over millions by heading up a spiritual bureaucracy that controls access to something folks think is valuable (god in this case). 3) Violence -- Finally, they discuss the Great Sun of the
Natchez people as an example of a system of pure sovereignty where the ruler is a force completely above the law and thus capable of dispensing arbitrary violence at any moment. Without an administration, however, it turns out that the power of such sovereigns is rather limited and doesn't extend much beyond their immediate surroundings. In other words, if the Great Sun
personally demands your death, there's not much you can do about it; within the immediate 'family' of the royal court there are no limits on his power. But since you don't have to listen to any
delegates of the Great Sun's power, as long as you avoid him you can pretty much do as you please. The king is divine, but by the same token somewhat removed from the world.
Naturally, their next step is to consider 'second-order' regimes that combine two of the three principles. This results in a pretty fascinating discussion of two places that folks have long considered 'the original state' -- Egypt and Mesopotamia. I won't go deeply into the details here because the point is relatively simple. Egypt managed to combine the principle of sovereignty -- the divine status of the pharaoh and the way all his family and court need to be sacrificed at his death -- with a giant administrative religion that mandated ongoing provision of beer and bread to care for him in his mummified afterlife. But there was never any formal political competition outside of the 'dark ages' between dynasties. Mesopotamia, on the other hand, started off as a purely peaceful administrative 'state' with its temples operating like factories that produce ritual goods (as we saw with Uruk in chapter 8). Only later did it acquire a heroic politics where various figures like Hammurabi and Gilgamesh vied to create a dynasty. But as the example of Hammurabi indicates, even the violence of these kings was not arbitrary and without law as with a true divine sovereign, but precisely
codified, that is, administered bureaucratically.
Their overarching point in exploring all this history is to observe that the way the modern 'democratic' nation state combines all three of these principles is entirely an accident of history. Many other regimes of power have operated over long spans of time without using this precise combination. However, it does seem to me that their framework suggests there is something uniquely 'totalizing' (or perhaps 'totalitarian') about the modern state. After all, if they really believe there are only three principles of domination, then there is at least something special, if perhaps not inevitable, about a regime of power that combines all of them.
P.S. In another of their many digressions, and with pretty much total disregard for their framework, G&W ask if regimes of power organized by women are any different. Here they briefly discuss Minoan Crete, apparently run by women, which produced a unique
visual style.
11 -- Full Circle
As the title implies, this chapter returns us to the indigenous critique of European society that they discussed in chapter 2. Before, they traced the intellectual history of the impact of American ideas of political freedom on the Enlightenment. Here, they try to trace the actual political and social history of the Eastern half of the continent that led native Americans to hold those ideas at the time white people happened to show up and start raining doom down on them. It's an interesting story that comes in three main parts: the "
Hopewell interaction sphere", the rise and fall of
Cahokia, and the history of the
Iroquois Confederacy. Since the details in these final chapters tends towards the overwhelming, I'll just summarize the parts that support the main conclusion they want to draw -- the unfreedom that dominated Europe at the time of colonization was not historically inevitable; but neither was the lifestyle personified by Kandiaronk; in fact, the political organization of society is neither predestined nor random; it is a product of human
choice.
Their political history of Eastern America begins with what little is known about the Hopewell culture. Though it's named after a town near Columbus,
OH, Hopewell is a blanket term for an entire 'culture area' or 'interaction sphere' or just 'civilization' (if there's any difference between these terms I'm not sure what it is) that stretched across much of the Mississippi river and its major tributaries about 1,800 years ago. It's even possible that Hopewell represented a 'first-order' Informational/Bureaucratic state like we saw in Chavín, but since its was a much less centralized system they choose to punt on this particular point rather than insist on their classification scheme. What held Hopewell together was a clan system that governed travel and inter-marriage between different tribes, as well as a propensity to build huge earthen mounds with precise geometries related to astronomical observations. Their point with this story is to suggest that at this stage, a large chunk of the continent was organized into a a system that effectively allowed people a great deal of freedom of movement. As a result, if they didn't like political conditions where they were, they could pull a geographic, so to speak.
Later (1050-1300AD), roughly the same set of river valleys came to be dominated by the city of Cahokia. This was more like a proper state or 'Mississippian' empire, centered on an urban capitol, and employing at least two and perhaps all three of the principles of domination. Like all good empires, the founding of Cahokia was bathed in ritual blood. And so, apparently, was its end -- the city fell apart so violently that for centuries afterwards no one even wanted to live in the area, despite the fact that its some of the most fertile soil on the planet. So in G&W's reading, Cahokia becomes a cautionary tale about what happens when the elites try to monopolize power and deny people the ability to move around or change their political organization.
Finally, they conjecture that the principles that governed the Iroquois Confederacy, as well as their own creation myth explaining how these principles came about, show us a sort of ongoing reaction to the political problem that Cahokia represents. As
Clastres would have put it, the Iroquois were "warding off the state". Cahokia served as the, by then, legendary representation of the abuse of power, and having this history to refer to enabled them to see when their own social arrangements began to tilt in this direction and to take appropriate counter-measures. As a result, when the Europeans showed up, the Iroquois has already spent centuries recognizing political unfreedom and thinking about how to preserve their freedom; the indigenous critique of the Europeans we discussed at the start of the book was thus not the product of social evolution's children, but they product of a long period of
self-critique.
12 -- Conclusion
Where has this long journey left us? Their biggest thesis, at least, is a clear and convincing result of the wealth of examples they've covered -- human society has
not evolved in an evolutionary straight line that leads inevitably to precisely where we find ourselves today; people have been self-consciously experimenting with and moving between different political systems for as long as there have been humans. A first corollary of this lack of teleology is a lack of
origins, which now appear as myths about the inevitability of the present which are projected into the past. This doesn't mean that humans have invented nothing; on the contrary, acknowledging that history is
contingent returns all political structures to us as quintessentially
human inventions, rather than the inevitable products of some law of scale or innate psychology. Which leads us to a second corollary -- things can
change. Naturally, this is their take home message. Hard as it is to imagine today, our political structure is not set in stone. The peculiar combination of violence, bureaucracy, and charismatic leaders that constitutes the modern nation state will not last forever. Hence the title of the book, which doesn't refer to historical origins, but suggests that we are still and always "
in illo tempore", that mythical age when anything can happen.
However, they also use the concluding chapter to summarize other ideas which are both less clear and less convincing. For example, they say that we've learned that, "the zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation -- even, in some ways, as an encyclopedia of social possibilities". It's not clear exactly what this means though. Are they referring to the evolution of kingship in Egypt that they discussed? Or the way farming may have started more as a ritual of communal labor dedicated to the gods rather than specifically as a source of food? Then too, have they convincingly demonstrated either of those things, or really just sort of suggested that maybe new possible social organizations arise first in these ritual context before somehow getting taken 'seriously'? A nod toward some commonalities in a few examples doesn't really constitute a theory.
Or, to take another example, they promised to tell us why we "got stuck". Yet they've totally failed to do this. Every state or empire they've discussed has long since come unstuck, with the exception of those created in the past 250 years. So
are we even stuck? And if not, why does it seem so? They haven't really even discussed this. Here in the conclusion they throw out a few ideas. Maybe it was the invention of war that caused us to lose some of our freedoms? Maybe, but since they've given almost no history or war at all, how could we say? Maybe it was a shift towards patriarchy, and the way the sovereign's domination of citizens parallels the father's domination of the household? In this context, they tell an interesting story about the differences between
Wendat public torture and French public torture at the time of colonization. The moral of the story is that the Wendat believed violence should only be exercised on people
outside the community, and was never a legitimate way to express care for those in the community. As anyone who has been spanked by dad or arrested by cops can attest, we Westerns find it entirely plausible that violence can be applied inside a community, as a sort of 'tough love' means of caring for people. This, "confusion between care and domination," is an interesting observation, but it seems to have little relation to the text they've given us. We don't really know when the patriarchy arose, or why people started having sovereigns to begin with. All we have are some intriguing suggestions that neolithic women were respected for their 'playful' experimental gardening, and that in Minoan ladies seemed to run the show without much violence.
Overall then, the book has been more successful at raising questions than answering them. Hopefully others will follow more carefully in their footsteps.
