An important and stimulating book because it challenges so many of our assumptions about the development of human societies, and effectively at that. Food for thought and debate.

More than one “revisionist” history starts by setting up a straw man to knock down — a thesis that nobody believes in anyway. But here the authors take on a set of assumptions that anthropologists may question but laymen still tend to take for granted: That a people’s economy evolves linearly from a hunter-gatherer mode to agriculture and then to industrial societies; that political structures grow from small bands to tribes to states and then perhaps supranational entities; and that organisations evolve from simple and egalitarian to complex and hierarchical. And we commonly assume that all these trends are naturally and unavoidably linked.

Those assumptions, the authors argue, are not supported by the facts. They may once have been a reasonable attempt by early modern western philosophers to understand how human societies evolve, but they were simplistic and wrong. Instead of allowing themselves to be steamrolled into a fixed pattern by some inexorable force of history, our ancestors demonstrated agency and creativity, and consciously experimented with many different models of survival and organisation. And crucially, they demonstrated the ability to reject forms that didn’t work for them — to turn their back on agriculture, cities and kings. Teleological interpretations of history tend to see such actions as regressive and signs of failure, but Graeber and Wengrow demand more respect for the wisdom of our ancestors and their innovation in the pursuit of happiness. In particular they offer fascinating perspectives into Native American political thinking and the possibility that it strongly influenced Enlightenment ideas (which are so often imagined to be essentially European).

To support their thesis, they walk us through a long list of societies, spread all over the world, that chose different models. There is an obvious risk there, as this to a varying degree involves interpretation of limited evidence. But they at least make a good case that their interpretations are as defensible as the traditionalist ones — and that much evidence has been previously overlooked or misinterpreted because both scientific and philosophical analyses were too biased, seeing kings and empires without serious evidence. They emphasise the evidence that many societies managed complexity and developed effective solutions with a self-organising collaborative model. Which may seem counterintuitive, but actually I have rarely seen an supervising hierarchy solve a problem — at their best hierarchies adopt and promulgate solutions that are developed at a collaborative level, but they almost never invent them. So this makes sense to me.

In a study that set out to investigate the origins of “inequality” (itself a fluid concept) Graeber and Wengrow arrive at the conclusion that the very hierarchical, multilayered organisation of most modern societies is an avoidable evil. A “trap” that we could escape from, because some our ancestors already did. It is an encouraging idea, that the condition of modern is often the ravine we got stuck in, while on our way descending from the rocky mountain slope to the green, fertile valley. A ravine of which the steep walls may be hard, but not impossible to climb. Still, the authors don’t really explain how so many of us got trapped there, if more egalitarian, more collaborative models are so much more attractive. They imply that Western colonialism may have helped to spread the hierarchical model, but they don't press that argument very hard.

Those of us with experience of top-down bureaucratic organisations know that one of the Kafkaesque ways in which they sustain themselves is to declare that challenging the status quo is “not done” and unhelpful. Such organisations instead tend to reward those who share the Panglossian notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds and everything is for the best. Graeber and Wengrow tell us that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, and we should have the courage of our ancestors to rethink, experiment, and find better solutions. They do not offer a cookbook, no easy road into paradise, but they do bring a fundamentally positive message. ( )

What an extraordinary, mind-expanding book [b:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity|56269264|The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072525l/56269264._SX50_.jpg|87659801] is. I had high hopes for it and they were consistently exceeded. Over 526 pages plus extensive notes and bibliography, Davids Graeber and Wengrow systematically undermine conventional wisdom about prehistoric life and recount the diversity of ways humans have lived in communities over the millennia. I found the sense of perspective and possibility running through the whole book really powerful and mind-expanding.

This feeling took me back thirty or more years, to reading a big hardback world history book in the primary school library with absolute fascination. (This might have been it but I'm not sure.) I was enthralled to learn about how many hundreds of thousands of years humans have been living in societies, leaving archaeological evidence of the buildings and objects they created. I've never got over that sense of awe about the span of human history; thank you school library. [b:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity|56269264|The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072525l/56269264._SX50_.jpg|87659801] reignited that same awe and fascination by bringing a dramatically original perspective to prehistory. The two Davids deconstruct conventional understandings of how agriculture, slavery, cultural exchange, democracy, sexual inequality, city-building, and hierarchy worked in ancient and precolonial times. Their analysis is intellectually robust and evidence-based, yet accessible to the general reader - something Graeber was always incredibly good at. The text is rich with fascinating examples that cover a huge span of history and much of the world. There is some intersection with and considerable expansion upon [b:Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia|60784843|Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1654480633l/60784843._SY75_.jpg|95849575], Graeber's other posthumous book. I wish I'd read that after [b:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity|56269264|The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072525l/56269264._SX50_.jpg|87659801], in fact, as now I realise why it felt unusually insubstantial. The ideas in the two books are closely connected.

[b:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity|56269264|The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072525l/56269264._SX50_.jpg|87659801] begins not at the start of history (if there is any such thing), but at the point when Europeans encountered a genuinely new and different society to their own in the Americas:

This is one area in which early missionary or travellers' accounts of the Americas pose a genuine conceptual challenge to most readers today. Most of us simply take it for granted that that 'Western' observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perhaps even unknowable Other. But in fact, in many ways, the authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignity - or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology - indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones.

The differing views on individual liberty are especially striking.

Successive chapters consider broad topics (agriculture, political organisation, cities, etc) and move through the millennia. I found the whole extremely thought-provoking, but will pick out a few points that proved particularly striking. The authors are at pains to counter linear narratives that societies move inexorably from simplicity to 'complexity', often underpinned by technological determinism and presumed irreversibility. One significant point is the number of societies that move between very different forms of social and political organisation depending on what time of year it is:

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either 'simple' or 'complex' types, since what have been identified as the diagnostic features of 'complexity' - territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display - apppear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population. Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognise that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgement has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn't really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history anymore. Nobody has proposed an alternative.
[...]
The same individual could experience life in what looks to us something like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states. With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to both make and unmake the political worlds we live in.

This book both seeks to recognise the true diversity of social forms that existed before capitalism flattened them all and to ask how and why such a range of forms arose. There is no straightforward explanation, of course, but the questions are all fascinating to consider:

But how do we explain the differences between these two culture areas? Do we start from the institutional structure (the rank system and importance of potlatch in the Northwest Coast, the role of money and private property in California), then try to understand how the prevailing ethos of each society emerges from it? Or did the ethos come first - a certain conception of the nature of humanity and its role in the cosmos - and did the institutional structures emerge from that? Or are both simply effects of a different technological adaptation to the environment?

These are fundamental questions about the nature of society. Theorists have been batting them about for centuries and probably will for centuries to come. To put matters more technically, we might ask what ultimately determines the shape a society takes: economic factors, organisational imperatives, or cultural meanings and ideas? Following in the footsteps of Mauss, we might also suggest a fourth possibility. Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?

The two Davids are evidently very tired of anthropological ideas being dumbed down and misinterpreted in popular social science books (some of which they cite and demolish impressively in a few sentences). One trope I've definitely come across before, presented without evidence, is that farming leads inexorably to hierarchical systems of domination. Their refutation is systematic and convincing:

If peasants are people 'existentially involved in cultivation', the ecology of freedom ('play farming', in short) is precisely the opposite condition. The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without becoming farmers; to raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one's existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death. It is just this sort of ecological flexibility that tends to be excluded from conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as the point of no return.

Moving freely in and out of farming in this way, or hovering on its threshold, turns out to be something our species has done successfully for a large part of its past. Such fluid ecological arrangements - combining garden cultivation, flood-retreat farming on the margins of lakes or springs, small-scale landscape management (e.g. by burning, pruning, or terracing) and the corralling or keeping of animals in semi-wild states, combined with a spectrum of hunting, fishing, and collecting activities - were once typical of human societies in many parts of the world. Often these activities were sustained for thousands of years, and not infrequently supported large populations. As we'll see, they may also have been crucial to the survival of those first human populations to incorporate domesticated plants and animals. Biodiversity - not biopower - was the initial key to the growth of Neolithic food production.

Dunbar's number is a concept even more overused and abused in social science books, notably those about technology and the workplace. The popularised version is that prehistoric humans lived in small communities, so we are evolutionarily hardwired to only able to personally know and maintain bonds with about 150 people. This is sometimes extravagantly extrapolated to explain why direct democracy can't work, why people act mean on social media, etc, etc. I was delighted by the two Davids nuanced treatment of Dunbar and emphasis on how patronising it is to assume that prehistoric humans were stupider than we are:

It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents. This might seem odd, but from the perspective of cognitive science it makes perfect sense. It's precisely this capacity to shift between scales that most obviously separates human social cognition from other primates. [...] Humans tend to live simultaneously with the 150-odd people they know personally, and inside imaginary structures shared by perhaps millions or even billions of other humans. Sometimes, as in the case of modern nations, these are imagined as being based on kin ties; sometimes they are not.

In this, at least, modern foragers are no different from modern city dwellers or ancient hunter-gatherers. We all have the capacity to feel bound to people we will probably never meet; to take part in a macro-society which exists most of the time in 'virtual reality', a world of possible relationships with its own rules, roles, and structures that are held in the mind and recalled through the cognitive work of image-making and ritual. Foragers may sometimes exist in small groups, but they do not - and probably have not ever - lived in small-scale societies.
Which is not to say that scale - in the sense of absolute population - makes no difference at all. What it means is that these things do not necessarily matter in the seemingly common-sense sort of way we tend to assume.

I also liked the point that throughout human history some people haven't got on with their family so have travelled a long way to live elsewhere! There is plenty of archaeological evidence for this phenomenon, it seems. A running theme throughout the book is that evidence for more nuanced and interesting interpretations of political organisation across history has been around for a long time (although some is more recent), but has often been dismissed. The academic emphasis has been on a narrative with European political forms as the logical endpoint, rather than exploring the variety of other forms tried elsewhere. I was particularly intrigued by the case study of democratic government in the Aztec city of Tlaxcala. The two Davids are unequivocal in stating that this dismissal is part of why nowadays we feel trapped in our current global political and economic system, despite it being obviously exploitative and destructive:

In fact, the evidence we have from Palaeolithic times onwards suggests that many - perhaps most - people did not merely imagine or enact different social orders at different times of year, but actually lived in them for extended periods of time. The contrast with our present situation could not be more stark. Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like. Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them.

If something did go terribly wrong in human history - and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did - then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel that this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of history.

The last two sentences pack an extraordinary punch:

We can see more clearly now what is going on when, for example, a study that is rigorous in every other respect begins from the unexamined assumption that there was some 'original' form of human society; that it's nature was fundamentally good or evil; that a time before inequality and political awareness existed; that something happened to change all this; that 'civilisation' and 'complexity' always come at the price of human freedoms; that participatory democracy is natural in small groups but cannot possibly scale up to anything like a city or a nation state.

We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths.

Yet I urge you not to stop reading there. In most nonfiction I only skim the notes, but they are always worth a thorough examination in any Graeber book. He invariably includes amusingly sardonic asides, such as:

As others point out, Yanomami tend to sleep together six to even ten people in the same bed. This requires a degree of good-natured mutual accommodation of which few contemporary social theorists would be capable. If they were really anything like the 'fierce savages' of undergraduate caricature, there would be no Yanomami as they'd all have long since killed each other for snoring.

[b:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity|56269264|The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617072525l/56269264._SX50_.jpg|87659801] is an antidote to TINA. It reminds us that there have always been alternatives in the past, we just haven't been looking for or at them. Although rapacious capitalism seems inescapable just now, it has only existed for a tiny proportion of human history. Many other ways to live together have been tried and remained stable for thousands of years. While some were violent and exploitative, others were peaceful and liberatory. I really hope the three sequels mentioned in the foreword still come to pass, even though tragically David Graeber is no longer alive to collaborate with Wengrow. I'd love to read a lot more revelatory reinterpretation of prehistory. ( )

Though the approach didn't resonate with me, I did enjoy the information, I wish it were presented in a more engaging manner. ( )

This sprawling book is hard to describe because it is a sprawling book covering spans of time from pre-Ice Ages to the 20th century, and cultures found all over the world. I found it fascinating to read/listen to. But I also found it a little frustrating that, by the end of it, I could not easily summarize their conclusions. And I think the authors are okay with this because they knew they were tackling a big, big intellectual puzzle.
So if you have the time to invest, I would suggest you give it a go. ( )

Loved this book for completely changing my perspective on ancient civilization and human history. ( )