Human History Gets a Rewrite

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/

No paywall
https://archive.md/u9xcs


*snip*

And what a gift it is, no less ambitious a project than its subtitle claims. The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.

Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).

It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong. Drawing on a wealth of recent archaeological discoveries that span the globe, as well as deep reading in often neglected historical sources (their bibliography runs to 63 pages), the two dismantle not only every element of the received account but also the assumptions that it rests on. Yes, we’ve had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the next—all this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them. Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring.

The bulk of the book (which weighs in at more than 500 pages) takes us from the Ice Age to the early states (Egypt, China, Mexico, Peru). In fact, it starts by glancing back before the Ice Age to the dawn of the species. Homo sapiens developed in Africa, but it did so across the continent, from Morocco to the Cape, not just in the eastern savannas, and in a great variety of regional forms that only later coalesced into modern humans. There was no anthropological Garden of Eden, in other words—no Tanzanian plain inhabited by “mitochondrial Eve” and her offspring. As for the apparent delay between our biological emergence, and therefore the emergence of our cognitive capacity for culture, and the actual development of culture—a gap of many tens of thousands of years—that, the authors tell us, is an illusion. The more we look, especially in Africa (rather than mainly in Europe, where humans showed up relatively late), the older the evidence we find of complex symbolic behavior.

*snip*

[Hugin]

1. This sure sounds worthy of a purview.

One issue I've had with the status-quo of the zeitgeist of human development is that it assumes human groups to have been relatively sedentary.

The evidence is that humans moved around quite often and long distances. Dropping off culture and innovation along the way.

[Bayard]

2. Bookmarking

[teach1st]

3. Fascinating paragraph from the Atlantic article

The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these [North American Native intellectuals] in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom. The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition). They go further, making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.

[ARPad95]

5. I hope they've included Matilda Joslyn Gage and her connection to the Haudenosaunee people.

Matilda was written out of history even though she was a prime mover and shaker in the early women's suffrage movement, strong advocate for the abolishment of slavery and student of Native American culture and egalitarian society.

https://www.syracuse.com/living/2020/08/matilda-joslyn-gage-directed-the-womens-suffrage-movement-from-her-fayetteville-home-then-she-was-written-out-of-history.html

“She was written out of history,” said Sally Roesch Wagner, Ph.D., a Gage historian. “It is not about her importance, it is about a political act of erasure. It was done by an increasingly conservative, racist and classist Christian women’s suffrage movement.”

“What happened was here was this radical woman, Matilda Joslyn Gage, who writes about the superior world of the Haudenosaunee, saying justice was never more perfect, a civilization never higher,” Wagner said. “And here they are appealing to racism. Gage was honorarily adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation and wrote approvingly and with great respect that this is the direction we should be going. And she’s an embarrassment and they write her out of history.”

[hunter]

4. Broken societies make the tyrants and strong men.

It's not the tyrants and strong men who break these societies.

The U.S.A. made Trump.

Trump didn't make the U.S.A.

The "Founding Fathers" perspective of history is bullshit.

As someone who is very critical of the U.S.A. High School / Mass Media heroes-and-villains versions of history I'm adding this book to my reading list.