{"id":20930,"date":"2021-12-30T13:38:47","date_gmt":"2021-12-30T21:38:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=20930"},"modified":"2021-12-30T13:38:49","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T21:38:49","slug":"what-if-everything-you-learned-about-human-history-is-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2021\/12\/30\/what-if-everything-you-learned-about-human-history-is-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"WHAT IF EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED ABOUT HUMAN HISTORY IS WRONG?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In \u201cThe Dawn of Everything,\u201d the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow aim to rewrite the story of our shared past \u2014 and future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The anthropologist David Graeber at a 2012 debate about the Occupy movement. His new book with David Wengrow, \u201cThe Dawn of Everything,\u201d takes on the standard narrative of the origins of human societies.Credit\u2026Pier Marco Tacca\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Jennifer<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By Jennifer Schuessler<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published Oct. 31, 2021 Updated Nov. 3, 2021 (NYTimes.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One August night in 2020, David Graeber \u2014 the anthropologist and anarchist activist who became famous as an early organizer of Occupy Wall Street \u2014 took to Twitter to make a modest announcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy brain feels bruised with numb surprise<\/a>,\u201d he wrote, riffing on a Doors lyric. \u201cIt\u2019s finished?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was referring to the book he\u2019d been working on for nearly a decade with the archaeologist David Wengrow, which took as its immodest goal nothing less than upending everything we think we know about the origins and evolution of human societies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even before the Occupy movement made him famous, Graeber had been hailed as one of the most brilliant minds in his field. But his most ambitious book also turned out to be his last. A month after his Twitter announcement, Graeber, 59, died suddenly<\/a> of necrotizing pancreatitis, prompting a shocked outpouring of tributes<\/a> from scholars<\/a>, activists and friends around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,\u201d out Nov. 9 from Farrar Straus and Giroux, may or may not dislodge the standard narrative popularized in mega-sellers like Yuval Noah Harari\u2019s \u201cSapiens\u201d and Jared Diamond\u2019s \u201cGuns, Germs and Steel.\u201d But it has already gathered a string of superlative-studded<\/a> (if not entirely uncritical) reviews<\/a>. Three weeks before publication, after it suddenly shot to #2 on Amazon, the publisher ordered another 75,000 copies on top of the 50,000 first printing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\u201cThe
\u201cThe Dawn of Everything,\u201d which began as an email exchange between the authors, aims to upend the narrative of social evolution undergirding best-sellers like \u201cSapiens\u201d and \u201cGuns, Germs and Steel.\u201d  Credit\u2026 Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In a video interview last month, Wengrow, a professor at University College London, slipped into a mock-grandiose tone to recite one of Graeber\u2019s favorite catchphrases: \u201cWe are going to change the course of human history \u2014 starting with the past.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More seriously, Wengrow said, \u201cThe Dawn of Everything\u201d \u2014 which weighs in at a whopping 704 pages, including a 63-page bibliography \u2014 aims to synthesize new archaeological discoveries of recent decades that haven\u2019t made it out of specialist journals and into public consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a whole new picture of the human past and human possibility that seems to be coming into view,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it really doesn\u2019t resemble in the slightest these very entrenched stories going around and around.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Wengrow
Wengrow in his office in London in Oct. 2021. \u201cThere\u2019s a whole new picture of the human past and human possibility that seems to be coming into view,\u201d he said.Credit\u2026Tom Jamieson for The New York Times<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Big History best-sellers by Harari, Diamond and others have their differences. But they rest, Graeber and Wengrow argue, on a similar narrative of linear progress (or, depending on your point of view, decline).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to this story, for the first 300,000 years or so after Homo sapiens appeared, pretty much nothing happened. People everywhere lived in small, egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups, until the sudden invention of agriculture around 9,000 B.C. gave rise to sedentary societies and states based on inequality, hierarchy and bureaucracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But all of this, Graeber and Wengrow argue, is wrong. Recent archaeological discoveries, they write, show that early humans, far from being automatons blindly moving in evolutionary lock step in response to material pressures, self-consciously experimented with \u201ca carnival parade of political forms.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a more accurate story, they argue, but also \u201ca more hopeful and more interesting\u201d one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are all projects of collective self-creation,\u201d they write. \u201cWhat if, instead of telling the story about how our society fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\u201cHe
\u201cHe just had that ability to look at your work and sprinkle magic dust over the whole thing,\u201d Wengrow said of Graeber, who died in Sept. 2020, several weeks after they finished the book.Credit\u2026Tom Jamieson for The New York Times<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The book\u2019s own origins go back to around 2011, when Wengrow, whose archaeological fieldwork has focused on Africa and the Middle East, was working at New York University. The two had met several years earlier, when Graeber was in Britain looking for a job after Yale declined to renew his contract<\/a>, for unstated reasons that he and others saw as related to his anarchist politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In New York, the two men sometimes met for expansive conversation over dinner. After Wengrow went back to London, Graeber \u201cstarted sending me notes on things I\u2019d written,\u201d Wengrow recalled. \u201cThe exchanges ballooned, until we realized we were almost writing a book over email.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, they thought it might be a short book on the origins of social inequality. But soon they started to feel like that question \u2014 a chestnut going back to the Enlightenment<\/a> \u2014 was all wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe more we thought, we wondered why should you frame human history in terms of that question?\u201d Wengrow said. \u201cIt presupposes that once upon a time, there was something else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wengrow, 49, an Oxford-educated scholar whose manner is more standard-issue professorial than the generally rumpled Graeber, said the relationship was a true partnership. He, like many, spoke with awe of Graeber\u2019s brilliance (as a teenager, a much-repeated story goes, his hobby of deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics caught the eye of professional archaeologists), as well as what he described as his extraordinary generosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDavid was like one of those Amazonian village chiefs who were always the poorest guy in the village, since their whole function was to give things away,\u201d Wengrow said. \u201cHe just had that ability to look at your work and sprinkle magic dust over the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most recent big histories are by geographers, economists, psychologists<\/a> and political scientists<\/a>, many writing under the guiding framework of biological evolution. (In a cheeky footnote assessing rival Big Historians\u2019 expertise, they describe Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, as the holder of \u201ca Ph.D on the physiology of the gall bladder.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graeber and Wengrow, by contrast, write in the grand tradition of social theory descended from Weber, Durkheim and Levi-Strauss. In a 2011 blog post<\/a>, Graeber recalled how a friend, after reading his similarly sweeping \u201cDebt: The First 5,000 Years\u201d<\/a> said he wasn\u2019t sure anyone had written a book like that in 100 years. \u201cI\u2019m still not sure it was a compliment,\u201d Graeber quipped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Dawn of Everything\u201d includes discussions of princely burials in Europe during the ice age, contrasting attitudes toward slavery among the Indigenous societies of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, the political implications of dry-land versus riverbed farming, and the complexity of preagricultural settlements in Japan, among many, many other subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the dazzling range of references raises a question: Who is qualified to judge whether it\u2019s true?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Occupy
Occupy Wall Street protestors in lower Manhattan in Sept. 2011. Graeber was often credited with the slogan \u201cWe Are the 99 Percent,\u201d though he insisted it was a collective effort.Credit\u2026Ozier Muhammad\/The New York Times<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Protestors
Protestors in Zucotti Park in Nov. 2011. Graeber liked to say the goal of his book with Wengrow was \u201cto change the course of human history \u2014 starting with the past.\u201dCredit\u2026Robert Stolarik for The New York Times<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Reviewing the book in The Nation<\/a>, the historian Daniel Immerwahr called Graeber \u201ca wildly creative thinker\u201d who was \u201cbetter known for being interesting than right\u201d and asked if the book\u2019s confident leaps and hypotheses \u201ccan be trusted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Immerwahr deemed at least one claim \u2014 that colonial American settlers captured by Indigenous people \u201calmost invariably\u201d chose to stay with them \u2014 \u201cballistically false,\u201d claiming that the authors\u2019 single cited source (a 1977 dissertation<\/a>) \u201cactually argues the opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wengrow countered that it was Immerwahr who was reading the source wrong. And he noted that he and Graeber had taken care to publish the book\u2019s core arguments in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals<\/a> or deliver them as some of the most prestigious invited lectures<\/a> in the field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI remember thinking at the time, why do we have to put ourselves through this?\u201d Wengrow said of the process. \u201cWe\u2019re reasonably established in our fields. But it was David who was adamant that it was terribly important.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James C. Scott, an eminent political scientist<\/a> at Yale whose 2017 book \u201cAgainst the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States\u201d<\/a> also ranged across fields to challenge the standard narrative, said some of Graeber and Wengrow\u2019s arguments, like his own, would inevitably be \u201cthrown out\u201d as other scholars engaged with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he said the two men had delivered a \u201cfatal blow\u201d to the already-weakened idea that settling down in agricultural states was what humans \u201chad been waiting to do all along.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the most striking part of \u201cThe Dawn of Everything,\u201d Scott said, is an early chapter on what the authors call the \u201cIndigenous critique.\u201d The European Enlightenment, they argue, rather than being a gift of wisdom bestowed on the rest of the world, grew out of a dialogue with Indigenous people of the New World, whose trenchant assessments of the shortcomings of European society influenced emerging ideas of freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ll bet it has a huge significance in our understanding of the relationship between the West and the rest,\u201d Scott said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Dawn of Everything\u201d sees pervasive evidence for large complex societies that thrived without the existence of the state, and defines freedom chiefly as \u201cfreedom to disobey.\u201d It\u2019s easy to see how such arguments dovetail with Graeber\u2019s anarchist beliefs, but Wengrow pushed back against a question about the book\u2019s politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m not particularly interested in debates that begin with slapping a label on a piece of research,\u201d he said. \u201cIt almost never happens with scholars who lean right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if the book helps convince people, in the words of the Occupy slogan, that \u201canother world is possible,\u201d that\u2019s not unintentional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve reached the stage of history where we have scientists and activists agreeing our prevailing system is putting us and our planet on a course of real catastrophe,\u201d Wengrow said. \u201cTo find yourself paralyzed, with your horizons closed off by false perspectives on human possibilities, based on a mythological conception of history, is not a great place to be.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n