If you were born in middle-class UK of the 60s onwards, the chances are the ‘Learnabout’ series of ‘Ladybird’ books for children on non-fictional (informational) subjects will form part of the backdrop to your childhood. At a half-a-crown (two shillings and six-pence) they could be purchased with a couple of weeks pocket money. They covered every imaginable topic, including the story of ‘our civilization’: not just its history, as told through the biographies of kings and queens, but also its pre-history (as we see above). Their style and tone are of the kind you might expect in a primary-level children’s publication of the period. In an age of multi-culturalism, it is hard not to feel a certain nostalgia for their blinkered and cheery didacticism
We are no doubt smarter – and more cynical – today. Yet, when it comes to the pre-historic times – ‘before the Romans’ – how many of us adults trundle on with the assumptions based on the kind of narrative we remember from the Ladybird book? I think you’ll know the kind of thing I mean. The story that begins with ‘hunter gatherers’ and pursues its upward civilizing course through neolithic farming and increased urbanization to the establishment of the modern state. On the one hand, this can be presented as a cumulative sequence of technical innovations – the development of metallurgy, agriculture, and writing; on the other, an evolution of ever larger and more complex political structures, from the ‘small band’ to villages, then cities, and ultimately the modern nation state. This process is civilization – an overwhelmingly good thing, apparently: but also one that is almost bound, once under way, to follow the same sequential stages, with the technical innovations somehow forcing the pace of socio-political development.
But how much is any of this is factually accurate?
The question has more than academic importance. Of course, relatively little is known of the earliest times. However, what we think and say about them often seems to have greater general import than any assumptions we might have about the history of later ages. Just think of all the bland generalizations one hears uttered in all kinds of debates about the influence on our present human condition of all those ‘hundreds of thousands of years’ we supposedly spent as ‘hunter gatherers’. Does it all that rely upon nothing more solid than what we all read in a Ladybird book half a century ago?
The problem, according to David Graeber, one of the authors of a recently published book, The Dawn of Everything, is that everyone needs a narrative. While no serious specialist any longer believes the Ladybird book account, it would appear that coming up with anything to replace it, in the present state of our knowledge, has been just too much of a challenge. Respectable academics, with a reputation to protect, stick to their specialisms and avoid generalization. Consequently, the rest of us, when we wish to find something on which to base out generalizations about the influence of early history on human development, naturally reach out for the only such narrative that we have.
What we could really do with, you might have thought, are archaeologists and anthropologists who are not only experts in their domain, but also ready to stick their professional necks out and generalize! We non-specialists would, for our part, have to accept their accounts as no more than a ‘best guess’. But wouldn’t that be a whole lot better than the Ladybird book?
The above-mentioned publication, The Dawn of Everything, by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow (G&W), constitutes a rare example of such academic bravery, and we owe it to the authors’ courage to take its narrative in the spirit in which it was intended. First and foremost, the book aims to offer a non-evolutionary alternative to the conventional view of history. But, as we shall see, its alternative is no more politically innocent than the view it means to replace.
Civilization: a steady upward progress?
As its primary goal, G&W set out to challenge the evolutionism at the heart of the conventional view. Does the history of humanity up to, say, AD1500 really follow a steady upward trajectory? Is agriculture really the revolutionary catalyst for urbanization? Does life in cities really give rise to hierarchical elites? Are things really getting better and better?
As it turns out, the picture that emerges in this book is of a profusion of socio-political structures, large and small, a ‘theatre of social experimentation’, with phases of urbanization and empire breaking out and receding in a manner that might best be described as sporadic. Agriculture has been present in some form throughout much of this long period. It supports urbanization, of course, where and when that occurs – but it could hardly be described as the principal trigger for its adoption. The recent triumph of the ‘nation state’ may not, in the authors’ view, differ so much from some of the more coercive social experiments of the past. So far from being the culmination of history we have thought, it may already be showing signs of obsolescence.
Above all, G&W are keen to break the link people so often assume between the size of a polity and its tendency towards social inequality and coercive political processes. The expansion and concentration of populations, they argue, cannot, in any meaningful sense, be said to have ‘caused’ the rise of those more complex, hierarchical and coercive polities we see as our precursors, and the impact of agriculture on such changes is complex in the extreme; certainly not such as to warrant its description as a ‘revolution’. Our almost universal assumptions to the contrary are built on evolutionary theories that were always very speculative and are increasingly out of line with evidence coming to light.
So where did it all go wrong?
Yet, for G&W, there’s more than just history at stake. I hesitate in this context to name a political belief, since the authors themselves make no such reference. Suffice it to say that the reader cannot but be aware of the extreme value they place on human freedom, and the very negative view of the contemporary nation-state. At all events, their motivation in the present debate (which is one that people of a wide range of political perspectives might share) is the concern that false assumptions about history risk narrowing our vision of future possibilities. If the modern state is the culmination of history, then the various other, perhaps more democratic, social-political options that humans have from time to time explored, will be seen as evolutionary dead-ends. We will tend, as they put it, to ‘get stuck’.
Moreover, the place we are now is, for G&W, not a great place to be. Something, apparently, has gone radically wrong for us today – something reflected in the perverse moral priorities that underlie the relative value we attach to the sort of cultural achievements we associate with more ‘civilized’ societies. Not only, then, is the authors’ anti-evolutionism a matter of questioning the notion of historical inevitability. It is also about challenging the moral priorities that underlie our judgments today as to the relative value of ‘civilization’. Is the production of great monuments, for example, something we should really prize over the maintenance of basic freedoms, and the preservation of more participative forms of government?
At first sight, the idea of a ‘fall from grace’ seems in conflict with anti-evolutionism. But it is important to remember G&W do not thereby allude to an irreversible catastrophe – as though some version of the Christian doctrine of original sin were being transposed into history. In fact, the aim of the authors is rather to use the experiences of earlier human ages to prompt a recognition that ‘it didn’t all have to be that way’. Still, the implication of their strategy is that a blinkering of our collective gaze would have been needed for us to view our present condition of citizens of a Western nation-state as an unqualified blessing. This, in turn, brings back the question what it is precisely about our present condition – and that of societies like ours – that marks a falling away from the happier condition of at least some of those many societies that we displaced. If, as G&W consistently lead us to suppose, it is a kind of freedom (‘freedom to move’; ‘freedom to disobey orders’; ‘freedom to create new social structures’), then, at what point, and thanks to what particular development, was that freedom lost?
The more or less chronological development of G&W’s discussion keeps us reading to discover the occasion of this loss, but the moment is ever deferred. No, it wasn’t the adoption of agriculture, nor urbanization, nor even, necessarily, the rise of great cities. We keep reading, only to reach some kind of answer – a somewhat sketchily presented one – at ll. 509ff. Meantime, of course, we have ranged over thousands of years of social and political history, as the great theatre of socio-political experimentation has passed before our eyes. Many thanks, G&W, for the ride! But, as regards our fall from grace, well, here we are left with the impression, despite the brief discussion of the penultimate chapter, that it may have been due to some more proximate event, beyond the horizon of G&W’s treatment of ‘pre-iron age’ societies.
An elephant in the room
The political stance of the authors comes most clearly into view, I think, with the idea that serves as both a point of departure and of arrival for their reflections, and thus neatly brings their discussion full circle. They suggest that the indigenous American leaders, such as the historical Iroquoian Kandiaronk who figures in the influential work of de Lahontan in early C18th, may actually have been the historical source of Enlightenment political ideas, and not, as has generally been supposed, a retrospective literary projection of the C18th paradigm of the ‘noble savage’. The idea is no more than half-seriously entertained – a balloon tentatively flown and quickly deflated. Yet, its rhetorical effect is to align indigenous political practice with progressive and secular Western ideas that privilege freedom, and against Christian religion and, specifically, Jesuitism. As the authors state on more than one occasion, contemporary readers, transported back three centuries, would feel more in common with the views of Kandiaronk than those of the Jesuits.
Perhaps. Yet, I believe this bringing together of (relatively) ancient and modern political ideation plasters over what, to the average ethnographically unschooled reader, will appear – quite justifiably, in my view – a far deeper discontinuity between them, and in a manner that shows up rather than concealing, the gap. For what we see, not just in the case of the Iroquoian Kandiaronk, but across the whole range of societies featured in the book, including the most apparently egalitarian ones, is the omnipresence of religious ideation in the structuring of political and social relations. This is frankly something of an elephant in the room, so far as G&W are concerned. Admittedly, our distance in time from the particular worlds discussed and the limitations of the archaeological record, save the authors from too intimate an engagement with these worlds. Intimacy is, in these cases, an impossibility. Yet, the reader can hardly help observing how readily G&W avail themselves of the fact.
The trick would be harder to pull, if, as readers, we didn’t instinctively know that religion (however weird it might seem to us) goes with this territory of anthropology, and that it would be naïve – if not a mark of inadequate education – to comment on what was so manifestly taken for granted by the authors. Yet – let’s face it – this world of religious ideation, and, above all, its ubiquity in ancient societies, probably strikes the everyday reader as ‘weird’; whereas the ideas of Rousseau and Turgot, for those who trouble to read that stuff, are so commonplace that, without the historical contextualization necessary to their appreciation, we wonder what all the fuss was about.
How, then, do G&W talk about religion?
Ritual and play
In the case of those societies whose egalitarian tendencies particularly draw the authors’ interest, the language G&W employ is one of ‘play’ – of ‘theatre’, ‘experimentation’, ‘creativity’ and ‘spectacle’. For example: ‘ritual play constituted both a scientific laboratory and, for any given society, a repertory of knowledge and techniques which might or might not be applied to pragmatic problems’. An image that recurs through the book is that of ‘Gardens of Adonis’ – play-gardens, for mere cultic employment, that mirror the more laborious business of real horticulture.
This language of play, when applied to religion, operates in two ways. First, it assimilates the kind of ritual activity we moderns find strange to a notion of ludicity very positively connoted in our modern world of expressivist individualism, for which ‘creativity’ functions as a cultural paradigm. In so doing, of course, it emphasizes the aesthetic elements of ritual, its employment of human skills and practices that in our own world find their place in the domain of ‘culture’ as opposed to ‘religion’. At the same time, it distinguishes such activities, considered relatively benign, from strategies of power, which are not. Or, as G&W put it, ‘Play kings cease to be play kings precisely when they start killing people’. It would be fair to say, then, that this concept of ‘play’ allows us to extract what we like about religious ideation, while consigning the unpleasant residue to some other category.
Strategies of power, on the other hand, are analysed in terms of three ‘principles of domination’. These turn out to be a version of Max Weber’s three types of authority, somewhat modified by G&W in a way that warrants attention. Broadly, Weber’s second and third types (‘legal-rational’ and ‘charismatic’ authority) are retained, but his first type (‘traditional’) is transformed into to a somewhat imprecise and shifting congeries that includes ‘violence’ & ‘sovereignty’. What is striking, then, is that ‘tradition’ disappears from the picture.
This is highly significant – because tradition, it would be hard to deny, can be a source of power which also happens to be inseparable from religious ideation. It’s absence from G&W’s worldview is all the more noteworthy, because when we come to look at what other writers (especially social anthropologists) have to tell us about the relationship of religiously derived status and political power, the role of a specifically ‘traditional’ form of authority (as understood by Weber) is absolutely central.
So why do people obey authority?
The question of why people do what their bosses tell them has received fairly extensive consideration by social anthropologists – and in particular those who have studied hierarchical societies, as, famously, Richard Firth (Tikopia) and Audrey Richards (Bemba). What emerges from these studies is that dissent, even a kind of covert defiance, are present on a scale that G&W would find gratifying, at least in regard to the practicalities of life. Yet this appears always to stop short of a repudiation of the principle of chiefly authority. Partly, this is a matter of the fear of supernatural sanction. But, more importantly, it is the result of the way the very desires and goals of people are structured by a worldview they haven’t invented but inherited from their ancestors. Hence, the somewhat puzzled response evidenced by one of Richards’ informants, when quizzed about withholding from the superior their due: Why would anyone wish to do that?’
In traditional authority, then, we can sometimes find a kind of power that is consensual without being properly voluntary, since it is based on a shared perception of how the world is, and where our obligations are owed. More recent writing on hierarchy, by Maurice Bloch amongst others, stresses that hierarchically attributed status does not necessarily equate with the exercise of power, but that it can offer a ready basis for it. From the perspective of its ideational basis, a gift to a superior may not differ so greatly from a tributary imposition or tax – and the one morphs easily into the other, where, as in Hawaii under its 18thC kings, status hardens into power. A more down-to-earth example would be that of the everyday relationship of man and wife – which, even under the relatively more patriarchal regime known to our grandparents, can be relatively benign, but in certain circumstances offer a pretext for outright tyranny.
There is, in fact, a fairly extensive recent literature on hierarchy, and the notion would seem to have become – to my limited knowledge – a widely deployed concept, even outside the extensive anthropological ‘fandom’ of its most famous recent theorist, Louis Dumont. G&W do not have the space to engage with recent academic discussions. This is no criticism, since any such engagement would have transformed this into another kind of book entirely. Still, it is curious that G&W ignore a fairly mainstream line of thinking that might have assisted the conceptualization of what is a – if not, the – central preoccupation of their book: namely, the moment in the trajectory of some polities, when religious ideation tips into political domination (or the reverse). Of course, hierarchy cannot explain the origin of that change. If historical explanation is what we want, G&W’s conclusions as to the probable role of slavery seem plausible enough. But it does help to explain the means by which that change could have been naturalized and accommodated – which is, after all, is part of the change itself, to the extent we do not see it as imposed by force alone. And, as G&W would be the first to point out, the role in any change of force alone is often exaggerated.
So, from the perspective of the value of this book as an ‘alternative history’, I would criticize G&W for having let a certain political stance come in the way of a fuller account of what they are describing – even though their critique of evolutionism is, in my view, largely justified. Moreover, the fact that the adoption of what I take broadly to be an anarchist perspective occludes rather than opening up, our historical vision, does nothing for my faith in anarchism (if that is what it is) or its capacity to make sense of the world.
However, the most serious problem I have is elsewhere.
An ultimately flawed perspective
The whole attempt to bring Kandiaronk on his own terms into the Enlightenment camp with Rousseau – and the blind eye cast upon the religious elephant in their midst – wilfully ignores what I take to be the one great discontinuity of history – the one point in history at which I think it would be legitimate to speak of the world having irrevocably passed into a new historical era. If there is any sense in the idea of historical evolution, it is in regard to this transition – from ancient polities, however egalitarian, to the state of today. Religious ideation continues; but the state (in its modern sense) has its basis in something else.
If not religious ideation, then what? This is not the place for a full discussion. I shall merely say that Milbank & Pabst, in Beyond Secular Order, convincingly identify the change with the progressive replacement of the religiously ideated polity, by an ‘abstract’ and entirely uniform politico-religious space constituted within fixed boundaries around a single sovereign centre. The ‘religious’ origins of this change go back to mediaeval Nominalism, though it has taken centuries for the implications of such thinking to work their way into political reality. Nor, is the process completed such that, like Hegel, we could see our present political arrangements as constituting the ‘end of history’. The process has gone along with a corresponding shift in the understanding of liberties, which are no longer synonymous with the privileges and immunities of particular elites, but have been redefined, in the face of a single absolute centre exercising power in the interests of all, as universal and common to every citizen – in short, as ‘rights’.
Does this mean we have left Kandiaronk behind? Sadly (or perhaps happily) yes. There is, of course, every benefit in anthropologists seeking to understand the ‘archaic’ polities of yesterday and today, because, if nothing else, the understanding what we are NOT, is the only route to understanding what we now ARE. But there is no sense in attempting to absolutize such notions as freedom in order to draw favourable or unfavourable comparisons between us and them.
If we cannot leave Kandiaronk behind, we may end up, once more, in the world of childish simplification. I began there, so that is where I shall end. Not, in G&W’s case, the very British world of the Ladybird book, but the world of the European post-war comic strip magazine ‘Pif’ – a world that, as regards its political origins, at least, I suspect G&W would find thoroughly congenial. As in ‘The Dawn of Everything’, an apparent breadth of cultural reference, admittedly, in this case, largely childish stereotype (‘the dazzling sweep of history and costume of these tales’) masks what is an instantly recognizable universalist Enlightenment ethic. This is the ethic which the French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, describes his hero, also Michel, as having absorbed through its pages.
Needless to say, this world also had its Kandiaronk:
Black Wolf … a synthesis of the noblest qualities of the Apache, the Sioux and the Cheyenne … roamed the prairies ceaselessly … instinctively coming to the age of the weak. Black Wolf continually commented on the transcendent ethic which underpinned his actions. Often, he referred to poetic proverbs from the Dakota and the Cree; sometimes more prosaically to the ‘law of the prairie’. Years later, Michel still thought of him as Kant’s ideal: always acting ‘as if he were by his maxims in every case a legitimating member in the universal kingdom of ends’.