human history
adding page this day:
CK (@Ceeekerrr) tweeted at 5:39 AM – 3 Mar 2018 :
Fascinating stuff with vast implications https://t.co/PkQZ40vRLu (http://twitter.com/Ceeekerrr/status/969915139251146757?s=17)
https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/
How to change the course of human history by David Graeber and David Wengrow – mar 2 2018
The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of ‘agricultural revolution’ remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors.
For centuries, we have been telling ourselves a simple story about the origins of social inequality. For most of their history, humans lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came farming, which brought with it private property, and then the rise of cities which meant the emergence of civilization properly speaking. Civilization meant many bad things (wars, taxes, bureaucracy, patriarchy, slavery…) but also made possible written literature, science, philosophy, and most other great human achievements.
Most see civilization, hence inequality, as a tragic necessity. Some dream of returning to a past utopia, of finding an industrial equivalent to ‘primitive communism’, or even, in extreme cases, of destroying everything, and going back to being foragers again. But no one challenges the basic structure of the story.
There is a fundamental problem with this narrative.
It isn’t true
[..]
Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands; agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the first cities were often robustly egalitarian. Still, even as researchers have gradually come to a consensus on such questions, they remain strangely reluctant to announce their findings to the public – or even scholars in other disciplines – let alone reflect on the larger political implications.
[..]
assumed story
200 000 yrs ago – begin human history
As the curtain goes up on human history – say, roughly two hundred thousand years ago, with the appearance of anatomically modern Homo sapiens – we find our species living in small and mobile bands ranging from twenty to forty individuals. They seek out optimal hunting and foraging territories, following herds, gathering nuts and berries. If resources become scarce, or social tensions arise, they respond by moving on, and going someplace else. Life for these early humans – we can think of it as humanity’s childhood – is full of dangers, but also possibilities.
Material possessions are few, but the world is an unspoiled and inviting place. Most work only a few hours a day, and the small size of social groups allows them to maintain a kind of easy-going camaraderie, without formal structures of domination.
Rousseau, writing in the 18th century, referred to this as ‘the State of Nature,’ but nowadays it is presumed to have encompassed most of our species’ actual history. It is also assumed to be the only era in which humans managed to live in genuine societies of equals, without classes, castes, hereditary leaders, or centralised government.
Alas this happy state of affairs eventually had to end. Our conventional version of world history places this moment around 10,000 years ago,at the close of the last Ice Age.
At this point, we find our imaginary human actors scattered across the world’s continents, beginning to farm their own crops and raise their own herds. Whatever the local reasons (they are debated), the effects are momentous, and basically the same everywhere. Territorial attachments and private ownership of property become important in ways previously unknown, and with them, sporadic feuds and war. Farming grants a surplus of food, which allows some to accumulate wealth and influence beyond their immediate kin-group. Others use their freedom from the food-quest to develop new skills, like the invention of more sophisticated weapons, tools, vehicles, and fortifications, or the pursuit of politics and organised religion. In consequence, these ‘Neolithic farmers’ quickly get the measure of their hunter-gatherer neighbours, and set about eliminating or absorbing them into a new and superior – albeit less equal – way of life.
To make matters more difficult still, or so the story goes, farming ensures a global rise in population levels. As people move into ever-larger concentrations, our unwitting ancestors take another irreversible step to inequality, and around 6,000 years ago, cities appear – and our fate is sealed. With cities comes the need for centralised government. New classes of bureaucrats, priests, and warrior-politicians install themselves in permanent office to keep order and ensure the smooth flow of supplies and public services. Women, having once enjoyed prominent roles in human affairs, are sequestered, or imprisoned in harems. War captives are reduced to slaves. Full-blown inequality has arrived, and there is no getting rid of it. Still, the story-tellers always assure us, not everything about the rise of urban civilization is bad. Writing is invented, at first to keep state accounts, but this allows terrific advances to take place in science, technology, and the arts. At the price of innocence, we became our modern selves, and can now merely gaze with pity and jealousy at those few ‘traditional’ or ‘primitive’ societies that somehow missed the boat.
[..]
For Diamond and Fukuyama, as for Rousseau some centuries earlier, what put an end to that equality – everywhere and forever – was the invention of agriculture and the higher population levels it sustained. Agriculture brought about a transition from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’.
[..]
‘Large populations’, Diamond opines, ‘can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws.Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary’.
[..]
There is no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian, or that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents, or bureaucracies. These are just prejudices stated as facts.
[..]
Civilization invariably puts in charge a small elite who grab more and more of the pie. The only thing that has ever been successful in dislodging them is catastrophe: war, plague, mass conscription, wholesale suffering and death. Half measures never work
[..]
We must conclude that revolutionaries, for all their visionary ideals, have not tended to be particularly imaginative, especially when it comes to linking past, present, and future. Everyone keeps telling the same story. It’s probably no coincidence that today, the most vital and creative revolutionary movements at the dawn of this new millennium – the Zapatistas of Chiapas, and Kurds of Rojava being only the most obvious examples – are those that simultaneously root themselves in a deep traditional past. Instead of imagining some primordial utopia, they can draw on a more mixed and complicated narrative. Indeed, there seems to be a growing recognition, in revolutionary circles, that freedom, tradition, and the imagination have always, and will always be entangled, in ways we do not completely understand. It’s about time the rest of us catch up, and start to consider what a non-Biblical version of human history might be like.
[..]
If so, then the real question is not ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’, but, having lived so much of our history moving back and forth between different political systems, ‘how did we get so stuck?’ All this is very far from the notion of prehistoric societies drifting blindly towards the institutional chains that bind them. It is also far from the dismal prophecies of Fukuyama, Diamond, Morris, and Scheidel, where any ‘complex’ form of social organization necessary means that tiny elites take charge of key resources, and begin to trample everyone else underfoot. Most social science treats these grim prognostications as self-evident truths. But clearly, they are baseless. So, we might reasonably ask, what other cherished truths must now be cast on the dust-heap of history?
The first bombshell on our list concerns the origins and spread of agriculture. There is no longer any support for the view that it marked a major transition in human societies. In those parts of the world where animals and plants were first domesticated, there actually was no discernible ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic Forager to Neolithic Farmer. The ‘transition’ from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production typically took something in the order of three thousand years. While agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception.
[..]
Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the agricultural revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. Since there was no Eden-like state, from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of rank or private property. If anything, it is among those populations – the ‘Mesolithic’ peoples – who refused farming through the warming centuries of the early Holocene, that we find stratification becoming more entrenched; at least, if opulent burial, predatory warfare, and monumental buildings are anything to go by. In at least some cases, like the Middle East, the first farmers seem to have consciously developed alternative forms of community, to go along with their more labour-intensive way of life. These Neolithic societies look strikingly egalitarian when compared to their hunter-gatherer neighbours, with a dramatic increase in the economic and social importance of women, clearly reflected in their art and ritual life (contrast here the female figurines of Jericho or Çatalhöyük with the hyper-masculine sculpture of Göbekli Tepe).
Another bombshell: ‘civilization’ does not come as a package. The world’s first cities did not just emerge in a handful of locations, together with systems of centralised government and bureaucrati
[..]
Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe.
[..]
The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that
the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence.
If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place
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Neal Gorenflo (@gorenflo) tweeted at 0:24 PM on Mon, Mar 05, 2018:
A long & winding exposition from @DavidGraeber abt why inequality isn’t inevitable from an anthropological perspective: https://t.co/rLWmxQImCaWorthwhile, but the lede is buried. Then again, it’s not a news story. It’s more like a long walk with an idiosyncratic friend.
(https://twitter.com/gorenflo/status/970741879401623552?s=03)
as it should be..
idio ness.. ie: idio-jargon as a language to get us back to us
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Michel Bauwens (@mbauwens) tweeted at 4:12 AM – 6 Mar 2018 :
How to change the course of human history | Eurozine https://t.co/zQfweqGoeE ; absolutely ESSENTIAL reading in the context of p2p hierarchy theory, based on the last decades of archeological evidence, thanks to DAVID GRAEBER !!! (http://twitter.com/mbauwens/status/970980425932988416?s=17)
Michel via fb:
the new essay by David Graeber on the history of hierarchy and egalitarianism, based on the newest archeologial findings and anthropological researchers is very important if not mind-blowing, and it not to be missed, essential reading.
I’ve extracted 3 long citations showing how it up-ends standard historical understandings,
this will be hugely important for re-formulating ‘p2p hierarchy theory’:
seasonal reversals of hierarchical structures (on p2p site):
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Seasonal_Reversals_of_Hierarchical_Structures
David Graeber:
“from the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. Anthropologists describe societies of this sort as possessing a ‘double morphology’. Marcel Mauss, writing in the early twentieth century, observed that the circumpolar Inuit, ‘and likewise many other societies . . . have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder. Property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, another social structure entirely took over as Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone. Within them, the virtues of equality, altruism, and collective life prevailed; wealth was shared; husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Seals.
Another example were the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast, for whom winter – not summer – was the time when society crystallised into its most unequal form, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastlines of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations, still ranked, but with an entirely different and less formal structure. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter, literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.
Perhaps most striking, in terms of political reversals, were the seasonal practices of 19th-century tribal confederacies on the American Great Plains – sometime, or one-time farmers who had adopted a nomadic hunting life. In the late summer, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip, or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet as the anthropologist Robert Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis, giving way to more ‘anarchic’ forms of organisation once the hunting season – and the collective rituals that followed – were complete.” (https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/
from foraging to farming (on p2p site):
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Transition_from_Foraging_to_Farming_Societies
David Graeber:
“Let us conclude, then, with a few headlines of our own: just a handful, to give a sense of what the new, emerging world history is starting to look like.
The first bombshell on our list concerns the origins and spread of agriculture. There is no longer any support for the view that it marked a major transition in human societies. In those parts of the world where animals and plants were first domesticated, there actually was no discernible ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic Forager to Neolithic Farmer. The ‘transition’ from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production typically took something in the order of three thousand years. While agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception. In the time between, people in areas as far removed as Amazonia and the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East were trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you like, switching annually between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth. Moreover, the ‘spread of farming’ to secondary areas, such as Europe – so often described in triumphalist terms, as the start of an inevitable decline in hunting and gathering – turns out to have been a highly tenuous process, which sometimes failed, leading to demographic collapse for the farmers, not the foragers.
Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the agricultural revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. Since there was no Eden-like state, from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of rank or private property. If anything, it is among those populations – the ‘Mesolithic’ peoples – who refused farming through the warming centuries of the early Holocene, that we find stratification becoming more entrenched; at least, if opulent burial, predatory warfare, and monumental buildings are anything to go by. In at least some cases, like the Middle East, the first farmers seem to have consciously developed alternative forms of community, to go along with their more labour-intensive way of life. These Neolithic societies look strikingly egalitarian when compared to their hunter-gatherer neighbours, with a dramatic increase in the economic and social importance of women, clearly reflected in their art and ritual life (contrast here the female figurines of Jericho or Çatalhöyük with the hyper-masculine sculpture of Göbekli Tepe).
Another bombshell: ‘civilization’ does not come as a package. The world’s first cities did not just emerge in a handful of locations, together with systems of centralised government and bureaucratic control. In China, for instance, we are now aware that by 2500 BC, settlements of 300 hectares or more existed on the lower reaches of the Yellow River, over a thousand years before the foundation of the earliest (Shang) royal dynasty. On the other side of the Pacific, and at around the same time, ceremonial centres of striking magnitude have been discovered in the valley of Peru’s Río Supe, notably at the site of Caral: enigmatic remains of sunken plazas and monumental platforms, four millennia older than the Inca Empire. Such recent discoveries indicate how little is yet truly known about the distribution and origin of the first cities, and just how much older these cities may be than the systems of authoritarian government and literate administration that were once assumed necessary for their foundation. And in the more established heartlands of urbanisation – Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Basin of Mexico – there is mounting evidence that the first cities were organised on self-consciously egalitarian lines, municipal councils retaining significant autonomy from central government. In the first two cases, cities with sophisticated civic infrastructures flourished for over half a millennium with no trace of royal burials or monuments, no standing armies or other means of large-scale coercion, nor any hint of direct bureaucratic control over most citizen’s lives.” (https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history
top down not necessary consequence of large scale org (on p2p site):
David Graeber:
“Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same size. It remained so for perhaps 400 years. Even in Cortés’ day, Central Mexico was still home to cities like Tlaxcala, run by an elected council whose members were periodically whipped by their constituents to remind them who was ultimately in charge.
The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.” (https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/
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@cblack__ @davidwengrow I think what we’re suggesting is that Rousseau is responsible for our emphasizing only the egalitarian aspects in small-scale societies and ignoring the other aspects, and doing the exact opposite in large-scale ones
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/979430421397110785
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Wilfredo E. Cespedes (@wecespedes) tweeted at 4:48 AM – 1 Aug 2018 :
@sibeledmonds @DianeDenizen @NewsBud_ So, the real Revolution is, as it has always been, a Revolution of Ideas, how are we to organize ourselves in such a way as benefit the many not just the few? Interview @davidgraeber to get context on our History as Human on this planet. (http://twitter.com/wecespedes/status/1024607772296601600?s=17)
org deep enough to benefit all (has to be all.. not even just the many).. ie: 2 convos.. as infra
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via michel fb share
very interesting critique of david graeber:
they definitively state that the story about our ancestors living in ‘tiny, egalitarian bands’ is wrong. But how do they know it’s wrong if there’s no evidence? And which bit is wrong exactly? That the bands were tiny? That they were egalitarian? So what is the story?
When discussing Morris’ economic income models of Palaeolithic life, Graeber and Wengrow themselves add in, ‘but what about all the free stuff: security, dispute resolution, primary education, care of the elderly, medicine, music, religion…’. Their list goes on, and yet, significantly, they leave out free collective childcare – probably the single most telling aspect of gender relations among hunter-gatherers, according to modern-day anthropology.
“In this response, I first want to establish that Graeber and Wengrow really have nothing to say about human origins. Then I am going to present evidence that beginning with our ancestors in genus Homo, and culminating in our recent modern human ancestors, we did live in increasingly egalitarian societies. What’s more, gender egalitarianism was pivotal to the evolution of our language-speaking ancestors. Finally I’ll ask whether it makes a difference if our modern human bodies and minds evolved through a prolonged period of increasing egalitarianism. Would it help us if it were true that this was our nature?That we were designed by natural and sexual selection to be happy and healthy in egalitarian conditions? If so, then perhaps the positive question that needs asking first is not ‘how did we get to be unequal?’ but ‘how did we first become equal?’
The transitions I focus on occurred 2 million, half a million and 150,000 years ago, a different timescale from Graeber and Wengrow’s.” The reasons they are disqualified from speaking about human origins are as follows. First, they give no context of evolution. Second, they don’t deal with sex and gender. Third, they leave out Africa, the continent on which we evolved as modern humans.
The strategies of females have now become central to models of human origins. Forget ‘man the hunter’, it’s hardworking grandmothers, babysitting apes, children with more than one daddy, who are the new Darwinian heroes... with the idea that the ‘social brain is for females’ extrapolated from primate studies.
David Graeber argues that capitalism preys upon and parasitizes our instincts for cooperation. ..but where do instincts come from
The absence of gender is the big hole in the Graeber and Wengrow article. Can we begin to talk about in/equality without addressing sex and gender? From an evolutionary perspective, it is likely to be central to the entire argument.
?
So Graeber and Wengrow are certainly not dealing with human origins. But I will.
What evidence is there for an increasing egalitarian tendency in human evolution, and why did this necessarily have a dimension of gender? There are three main areas to consider: firstly, our species biology, life history and evolved psychology – the evidence of our bodies and minds; secondly, the ethnography of hunters and gatherers, particularly African hunter-gatherers, who give us specific insight into how egalitarianism works in practice; and thirdly, the archaeological record in Africa of art, culture and symbolism stretching back long before 40,000 years.
Egalitarian bodies and minds:
Let’s begin with the biology. Perhaps the hallmark of our egalitarian nature is seen in the design of our eyes. We are the only one of well over 200 primate species to have evolved eyes with an elongated shape and a bright white sclera background to a dark iris. Known as ‘cooperative eyes’, they invite anyone we interact with to see easily what we are looking at. ..
Our eyes are adapted for mutual mindreading, also known as intersubjectivity; our closest relatives block this off. To look into each other’s eyes, asking ‘can you see what I see?’ and ‘are you thinking what I am thinking?’ is completely natural to us, beginning from an early age. Staring into the eyes of other primate species is taken as a threat. This tells us immediately that we evolved along a different path from our closest primate relatives.In Mothers and Others, Hrdy gives the most convincing account of how, why and when this happened.”
Doing the whole job by themselves, great ape mothers are constrained in the amount of energy they can provide to offspring and so apes cannot expand brains above what is known as a ‘gray ceiling’ (600 cc). Our ancestors smashed through this ceiling some 1.5-2 million years ago with the emergence of Homo erectus, who had brains more than twice the volume of chimps today. This tells us that cooperative childcare was already part of Homo erectus society, with concomitant features of evolving cooperative eyes and emergent intersubjectivity.
“Does it matter that women organizing as the revolutionary sex bust through the ‘gray ceiling’ of brain size? That deep social mind gave us the platform of trust for sharing language, rhythm and song? That female political strategies created human symbolic culture? That resistance is at the core of being human? Should we be telling our children the story of our Paleolithic heritage of gender equality – the untold secret – and how it gave our African ancestors an extraordinary future? If we want that future stretching ahead of us as far as it stretches back into our hunter-gatherer past, I think it does.
We are lingering in the dying days of a clapped-out Neolithic gender system. The more that women all over the world achieve true equality, the more they regain the Palaeolithic birthright of all humans. Through gender egalitarianism, we became language-speaking, artistic, shamanistic, all-singing, all-dancing human beings roughly 200,000 years ago. Against the lifespan of our species, Neolithic patriarchy is a historic blip in time.”
?
not really sure what either are trying to say
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David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) tweeted at 3:29 AM – 21 Nov 2018 :
Winter is coming .. @davidgraeber @UCLarchaeology https://t.co/PiXaWBCjGs (http://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1065190381904633856?s=17)Untangling our roots
New research suggests that the familiar story of early human society is wrong – and the consequences are profound, as David Graeber and David Wengrowexplain.
Overwhelming evidence from archaeology, anthropology and kindred disciplines is beginning to give us a fairly clear idea of what the last 40,000 years of human history really looked like, and in almost no way does it resemble the conventional narrative. Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands; agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the first cities were often robustly egalitarian.
agri not irreversible.. but bad geno/pheno gap .. no..?
@biopoetics: Still not convinced by the Graeber/Wengrow essay. Their main argument is that the neolithic revolution was a process that went back and forth, not a singular event. But that does not exclude that it was (IS) a violent enclosure of something self-balancing.
@davidgraeber: Actually it’s just one of a series of interlinked arguments: that hunter-gatherers aren’t necessarily egalitarian, early cities can be extremely egalitarian, the whole story is wrong
@biopoetics: how come then that the non egalitarian forms of society seem to have been winning the upper hand (enclosures)? Is this linked to the invention of grain as tax unit (james scott)? so has to do with way of participation in the ecosystem?
@davidwengrow@davidgraeber: farming might have made some things possible, but saying farming was responsible for the state is like saying inventing long division is responsible for the atomic bomb – well, yes, in a way, if you eliminate 1000 intermediary steps many of which were hardly inevitable
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both Davids talk on mar 2018 with on slavery rejection et al (notes of whole 1 hr talk on Wengrow‘s page):
55 min
g: yeah people really do see foragers as slaves to their environ to some degree.. if not.. some sort of default of raw/egalitarian simplicity.. not seen as people who engage in politics.. and i think this is one of the key things we were trying to bring back.. that these are people conscious of diff political/sociological/organizational possibility in same way people were moving back and forth seasonally in many places.. between alt social structure.. they were aware of social possibilities and developing a set of values that rejected some and accepted others.. often in contrast w their neighbors in a mutual process of schismogenesis and this is how politics has worked thru much of human history and it doesn’t start w agriculture and the rise of cities.. that people have always been like this
this was a huge grasping moment for me (i think.. i hope.. of what all this is about.. ie: why they are looking into this.. not so much that h/g were/weren’t egalitarian.. and something changed us.. but that they consciously chose how to be from the get go
57 min – w: that’s right.. in the end of this venture.. we’ve learned almost nothing about the origins of farming (we have other theories about that) but we learned something about the political possibilities w/o farming
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New Humanist (@NewHumanist) tweeted at 4:27 AM on Mon, Jan 14, 2019:
“Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands; agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the first cities were often robustly egalitarian.” @davidgraeber and @davidwengrow on early human society https://t.co/2ZMbnle2y3
(https://twitter.com/NewHumanist/status/1084774006207795201?s=03)
article from jan 2019 (same as above from march 2018 – re reading/noting)
Are we city dwellers or hunter-gatherers?
For centuries, we have been telling ourselves a simple story about the origins of social inequality. For most of their history, humans lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came farming, which brought with it private property, and then the rise of cities which meant the emergence of civilisation properly speaking. Civilisation meant many bad things (wars, taxes, bureaucracy, patriarchy, slavery) but also made possible written literature, science, philosophy and most other great human achievements.
Almost everyone knows this story in its broadest outlines. ..This is important because the narrative also defines our sense of political possibility. Most see civilisation, hence inequality, as a tragic necessity. Some dream of returning to a past utopia, of finding an industrial equivalent to “primitive communism”, or even, in extreme cases, of destroying everything, and going back to being foragers again. But no one challenges the basic structure of the story.
There is a fundamental problem with this narrative: it isn’t true. Overwhelming evidence from archaeology, anthropology and kindred disciplines is beginning to give us a fairly clear idea of what the last 40,000 years of human history really looked like, and in almost no way does it resemble the conventional narrative. Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands; agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the first cities were often robustly egalitarian.Still, even as researchers have gradually come to a consensus on such questions, they remain strangely reluctant to announce their findings to the public – or even scholars in other disciplines – let alone reflect on the larger political implications. As a result, those writers who are reflecting on the “big questions” of human history – Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Ian Morris and others – still take Rousseau’s question (“what is the origin of social inequality?”) as their starting point, and assume the larger story will begin with some kind of fall from primordial innocence.
Simply framing the question this way means making a series of assumptions. First, that there is a thing called “inequality”; second, that it is a problem; and third, that there was a time it did not exist.Since the financial crash of 2008 and the upheavals that followed, the “problem of social inequality” has been at the centre of political debate. There seems to be a consensus, among the intellectual and political classes, that levels of social inequality have spiralled out of control, and *that most of the world’s problems result from this, in one way or another. Pointing this out is seen as a challenge to global power structures, but compare this to the way similar issues might have been discussed a generation earlier. Unlike terms such as “capital” or “class power”, the word “equality” is practically designed to lead to half-measures and compromise. One can imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s very difficult to imagine eliminating **“inequality”. In fact, it’s not obvious what doing so would even mean, since people are not all the same and nobody would particularly want them to be.
and making that happen (via 2 needs/desires) is getting to the *roots of the problem/healing
it’s **equity that matters.. everyone getting a go everyday..
that we can resolve.. today
“Inequality” is a way of framing social problems appropriate to technocratic reformers, the kind of people who assume from the outset that any real vision of social transformation has long since been taken off the political table. It allows one to tinker with the numbers,..t.. argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (“can you imagine? 0.1 per cent of the world’s population controls over 50 per cent of the wealth!”), .. The latter, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality, and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. That is the real political message conveyed by endless invocations of an imaginary age of innocence, before the invention of inequality that if we want to get rid of such problems entirely, we’d have to somehow get rid of 99.9 per cent of the Earth’s population and go back to being tiny bands of foragers again.
Mainstream social science now seems mobilised to reinforce this sense of hopelessness. Almost on a monthly basis we are confronted with publications trying to project the current obsession with property distribution back into the Stone Age, setting us on a false quest for “egalitarian societies” defined in such a way that they could not possibly exist outside some tiny band of foragers (and possibly not even then).
What we’re going to do in this essay, then, is two things. First, we will spend a bit of time picking through what passes for informed opinion on such matters, to reveal how the game is played, how even the most apparently sophisticated contemporary scholars end up reproducing conventional wisdom as it stood in France or Scotland in, say, 1760. Then we will attempt to lay down the initial foundations of an entirely different narrative. This is mostly ground-clearing work. The questions we are dealing with are so enormous, and the issues so important, that it will take years of research and debate to even begin to understand the full implications..t
unless we just model a nother way
to hasten equity (everyone getting a go everyday)
But on one thing we insist. Abandoning the story of a fall from primordial innocence does not mean abandoning dreams of human emancipation – that is, of a society where no one can turn their rights in property into a means of enslaving others, and where no one can be told their lives and needs don’t matter. On the contrary. Human history becomes a far more interesting place, containing many more hopeful moments than we’ve been led to imagine, once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there.
[..]
It was time to grow up, time to appoint some proper leadership. Before long, chiefs had declared themselves kings, even emperors. There was no point in resisting. All this was inevitable once humans adopted large, complex forms of organisation.Even when the leaders began acting badly – creaming off agricultural surplus to promote their flunkey and relatives, making status permanent and hereditary, collecting trophy skulls and harems of slave-girls, or tearing out rival’s hearts with obsidian knives – there could be no going back. “Large populations,” Diamond opines, “can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary.”
A dismal conclusion, not just for anarchists, but for anybody who ever wondered if there might be some viable alternative to the status quo. But the remarkable thing is that, despite the smug tone, such pronouncements are not actually based on any kind of scientific evidence. There is no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian, or that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or bureaucracies. These are just prejudices stated as facts..t
ginorm small ness
[..]
As emphasised by the Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar, Rousseau was really trying to explore what he considered the fundamental paradox of human politics: that our innate drive for freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a “spontaneous march to inequality”.
[..]
We must conclude that revolutionaries, for all their visionary ideals, have not tended to be particularly imaginative, especially when it comes to linking past, present and future. Everyone keeps telling the same story. It’s probably no coincidence that today, the most vital and creative revolutionary movements at the dawn of this new millennium – the Zapatistas of Chiapas and Kurds of Rojava being the most obvious examples – are those that simultaneously root themselves in a deep traditional past. Instead of imagining some primordial utopia, they can draw on a more mixed and complicated narrative. Indeed, there seems to be a growing recognition, in revolutionary circles, that *freedom, tradition and the imagination have always been, and will always be, entangled, in ways we do not completely understand. It’s about time the rest of us catch up, and start to consider what a non-Biblical version of human history might be like.
[..]
What, then, are we to make of all of this? One scholarly response has been to abandon the idea of an egalitarian Golden Age entirely, and conclude that rational self-interest and accumulation of power are the enduring forces behind human social development. But this doesn’t really work either. Evidence for institutional inequality in Ice Age societies, whether in the form of grand burials or monumental buildings, is nothing if not sporadic.
[..]
If so, then the real question is not “what are the origins of social inequality?” but, having lived so much of our history moving back and forth between different political systems (with the seasons), “how did we get so stuck?
or as you say here – from stock pile and accum control issues:
from David Graeber and David Wengrow talk on mar 2018 with on slavery rejection et al (notes of whole 1 hr talk on Wengrow‘s page):
1:07 – (philippe descola) – ineq not on shift to agri but on stockpiling/accumulation.. whether thru agri or foraging.. the control of the stock becomes the central point precisely not interpreted in terms of the immediate ecological analysis.. but the point to understanding the emergence of social control/protection
the issue is control.. (which we seek because of our holes).. the measuring and stockpiling are all symptoms of and means to maintain.. control.. and that is why we haven’t yet gotten to global equity (not equality)
[..]
The “transition” from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production typically took something in the order of 3000 years. While agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception.
[..]
Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like “the agricultural revolution” when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. Since there was no Eden-like state, from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of *rank or private property.
no eden like state – because the holes (and thus the *control issues) came early on..
[..]
Another bombshell: “civilisation” does not come as a package. The world’s first cities did not just emerge in a handful of locations, together with systems of centralised government and bureaucratic control. In China, for instance, we are now aware that by 2500 BC, settlements of 300 hectares or more existed on the lower reaches of the Yellow River, over a thousand years before the foundation of the earliest (Shang) royal dynasty
[..]
Such recent discoveries indicate how little is yet truly known about the distribution and origin of the first cities, and just how much older these cities may be than the systems of authoritarian government and literate administration that were once assumed necessary for their foundation. And in the more established heartlands of urbanisation – Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Basin of Mexico – there is mounting evidence that the first cities were organised on self-consciously egalitarian lines,municipal councils retaining significant autonomy from central government. In the first two cases, cities with sophisticated civic infrastructures flourished for over half a millennium with no trace of royal burials or monuments, no standing armies or other means of large-scale coercion, nor any hint of direct bureaucratic control over most citizens’ lives.
Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organisation. .t.. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe
meadows undisturbed ecosystem
[..]
The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly “scale up” to anything like a city, a region or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not.
Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence..t
If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.
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55 min video from 2015 – talks about hunter gatherers being diff during diff seasons
David Graeber and David Wengrow: Palaeolithic Politics and Why It Still Matters 13 October 2015 [https://vimeo.com/145285143]
17 min – robert lowie – wrote amazing essay no one reads anymore.. (1920s).. came up w this – anti evolutionary notion – people assume that complexity and hierarchy are the same thing.. ie: society not reached levels of great kingdoms.. this assumption that in order to org things you’ve got to push people around.. what closter (?) pointed out was that there’s this tacit idea that you’re slowly figuring out more complex forms of org.. yes.. violence/oppression comes w that.. just part of the deal..
19 min – whereas lowie: ‘if you look at amazonian societies.. it’s not as though they don’t understand what it means to push people around and give people orders.. they’ve all heard of kingdoms/states.. they just really dislike the idea.. so better way to think of it.. what he called the society against the state – that these are societies.. that’s it’s not that they haven’t not figured out yet how to create complex hierarchical societies .. it’s that they know exactly what it would be like and they are org-ing their entire lives to ensure that that never happens ..t.. – this idea really comes out of lowie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowie
and twitter response from lemon inside
Lemon Inside (@inside_lemon) tweeted at 8:19 PM on Mon, Feb 18, 2019:
Not just heard but they push people around themselves as well. Hence they know/knew by first-hand experience. See screenshot from DG’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology below for an elaboration. https://t.co/QGoJpxtqGj
(https://twitter.com/inside_lemon/status/1097697229442150400?s=03)
@monk51295 @davidgraeber Clastres manages to talk blithely about the uncompromised egalitarianism of the very same Amazonian societies, for instance, famous for their use of gang rape as a weapon to terrorize women who transgress proper gender roles. 1/2 Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/inside_lemon/status/1097698151165612032
21 min – so lowie’s idea.. have to come from profits
22 min – lowie: societies org’s seasonally – so that they actually create hierarchical institutions during certain types of year.. so playing around w things that look/opp like a state.. but only for a short period of time – plasticity/flexibility of institutions
24 min – kind of confusing.. because hierarchical when dispersed..opp of what lowie was saying
25 min – if you accept the idea that a society can morph in political arrangements.. then how can you actually have a scheme like band, tribe, chief, state, .. when the same population/people can take on defining attributes of all these diff categories at diff times of year..t... ie: trying to distinguish complex hunter gatherers from simple ones
35 min – burials.. evidence we’ve banked claim of society on .. seems to be abnormal..
37 min – in so far as there is something sort of presaging the development of social ineq .. you can see something going on here because there’s a tendency for chiefs to anomalous people.. orphans, weirdos, crazy, runaways.. to sort of accumulate.. which includes physically odd people.. around chiefs.. and eventually become the basis of this extrasocial power.. which later turns into something like a chief or state
42 min – seasonal flux – esp in north
46 min – we are talking clearly here about important differences in social possibilities.. which are linked to seasonal fluctuations.. in econ resources and opps to congregate..t
47 min – to sum up – what we are not arguing is that these seasonal variations cause changes in human capacities.. social or cognitive.. we don’t believe seasonal variations had any kind of effect on the hard wiring of the brain.. or anything like that – what we are suggesting is that when you have strongly dualistic patterns of social org.. such as almost certainly would have existed on the glacial fringe on the upper paleolithic.. you also have particular kinds of opps for that kind of conscious/reflexive elaboration of social structures.. to experiment w all kinds of diff social orgs.. hierarchical/egalitarianism.. so we’re proposing that the archeological record of the last ice age in europe is to the archeologist a bit like the ethnographic record of the inuit was to the anthropologist.. it’s a world of structured extremities.. where these elemental features of human social life.. that might otherwise be rather invisible.. become visible to us as investigators
49 min – so may have hierarchies raised to the sky .. only to be swiftly torn down again
so back to the question we started with – were our early ancestors simple/egalitarian or were they complex/stratified.. maybe it’s a question that’s just wrong.. do we have to choose.. we don’t think so.. just have to acknowledge that the people we’re talking about are not just behaviorally but also intellectually like us.. philosophically like us not necessarily in their ideas.. but in their capacities..t.. they would have been aware of these later possibilities.. they played around with all these paradoxes.. and they failed to understand them.. just as we fail to understand why it is that our world is plunging into yet another phase of radical ineq despite the best efforts of everyone to come up with alt’s..
ie: a nother way
50 min – why after 1000s of years of constructing and de constructing forms of hierarchy.. why does our species give way and get stuck in much more permanent and intractable systems of social ineq.. that’s the question we ended up with.. t.. and we now want to try and answer
53 min – it’s only in certain moments that that hierarchy actually appears.. and sometimes exactly the opposite.. so which is it.. is ritual subversive or anti subversive.. you can’t tell
graeber/wengrow back & forth law:
54 min – what makes us humans in that modern sense.. is not that we are ritual or pragmatic.. but that we *move back and forth between the two.. that’s what creates self conscious beings.. aware of diff social possibilities..t.. we still have this idea that at some point humans were just naive/lost in how to be.. couldn’t possibly imagine another way of existence.. nature/society was the same thing.. and gradually we worked our way into this self consciousness or our possibilities.. and what we’re suggesting is no.. actually.. in fact.. people used to be more able to play around w social possibilities.. somehow we got stuck in a hierarchical rut.. they used to set it up and rip it down.. and one day they didn’t rip it down and they forgot they could rip it down and here we are.. so the idea is how we get back to that cycle again..t
imagining the possibilities with a mech/infra to facil *iterations of that cycling (as limit approaches both ends of infinity – ginorm/small). .everyday.. zoom dancing
Dreamflesh (@dreamflesh) tweeted at 2:38 AM on Sat, Mar 02, 2019:
My write-up of @davidgraeber and @davidwengrow’s fascinating 2015 talk to the Radical Anthropology Group, discussing their theory that seasonal gatherings formed the basis for early human experience of shifting between ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘hierarchy’. https://t.co/qs7rJubOHp
(https://twitter.com/dreamflesh/status/1101778809857212422?s=03)
Graeber and Wengrow argue that the evidence isn’t confusing: it’s simply that hunter-gatherers are far more politically sophisticated and experimental than we’ve realised. Many different variations, and variations on variations, have been tried over the vast spans of time that hunter-gatherers have existed (over 200,000 years, compared to the 12,000 or so years we know agriculture has been around). Clastres was right: people were never naive, and resistance to the formation of hierarchies is a significant part of our heritage. However, seasonal variations in social structures mean that hierarchies may never have been a ghostly object of resistance. They have probably been at least a temporary factor throughout our long history. Sometimes they functioned, in this temporary guise, to facilitate socially positive events — though experience of their oppressive possibilities usually encouraged societies to keep them in check, and prevent them from becoming fixed.
In its simplest form, it moves the debate from ‘how and when did hierarchy arise?’ to ‘how and when did we get stuck in the hierarchical mode?’.
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wengrow/graeber never stupid law
David Graeber (@davidgraeber) tweeted at 7:55 AM on Wed, Mar 20, 2019:
.@davidwengrow just came up with the perfect title for our new book on prehistory – “We Have Never Been Stupid” (must say it here because they’ll never let us use it.)
(https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/1108366348390944769?s=03)
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Mason Carpenter Smith (@zada_nilch) tweeted at 8:50 PM on Fri, Apr 19, 2019:
I have a hunch that @davidwengrow and @davidgraeber in https://t.co/XZPJ1TD0Nc have initiated a paradigm shift in social-political-historical theory similar (but actually more important to people) to relativity in physics. T’will change thought and life for generations to come.
(https://twitter.com/zada_nilch/status/1119433031994023937?s=03)
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David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) tweeted at 11:34 AM on Sun, Apr 21, 2019:
Evolutionary anthropology was the last bastion of “simple egalitarian foraging bands.” 250 yrs post-Rousseau, they’re finally gone from there too. Soon there’ll be nowhere for this phantasm to hide, except in outdated textbooks and the tracts of defunct theorists. Exciting times! https://t.co/rDb61qlu4M
(https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1120017883109699584?s=03)
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David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) tweeted at 6:00 AM on Tue, Apr 23, 2019:
The point about caste is very interesting in my opinion, and worth exploring. There’s a good essay by Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky about whether it existed in the Bronze Age Indus, and if so, in what form.
(https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1120658719270948865?s=03)
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Patch Davies (@Patch_JD) tweeted at 2:53 AM on Thu, May 09, 2019:
So that myth of humans living in blissful equality as hunter gatherers then thrown forever into inevitable hierarchy by an agricultural/urbanising revolution is, er, a myth! Sounds like we lived in many forms of society both before and after moving to agriculture and cities https://t.co/LCLAUxDCHL
(https://twitter.com/Patch_JD/status/1126409946395025408?s=03)
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David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) tweeted at 5:52 AM – 14 May 2019 :
On Thursday at 16:30 @davidgraeber and I will be talking about our evolving thoughts on “The Myth of the Stupid Savage” as part of https://t.co/34N84RJELB at the University of Amsterdam. If you can’t join us, here’s a tweet-size version of the lecture. @enzoreds https://t.co/uhTND29Kfu (http://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1128266772870725637?s=17)Indigenous American habits – smoking pipes, drinking chocolate – transformed European social customs in the “Age of Reason.” Why does it never occur to anyone that Europeans also borrowed Indigenous ideas (e.g. about liberty and other “enlightened” concepts) not just soft drugs?
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via David Wengrow
David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) tweeted at 6:08 AM on Sat, May 25, 2019:
.@BritishAcademy_ asked me to write a “provocation” about social cohesion. Think I’ll tackle the assumption that human societies become less cohesive/more coercive as they grow in scale. Archaeology has different stories to tell, of egalitarian cities, indigenous republics . . . https://t.co/JymM1ZT5sz
(https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1132257123226791942?s=03)
jo freeman and structurelessness ness.. et al
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Samuel Pfister (@pfister_samuel) tweeted at 4:46 AM on Thu, Jun 06, 2019:
So I’m happy that Twitter has emerged as a platform outside of these traditional frames of knowledge production for people to clear the air, work through these complex themes, and begin to develop alternatives frameworks of thinking (strong kudos, @davidwengrow)
(https://twitter.com/pfister_samuel/status/1136585079784951808?s=03)
ie:
@davidwengrow: Was trying to imagine how Twitter would be if we subjected all our tweets to academic peer-review. But think I’ll go back to my breakfast, then probably tweet some more ideas about things I’m working on. You can use my http://academia.edu if you just want the other stuff.
@davidwengrow: Well, except there’s a large body of data already published on this topic, for the region in question. If you’re not familiar with it, that’s fine. But please don’t assume that goes for others who’ve been studying these things for decades, and want to share their thoughts here.
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David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) tweeted at 11:37 AM on Sat, Jun 15, 2019:
On reflection, the “origins of the state” is a very odd thing to investigate. Like the “origins of inequality,” it presupposes certain things about human history that are simply not true (e.g. that there was a time when inequality, sovereignty, or even bureaucracy did not exist).
(https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1139950021141508097?s=03)
yeah.. but i do believe there was a speck of time in the very beginning (garden of eden) .. and i do think that (undisturbed ecosystem) is what we are capable of (getting back to that essence) .. if we could only refocus to what truly matters.. for 7b people
David Graeber (@davidgraeber) tweeted at 6:17 AM on Sun, Jun 16, 2019:
we’re incidentally not saying that there never was a time when “non-statehood” existed. At all. We’re saying that even many of the organisations now labeled as “states” weren’t really states. That didn’t make them good. We need to rethink what it is we’re fighting.
(https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/1140232013296885762?s=03)
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David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) tweeted at 4:51 AM – 14 Aug 2019 :
“.. the pyramid of King Unas .. was only 43 m high,” and I love @davidgraeber ‘s notion that his megalomaniacal Pyramid Texts were compensating for a deep case of “pyramid envy” (in them Unas literally eats other gods and royal ancestors for breakfast .. ) https://t.co/9eoqgWYzn5 (http://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1161591263508017153?s=17)
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David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) tweeted at 1:47 AM on Tue, Aug 13, 2019:
This is wonderful – objects of everyday life in the female world, unearthed at Pompeii: in this assemblage of personal charms one can see a shared European/African/Middle Eastern civilisation deeper and more stable than the history of states and empires. https://t.co/oSeQvS954T
(https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1161182560476643328?s=03)
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David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) tweeted at 1:47 AM on Sat, Aug 31, 2019:
Solidarity with Bronze Age miners and migrants – they invented the alphabet, or at least an alphabet. The evidence is there, if we can only get over the idea that “civilisation” was a gift to ordinary people from ruling elites. Oh, and please #StopTheCoup https://t.co/wrCAPAddPO
(https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1167705525292847104?s=03)
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There’s no evidence of ‘warfare’ here. Equating trauma with human-human violence let alone ‘war’ is really VERY dodgy. It brings us back to the same old Hobbesian tropes about human nature and violence that @davidwengrow & others are banging on about as deeply problematic.
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/AnnemiekeMilks/status/1323580701644566529Sorry to bang on . . but yeah, these drab myths just keep coming back whenever non-experts try to write history on a grand scale. It’s time to take the toys away from the children, for archaeologists and anthropologists to start asking new questions and piecing together the past. https://t.co/b4TWjyPljh
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1323584963338506240
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graeber/wengrow back & forth law
graeber/wengrow never stupid law
david & david on stupid savage
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be you. 