Archaeology, anthropology, and anarchism
Jan. 22nd, 2023 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileAt last year’s Boston Anarchist Book Fair I bought a copy of the then-brand-new The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Wengrow and the newly posthumous David Graeber. I did not attend this year’s Boston Anarchist Book Fair but it reminded me that I hadn’t actually read this book yet, so I suggested it and it was accepted as the first read of 2023 for the book club. I just got back from said book club when writing this review so I’m already a little talked out about it, so I may not put all my thoughts here.
The main project of this book is to challenge the metanarrative/3,000-foot level view of human cultural development that dominates in our culture on the basis that the archaeological finds of the past few decades don’t seem to support it at all, and at some point if there are enough “exceptions” and not enough things that follow the “correct” pattern then it’s not a very correct pattern. Given that the stageist narrative of hunter-gatherer → settled agriculture → industrialization is used to justify a lot of people’s politics and paint the current way we run the world as basically inevitable, it’s a matter of real political salience that we get this stuff right, and not simply a matter of historical curiosity. What follows is basically a 500-page romp through not just modern archaeology, but also through the last couple hundred years of historical and philosophical thought on early humans and their societies and What People Are Fundamentally Like. I enjoy this stuff because I really like looking at what makes certain ideas popular and also learning about when Common Wisdom is actually wrong. This book talks a lot about the legacy of the Hobbes and Rousseau debate (which you’ve probably heard of), a significant chunk of which is actually the fault of a guy named Turgot who for some mysterious reason probably did not show up in your Two Weeks Overview of the Enlightenment in high school European history. Hmm.
The Davids also do their best to retrace the discourse of indigenous American critiques of European society during early colonization. This was really interesting to me because the written versions of these critiques, or at least the versions of these critiques that got circulated in Europe in European languages and therefore seeped into Enlightenment discourse, were largely authored by Europeans, even when Native Americans traveled to Europe to engage in these debates the writeups always seem to be written by French people. This means there are also trends and orthodoxies and general politics about how to interpret these texts, including debate over to what degree actual indigenous people were saying these things and to what degree Europeans were just putting the spicier of their own words into the mouths of convenient outsiders. The Davids come down fairly convincingly on the side that assuming these discourses were actually all Europeans all the time is deeply incorrect.
Other interesting questions raised during this revisitation of the intellectual histories of archaeology and anthropology include “Why have archaeologists abandoned formulating big stories about the arc of human history” (the reasons here are mostly good) and “What are the consequences of not putting forth a competing metanarrative” (mostly bad–it cedes the space to people who don’t know what they’re talking about). There is also of course their stab at “What does prehistory/early history tell us about What People Are Fundamentally Like” which mainly seems to be that people have always been a) creative and b) political, which I admit is something I also definitely want to believe, and not merely am reluctantly convinced by. “How did we get stuck with the system we currently have, if it wasn’t inevitable” is also a major question. But mostly the book is really more about debunking the old narratives (from multiple sides) than about trying to build a new one, since the Davids’ main argument is really that people and their societies don’t conform to a single linear narrative. At any rate, it’s lots of fun! We get to visit lots of cool Neolithic archaeological sites all over the world and dunk on folks like Jared Diamond! It makes me want to read more about prehistory and ancient history! Archaeology is cool!
Honestly my biggest immediate complaint with this book was the lack of pictures; I had to search a lot of the archaeological sites described on my phone, and I try to stay off my phone when reading.
The main project of this book is to challenge the metanarrative/3,000-foot level view of human cultural development that dominates in our culture on the basis that the archaeological finds of the past few decades don’t seem to support it at all, and at some point if there are enough “exceptions” and not enough things that follow the “correct” pattern then it’s not a very correct pattern. Given that the stageist narrative of hunter-gatherer → settled agriculture → industrialization is used to justify a lot of people’s politics and paint the current way we run the world as basically inevitable, it’s a matter of real political salience that we get this stuff right, and not simply a matter of historical curiosity. What follows is basically a 500-page romp through not just modern archaeology, but also through the last couple hundred years of historical and philosophical thought on early humans and their societies and What People Are Fundamentally Like. I enjoy this stuff because I really like looking at what makes certain ideas popular and also learning about when Common Wisdom is actually wrong. This book talks a lot about the legacy of the Hobbes and Rousseau debate (which you’ve probably heard of), a significant chunk of which is actually the fault of a guy named Turgot who for some mysterious reason probably did not show up in your Two Weeks Overview of the Enlightenment in high school European history. Hmm.
The Davids also do their best to retrace the discourse of indigenous American critiques of European society during early colonization. This was really interesting to me because the written versions of these critiques, or at least the versions of these critiques that got circulated in Europe in European languages and therefore seeped into Enlightenment discourse, were largely authored by Europeans, even when Native Americans traveled to Europe to engage in these debates the writeups always seem to be written by French people. This means there are also trends and orthodoxies and general politics about how to interpret these texts, including debate over to what degree actual indigenous people were saying these things and to what degree Europeans were just putting the spicier of their own words into the mouths of convenient outsiders. The Davids come down fairly convincingly on the side that assuming these discourses were actually all Europeans all the time is deeply incorrect.
Other interesting questions raised during this revisitation of the intellectual histories of archaeology and anthropology include “Why have archaeologists abandoned formulating big stories about the arc of human history” (the reasons here are mostly good) and “What are the consequences of not putting forth a competing metanarrative” (mostly bad–it cedes the space to people who don’t know what they’re talking about). There is also of course their stab at “What does prehistory/early history tell us about What People Are Fundamentally Like” which mainly seems to be that people have always been a) creative and b) political, which I admit is something I also definitely want to believe, and not merely am reluctantly convinced by. “How did we get stuck with the system we currently have, if it wasn’t inevitable” is also a major question. But mostly the book is really more about debunking the old narratives (from multiple sides) than about trying to build a new one, since the Davids’ main argument is really that people and their societies don’t conform to a single linear narrative. At any rate, it’s lots of fun! We get to visit lots of cool Neolithic archaeological sites all over the world and dunk on folks like Jared Diamond! It makes me want to read more about prehistory and ancient history! Archaeology is cool!
Honestly my biggest immediate complaint with this book was the lack of pictures; I had to search a lot of the archaeological sites described on my phone, and I try to stay off my phone when reading.