# The Dawn of Everything  ## Metadata - Author: [[David Graeber]] - Full Title: The Dawn of Everything - Category: #books ## Highlights - The political implications of the Hobbesian model need little elaboration. It is a foundational assumption of our economic system that humans are at base somewhat nasty and selfish creatures, basing their decisions on cynical, egoistic calculation rather than altruism or co-operation; in which case, the best we can hope for are more sophisticated internal and external controls on our supposedly innate drive towards accumulation and self-aggrandizement. Rousseau’s story about how humankind descended into inequality from an original state of egalitarian innocence seems more optimistic (at least there was somewhere better to fall from), but nowadays it’s mostly deployed to convince us that while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering. The term ‘inequality’ is itself very telling in this regard. ([Location 201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=201)) - Tags: [[blue]] - social theory always, necessarily, involves a bit of simplification. For instance, almost any human action might be said to have a political aspect, an economic aspect, a psycho-sexual aspect and so forth. Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify. ([Location 512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=512)) - Tags: [[blue]] - All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument. It’s almost as if these writers are afraid to suggest anything that seems original, or, if they do, feel obliged to use vaguely scientific-sounding language (‘trans-regional interaction spheres’, ‘multi-scalar networks of exchange’) to avoid having to speculate about what precisely those things might be. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy. The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, Bronisław Malinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes how in the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Islands off Papua New Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in outrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most important ones has its own name, and history of former owners) – only to hold it briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from another island. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider, it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen. ([Location 533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=533)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We could multiply examples, but assume that by now the reader gets the broader point we are making. When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on. ([Location 571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=571)) - Tags: [[blue]] - there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.2 These are remarkably arrogant assumptions – as if ‘Western thought’ (as it later came to be known) was such a powerful and monolithic body of ideas that no one else could possibly have any meaningful influence on it. It’s also pretty obviously untrue. Just consider the case of Leibniz: over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European governments gradually came to adopt the idea that every government should properly preside over a population of largely uniform language and culture, run by a bureaucratic officialdom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competitive exams. It might seem surprising that they did so, since nothing remotely like that had existed in any previous period of European history. Yet it was almost exactly the system that had existed for centuries in China. ([Location 650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=650)) - Tags: [[blue]] - our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique. ([Location 694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=694)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The first thing to emphasize is that ‘the origin of social inequality’ is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve. ‘Social equality’ – and therefore, its opposite, inequality – simply did not exist as a concept. ([Location 697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=697)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus. So one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them. ([Location 700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=700)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Earlier authors, confronted by a population of forest dwellers with no king and employing only stone tools, were unlikely to have seen them as in any way primordial. Sixteenth-century scholars, such as the Spanish missionary José de Acosta, were more likely to conclude they were looking at the fallen vestiges of some ancient civilization, or refugees who had, in the course of their wanderings, forgotten the arts of metallurgy and civil governance. Such a conclusion would have made obvious common sense for people who assumed that all truly important knowledge had been revealed by God at the beginning of time, that cities had existed before the Flood, and that saw their own intellectual life largely as attempts to recover the lost wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans. ([Location 732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=732)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One of the reasons that missionary and travel literature became so popular in Europe was precisely because it exposed its readers to this kind of criticism, along with providing a sense of social possibility: the knowledge that familiar ways were not the only ways, since – as these books showed – there were clearly societies in existence that did things very differently. We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples. Because it was true. ([Location 800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=800)) - Tags: [[blue]] - That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case. What they differed on was whether or not individual liberty was desirable. ([Location 866](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=866)) - Tags: [[blue]] - To the Jesuits, of course, all this was outrageous. In fact, their attitude towards indigenous ideals of liberty is the exact opposite of the attitude most French people or Canadians tend to hold today: that, in principle, freedom is an altogether admirable ideal. Father Lallemant, though, was willing to admit that in practice such a system worked quite well; it created ‘much less disorder than there is in France’ – but, as he noted, the Jesuits were opposed to freedom in principle: This, without doubt, is a disposition quite contrary to the spirit of the Faith, which requires us to submit not only our wills, but our minds, our judgments, and all the sentiments of man to a power unknown to our senses, to a Law that is not of earth, and that is entirely opposed to the laws and sentiments of corrupt nature. Add to this that the laws of the Country, which to them seem most just, attack the purity of the Christian life in a thousand ways, especially as regards their marriages … 22 The Jesuit Relations are full of this sort of thing: scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will. This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage. Such sinful conduct, they believed, was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious. The ‘wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’.23 Even finding terms to translate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ into indigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining the underlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible. ([Location 924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=924)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic world. Trained in classical rhetoric and techniques of disputation, Jesuits had learned the Americans’ languages primarily so as to be able to argue with them, to persuade them of the superiority of the Christian faith. Yet they regularly found themselves startled and impressed by the quality of the counterarguments they had to contend with. ([Location 961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=961)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It’s true that Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence. Still, persuasiveness need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to which one privileges any of these has everything to do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumed dispositions of their audience. ([Location 975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=975)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In many societies – and American societies of that time appear to have been among them – it would have been quite inconceivable to refuse a request for food. For seventeenth-century Frenchmen in North America, this was clearly not the case: their range of baseline communism appears to have been quite restricted, and did not extend to food and shelter – something which scandalized Americans. But just as we earlier witnessed a confrontation between two very different concepts of equality, here we are ultimately witnessing a clash between very different concepts of individualism. Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies of the Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other. Insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom. ([Location 1013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1013)) - Tags: [[blue]] - he notes that Americans who had actually been to Europe – here, he was very likely thinking primarily of Kandiaronk himself, as well as a number of former captives who had been put to work as galley slaves – came back contemptuous of European claims to cultural superiority. Those Native Americans who had been in France, he wrote, … were continually teasing us with the faults and disorders they observed in our towns, as being occasioned by money. There’s no point in trying to remonstrate with them about how useful the distinction of property is for the support of society: they make a joke of anything you say on that account. In short, they neither quarrel nor fight, nor slander one another; they scoff at arts and sciences, and laugh at the difference of ranks which is observed with us. They brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the king] who possesses all the power, and is bound by no law but his own will. ([Location 1089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1089)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Native Americans who had the opportunity to observe French society from up close had come to realize one key difference from their own, one which may not otherwise have been apparent. Whereas in their own societies there was no obvious way to convert wealth into power over others (with the consequence that differences of wealth had little effect on individual freedom), in France the situation could not have been more different. Power over possessions could be directly translated into power over other human beings. ([Location 1102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1102)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest: Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver? ([Location 1142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1142)) - Tags: [[blue]] - while gorillas do not mock each other for beating their chests, humans do so regularly. Even more strikingly, while the bullying behaviour might well be instinctual, counter-bullying is not: it’s a well-thought-out strategy, and forager societies who engage in it display what Boehm calls ‘actuarial intelligence’. That’s to say, they understand what their society might look like if they did things differently: if, for instance, skilled hunters were not systematically belittled, or if elephant meat was not portioned out to the group by someone chosen at random (as opposed to the person who actually killed the beast). This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another. In this sense, one could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’ – since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge. ([Location 1749](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1749)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In this way, the ‘sapient paradox’ returns. Not as something real, but as a side effect of the weird way we read the evidence: insisting either that for countless millennia we had modern brains, but for some reason decided to live like monkeys anyway; or that we had the ability to overcome our simian instincts and organize ourselves in an endless variety of ways, but for some equally obscure reason only ever chose one way to organize ourselves. ([Location 1887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1887)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working out habitual forms of behaviour without any sort of conscious reflection. When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. ([Location 1891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1891)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the few mid-twentieth-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals; hence his famous argument in The Savage Mind that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of ‘neolithic science’ as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles. ([Location 1980](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1980)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For Lévi-Strauss, what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were averse to competition (they had little wealth to compete over anyway), they did appoint chiefs to lead them. The very simplicity of the resulting arrangement, he felt, might expose ‘some basic functions’ of political life that ‘remain hidden in more complex and elaborate systems of government’. Not only was the role of the chief socially and psychologically quite similar to that of a national politician or statesman in European society, he noted, it also attracted similar personality types: people who ‘unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward’.34 ([Location 1991](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1991)) - Tags: [[blue]] - More than anything, they resembled modern politicians operating tiny embryonic welfare states, pooling resources and doling them out to those in need. What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was their political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. But in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists (in the tradition of Turgot) insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters and foragers to farmers and back again. ([Location 2010](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2010)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: This looks distinctively classical (eg Hellenistic or Roman). A leader gains respect through his conduct in wartime and then uses that respect to achieve high political status and direct non-wartime activity. - All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foragers who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way. ([Location 2119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2119)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin – much more so than the Nambikwara chiefs in the dry season. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea. ([Location 2151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2151)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Similar to the Nambikwara, the Inuit were much more authoritarian in hard times than in easier times. They also split into smaller groups in harder times where food is scarce and the environment is more dangerous - It’s easy to see why the neo-evolutionists of the 1950s and 1960s might not have known quite what to do with this legacy of fieldwork observations. They were arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organization – successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states – and held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilization. It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between economic categories. The Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine or Lakota would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to the other. They were a kind of band/state amalgam. In other words, they threw everything askew. ([Location 2194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2194)) - Tags: [[blue]] - archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them – all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states. ([Location 2227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2227)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Recall, though, that Lowie’s original piece included one additional section, on the ‘evolutionary germs’ of top-down authority, which describes the seasonal ‘police’ and ‘soldiers’ of the Plains societies in detail. Clastres simply left it out. Why? The answer is probably a simple one: seasonality was confusing. In fact, it’s kind of a wild card. The societies of the Great Plains created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving when they dispersed into smaller groups. But those of central Brazil dispersed into foraging bands as a way of asserting a political authority that was ineffectual in village settings. Among the Inuit, fathers ruled in the summertime; but in winter gatherings patriarchal authority and even norms of sexual propriety were challenged, subverted or simply melted away. The Kwakiutl were hierarchical at both times of year, but nonetheless maintained different forms of hierarchy, giving effective police powers to performers in the Midwinter Ceremonial (the ‘bear dancers’ and ‘fool dancers’) that could be exercised only during the actual performance of the ritual. At other times, aristocrats commanded great wealth but couldn’t give their followers direct orders. Many Central African forager societies are egalitarian all year round, but appear to alternate monthly between a ritual order dominated by men and another dominated by women.51 In other words, there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question. ([Location 2283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2283)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing? ([Location 2298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2298)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it’s becoming increasing clear that the earliest known evidence of human social life resembles a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. ([Location 2374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2374)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This is precisely why the ethnographic record is so important. The Nuer and Inuit should never have been seen as ‘windows on to our ancestral past’. They are creations of the modern age just the same as we are – but they do show us possibilities we never would have thought of and prove that people are actually capable of enacting such possibilities, even building whole social systems and value systems around them. In short, they remind us that human beings are far more interesting than (other) human beings are sometimes inclined to imagine. ([Location 2403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2403)) - Tags: [[blue]] - we know almost nothing about the languages people were speaking in the Upper Palaeolithic, their myths, initiation rituals, or conceptions of the soul; but we do know that, from the Swiss Alps to Outer Mongolia, they were often using remarkably similar tools,1 playing remarkably similar musical instruments, carving similar female figurines, wearing similar ornaments and conducting similar funeral rites. What’s more, there is reason to believe that at certain points in their lives, individual men and women often travelled very long distances.2 Surprisingly, current studies of hunter-gatherers suggest that this is almost exactly what one should expect. ([Location 2419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2419)) - Tags: [[blue]] - while forager societies today may be numerically small, their composition is remarkably cosmopolitan. When forager bands gather into larger residential groups these are not, in any sense, made up of a tight-knit unit of closely related kin; in fact, primarily biological relations constitute on average a mere 10 per cent of total membership. Most members are drawn from a much wider pool of individuals, many from quite far away, who may not even speak the same first languages.3 This is true even for contemporary groups that are effectively encapsulated in restricted territories, surrounded by farmers and pastoralists. ([Location 2426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2426)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the striking material uniformities observed by archaeologists across very long distances attest to the existence of such systems. ‘Society’, insofar as we can comprehend it at that time, spanned continents. ([Location 2441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2441)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A cosmopolitan Upper Palaeolithic is followed by a complicated period of several thousand years, beginning around 12,000 BC, in which it first becomes possible to trace the outlines of separate ‘cultures’ based on more than just stone tools. Some foragers, after this time, continued following large mammal herds; others settled on the coast and became fisherfolk, or gathered acorns in forests. Prehistorians use the term ‘Mesolithic’ for these postglacial populations. ([Location 2448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2448)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The emergence of local cultural worlds during the Mesolithic made it more likely that a relatively self-contained society might abandon seasonal dispersal and settle into some kind of full-time, top-down, hierarchical arrangement. In our terms, to get stuck. ([Location 2486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2486)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Another way to put this might be as follows. If all societies are organized around certain key values (wealth, piety, beauty, freedom, knowledge, warrior prowess), then ‘egalitarian societies’ are those where everyone (or almost everyone) agrees that the paramount values should be, and generally speaking are, distributed equally. If wealth is what’s considered the most important thing in life, then everyone is more or less equally wealthy. If learning is most valued, then everyone has equal access to knowledge. If what’s most important is one’s relationship with the gods, then a society is egalitarian if there are no priests and everyone has equal access to places of worship. ([Location 2501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2501)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Woodburn adds a twist: the real defining feature of such societies is, precisely, the lack of any material surplus. Truly egalitarian societies, for Woodburn, are those with ‘immediate return’ economies: food brought home is eaten the same day or the next; anything extra is shared out, but never preserved or stored. All this is in stark contrast to most foragers, and all pastoralists or farmers, who can be characterized as having ‘delayed return’ economies, regularly investing their energies in projects that only bear fruit at some point in the future. Such investments, he argues, inevitably lead to ongoing ties that can become the basis for some individuals to exercise power over others; what’s more, Woodburn assumes a certain ‘actuarial intelligence’ – Hadza and other egalitarian foragers understand all this perfectly well, and as a result they self-consciously avoid stockpiling resources or engaging in any long-term projects. ([Location 2556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2556)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Part of the difficulty with studying scientific innovation in prehistory is that we have to imagine a world without laboratories; or rather, a world in which laboratories are potentially everywhere and anywhere. Here Lévi-Strauss is much more on the ball: … there are two distinct modes of scientific thought. These are certainly not a function of different stages of development of the human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination: the other at a remove from it. It is as if the necessary connections which are the object of all science, Neolithic or modern, could be arrived at by two different routes, one very close to, and the other more remote from, sensible intuition.51 Lévi-Strauss, as we noted, called the first route to discovery a ‘science of the concrete’. And it’s important to recall that most of humanity’s greatest scientific discoveries – the invention of farming, pottery, weaving, metallurgy, systems of maritime navigation, monumental architecture, the classification and indeed domestication of plants and animals, and so on – were made under precisely those other (Neolithic) sorts of conditions. Judged by its results, then, this concrete approach was undeniably science. ([Location 4661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=4661)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Originally, as we’ve seen, much of this Neolithic lifestyle developed alongside an alternative cultural pattern in the steppe and upland zones of the Fertile Crescent, most clearly distinguished by the building of grand monuments in stone, and by a symbolism of male virility and predation that largely excluded female concerns. By contrast, the art and ritual of lowland settlements in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys presents women as co-creators of a distinct form of society – learned through the productive routines of cultivation, herding and village life – and celebrated by modelling and binding soft materials, such as clay or fibres, into symbolic forms.62 ([Location 4772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=4772)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Straight from the brith of philosophy! Female-dominated agrarian societies get overrun by male-dominated nomadic/warrior societies. These nomads end up ruling the much larger agrarian population and forming an aristocracy. It’s a pairing like a parasite and host - potentially symbiotic in nature. And the combination of agrarian (therefore feminine) underclass with a warrior aristocracy was the most symbiotic relationship because the aristocracy could use the surplus food generated by the agrarian population to exist without “mere labor”. In addition, agrarian societies supported larger populations that the warrior aristocracy could use for further conquests - In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, long regarded as the cradle of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, there was in fact no ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic forager to Neolithic farmer. The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production took something in the order of 3,000 years. And 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 centuries between, people were effectively trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you will, switching between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth. Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the Agricultural Revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. ([Location 4826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=4826)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Food production did not always present itself to foragers, fishers and hunters as an obviously beneficial thing. Historians painting with a broad brush sometimes write as if it did, or as if the only barriers to the ‘spread of farming’ were natural ones, such as climate and topography. This sets up something of a paradox, because even foragers living in highly suitable environments, and clearly aware of the possibilities of cereal-farming, often chose not to adopt it. ([Location 4911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=4911)) - Tags: [[blue]] - while evidence of democratic self-governance is always a bit ambiguous (would anyone guess what was really going on in fifth-century Athens, from archaeological evidence alone?), evidence for royal rule, when it appears, is entirely unmistakable. ([Location 5948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=5948)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the emissaries of Uruk seem to have proceeded with an almost missionary zeal. Temples were established, and with them new sorts of clothing, new dairy products, wines and woollens were disseminated to local populations. While these products might not have been entirely novel, what the temples introduced was the principle of standardization: urban temple-factories were literally outputting products in uniform packages, with the houses of the gods guaranteeing purity and quality control.76 The entire process was, in a sense, colonial, ([Location 6014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=6014)) - Tags: [[blue]] - All these cultures were aristocracies, without any centralized authority or principle of sovereignty (or, maybe, some largely symbolic, formal one). Instead of a single centre, we find numerous heroic figures competing fiercely with one another for retainers and slaves. ‘Politics’, in such societies, was composed of a history of personal debts of loyalty or vengeance between heroic individuals; all, moreover, focus on game-like contests as the primary business of ritual, indeed political, life. ([Location 6066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=6066)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Moreover, all such groups explicitly resisted certain features of nearby urban civilizations: above all, writing, for which they tended to substitute poets or priests who engaged in rote memorization or elaborate techniques of oral composition. Inside their own societies, at least, they also rejected commerce. Hence standardized currency, either in physical or credit forms, tended to be eschewed, with the focus instead on unique material treasures. ([Location 6071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=6071)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains, for which they likely had much the same mixed but ultimately hostile and murderous feelings as Alaric the Goth would later have towards Rome and everything it stood for, Genghis Khan towards Samarkand or Merv, or Timur towards Delhi. ([Location 6079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=6079)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Bronze Age cities – the world’s first large-scale, planned human settlements – could emerge in the absence of ruling classes and managerial elites; ([Location 6089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=6089)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley. Can we speak, then, of ‘egalitarian cities’ here as well, and if so, in what sense? If the Upper Citadel at Mohenjo-daro really was dominated by some sort of ascetic order, literally ‘higher’ than everyone else, and the area around the citadel by wealthy merchants, then there was a clear hierarchy between groups. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean that the groups themselves were hierarchical in their internal organization, or that ascetics and merchants had a greater say than anyone else when it came to matters of day-to-day governance. ([Location 6196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=6196)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In terms of the specific theory we’ve been developing here, where the three elementary forms of domination – control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power – can each crystallize into its own institutional form (sovereignty, administration and heroic politics), almost all these ‘early states’ could be more accurately described as ‘second-order’ regimes of domination. First-order regimes like the Olmec, Chavín or Natchez each developed only one part of the triad. But in the typically far more violent arrangements of second-order regimes, two of the three principles of domination were brought together in some spectacular, unprecedented way. Which two it was seems to have varied from case to case. Egypt’s early rulers combined sovereignty and administration; Mesopotamian kings mixed administration and heroic politics; Classic Maya ajaws fused heroic politics with sovereignty. ([Location 8031](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=8031)) - Tags: [[blue]] - That is why sovereignty and administration make such a potentially lethal combination, taking the equalizing effects of the latter and transforming them into tools of social domination, even tyranny. ([Location 8239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=8239)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships. ([Location 8287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=8287)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If anything is clear by now it’s this. Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart. Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself. ([Location 8388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=8388)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book – indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us – was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation – even, in some ways, as an encyclopaedia of social possibilities. ([Location 9695](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=9695)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Insofar as these and other polities commonly regarded as ‘early states’ (Shang China, for instance) really share any common features, they seem to lie in altogether different areas – which brings us back to the question of warfare, and the loss of freedoms within society. All of them deployed spectacular violence at the pinnacle of the system (whether that violence was conceived as a direct extension of royal sovereignty or carried out at the behest of divinities); and all to some degree modelled their centres of power – the court or palace – on the organization of patriarchal households. Is this merely a coincidence? On reflection, the same combination of features can be found in most later kingdoms or empires, such as the Han, Aztec or Roman. In each case there was a close connection between the patriarchal household and military might. ([Location 9822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=9822)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What is both striking and revealing, for our present purposes, is how in Roman jurisprudence the logic of war – which dictates that enemies are interchangeable, and if they surrendered they could either be killed or rendered ‘socially dead’, sold as commodities – and, therefore, the potential for arbitrary violence was inserted into the most intimate sphere of social relations, including the relations of care that made domestic life possible. ([Location 9860](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=9860)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Carole Crumley, an anthropologist and expert on Iron Age Europe, has been pointing this out for years: complex systems don’t have to be organized top-down, either in the natural or in the social world. That we tend to assume otherwise probably tells us more about ourselves than the people or phenomena that we’re studying. ([Location 9965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=9965)) - Tags: [[blue]] - at Uruk, for example, in the Temple of Inanna, protective goddess of the city, overlooking the great courtyard of the city’s assembly. The first charismatic war-kings attached themselves to such spaces, quite literally moving in next door to the residence of the city’s leading deity. In such ways, Sumerian monarchs were able to insert themselves into institutional spaces once reserved for the care of the gods, and thus removed from the realm of ordinary human relationships. This makes sense because kings, as the Malagasy proverb puts it, ‘have no relatives’ – or they shouldn’t, since they are rulers equally of all their subjects. ([Location 10007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10007)) - Tags: [[blue]]