The Origins of Human Society

This might seem like something related strictly to anthropology or archaeology but it actually plays an important role in modern (ie post-1500s) society. Our ideas about what a society should be, come from the writings of folks like Locke, Hobbs, and Rousseau (to name just a few), and their concept of the "Noble Savage" or "Natural Man."

Regardless of where one might find themselves on the political spectrum, the discussion of such things has value. One wishes to describe both the worst of human civilization and society, while also trying to describe the best of human civilization and society. Now, imagine, if you will, that essentially everyone who's discussed such things has gotten the origins wrong.

That is the premise of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wingrow. They make the argument that modern (again post-1500) political thought about such things as freedom and liberty began as a response to criticisms of European society made by Native Americans. This isn't one of those bullshit claims that the Founding Fathers (for example) cribbed the ideas for the Constitution from Native Americans but that Europeans didn't put significant thought into the ways politics define a society until Native Americans raised questions about why Europeans did things in the manner that they did. At which point, Europeans had to start thinking about not only how their society operated but in the ways in which a society should operate.

Or, to put it another way (and one that avoids political ideology), think of this in terms of how things like Star Trek have influenced technology. Not only do you have people looking at things they've seen in Trek and wanting to create tech like that, but also adapting technology so that it mirrors the things that they've seen in Trek.

The authors argue that our ideas of what various pre-modern societies were like is flawed and that these flaws have impacted how we think a free society should be. Not even the wildest imaginations of alternative societies dreamed up by the folks behind the various Trek incarnations have managed to capture how diverse human societies have been, and yet even most experts in anthropology and human history have missed many of the details.

I'm only about four chapters into the book, and I'm not willing to say that the authors are 100% correct, but I am willing to say that they raise some important questions about how modern humans have organized themselves into their current societies. I'm also going to say that there's evidence societies in pre-Columbian America had social structures many folks on various ends of the political spectrum would approve of.

I will certainly read this book.

It is interesting. There are arguments to be made that the authors might be misinterpreting certain things, but even so, it makes you stop and think that perhaps some of our ideas about politics are wrong.

For example, we tend to think that very primitive hunter-gatherer societies operated in a particular way (ie Communistic in many cases), and yet the authors show that there's evidence this isn't the case and that such societies were far more complicated than we give them credit for. So you have societies that shifted their political structure based upon the time of year. At certain points, a society would be vaguely Communist, while at other times in the year, they'd be highly authoritarian. And for every society that was authoritarian when there were traditionally shortages (say during winter), you can find an equal number of societies that were Communistic during those same times.

I also need to point out that while I'm using the terms "Communist" and "authoritarian" those are approximate descriptions of the social orders being described. In truth, I think that the book makes pretty good justifications for us to redefine our ideas of politics and social structures.

Onto the reading list it goes.

Graeber is an anarchist, so it's unsurprising that where he lands on this is completely at odds with liberal thinkers.

15th century native american's had no voice. The idea that Europeans had to start thinking about their roles in society is laughable.

It was a feudal society. Walls and boiling oil protected fiefdoms. As weapons became more sophisticated and transportation easier, society changed to address the new threats.

North American natives had nothing to do with it.

Nah, we were a lot smarter back then.

I am certainly curious to read how those ideas have been approached throughout history. Having read Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and more recently Mao, among others, some folks think communism is something recent, and it's not. Speaking in terms of communalism, we've been doing it in one form or another since we all got down from the trees together and said "fuck nature, there has to be a better way to live than on the run."

Also, random tidbit, the indigenous peoples of the Indus Valley (modern day Pakistan) invented indoor plumbing back around the time of the Pharoahs. I shit you not:
https://arthistoryproject.com/timeline/prehistory/indus-valley-civilization/

As someone who's studied anthropology as a hobby for 30+ years now, I wouldn't say that he was at odds (at least with recent writings on the subject), just that he's willing to ask questions that haven't been asked, and isn't willing to make certain leaps in thought that others have. There are places where he could make claims about a particular society, using the same evidence that others have used to make claims about that society. Instead, he points out that the evidence only shows that something happened in one particular instance and that to draw any wider conclusions based upon it does a disservice to the people who left those artifacts.

You forgot to list Thanksgiving.

I've finished it and I have some thoughts about, as well as some minor quibbles, with the work. If you remember the first episode of Cosmos: Possible Worlds, it talked about a society in ancient Turkey called Catalhoyuk. NDT pointed out that it was a city of about 10K people and they hadn't invented the idea of social classes, in the sense that there were no palaces, no temples, and no mansions for the wealthy. The implication is that this society which existed ~9K years ago was somehow unique. It wasn't. Graeber and Wengrow cite a number of other societies that were the same in various places around the world and at different times.

One of my quibbles is that I think that some things they discuss in the final chapters of the work, should have been brought up in the first chapters. And while I don't disagree with some of the arguments that they make, I think that they could have been phrased better, especially since some of them require one to have pretty specific knowledge of esoterica to be convincing. I honestly can't imagine too many people in the fields of archaeology or anthropology knowing some of the nuances necessary to get a few of the points that they're trying to make, while with a few simple modifications to their arguments, you could provide an example that was crystal clear to almost everyone.

Another one of my quibbles has to do with some of the phrasing that they use. In one case, where they're talking about the Hopewells and the mounds that they built in Ohio, they use the term "swamp" to describe the location of a particular set of mounds. Speaking as someone who grew up in Ohio, and not too far from the location of the mounds described in Licking county, the use of "swamp" implies something along the lines of what one would find in a warmer location like Florida or Lousiana. It might be technically correct (I don't know if a climate like one finds in Ohio could have swamps), but "bog" or "moor" would have been a more accurate description for most people, IMHO. They also don't mention that a shitload of mound builder sites were destroyed by White people due to racism, and so large swaths of the archeological record of human history in North America has been lost.

Additionally. I think that they must have very carefully chosen their words to not appeal to tech bros. There are places where one could have used terms like "disruptive" or "libertarian" and you'd have been as accurate as the terms that the authors used. So why didn't they use them? I don't know. But they do make a convincing case that our ideas about how societies evolve, what advanced societies require, and the like, aren't necessarily grounded in reality. But if you don't know shit about certain other ancient societies, this point might escape you.

Finally, one thing that I wish they had done, that they didn't, was to really highlight via a 1:1 comparison the kind of sophisticated thinking required to build some of the monuments in both the Old and New Worlds. For example, people will often mention that Stone Henge is an astronomical calendar and go to great depths to point out not only how much work was involved in extracting the stones and transporting them to their present location, but also to the degree of accuracy involved with placing them so that they align with celestial events. They don't seem to do the same with various sites in North America, even though those involved equal amounts of effort, both in terms of creating them, as well as their accuracy.

The book is worth reading, but it's not a final answer to anything. It just points us, vaguely, in the directions we should look at for more information. One hopes that it inspires people to do so.

sounds like a useful companion to ideas of "decolonizing community engagement" relevant to my job.

essentially retiring the savior perspectives while recognizing that either/or dichotomies are an imposed barrier rather than good faith solutions.

although with that in mind, I'm not sure why the wholesale dismissal of two row wampum and the great peace on the US constitution (vis a vis 17th-18th C french philosophers)

I haven't read the book, but I imagine 1453 was a more significant year than 1492 for inspiring political philosophy in the West.

Um, wasn't the basis of modern political thought such as rights and such come from the Magna Carta? While it's true that the Cherokee had a constitution, I'm pretty sure our constitution was first. The Iriquoi Confederacy might have shared similar values to western civilization, our constitution is derived from the British constitution. I'd argue modern society sprung from the erosion of fuedelism in Europe, a system which was still in place in countries like Russia when the new world was "discovered". That's not to say that what natives had to say about European society should be outright dismissed.

Would these certain times of the year coincide with hunting seasons, mating seasons and when certain plants grow? Yeah, our ancestors were a lot smarter than we give them credit for. They had the same brains we have.

Not really, as people didn't really speak about getting rid of kings until much later.

Aspects of it, yes, but the Magna Carta mainly focused on the rights nobility had, and not the average citizen.

And? Do you think that the Cherokee didn't have a system of government before we showed up?

The British don't have a Constitution. Tony Blair proposed the idea of the British writing one, but nothing ever came of it. We created ours based on British law, and the writings of folks like Locke, Hume, and others, as well as Greco-Roman ideas. I'm not aware of any evidence that we based ours on direct influence of Native American philosophies or politics, but the book makes it pretty clear that there was a definite indirect influence.

Feudalism was starting to wane in Europe when Columbus got lost looking for Indian take-out, but it didn't die out in Western Europe until the French Revolution.

Yes, but they didn't happen consistently across societies, so while some might be authoritarian during harvest season, others were rather laize-faire during harvest season. It depended upon a number of factors. One surprising one was just that one tribe would flip things to show how they're different than a neighboring tribe.

As much as I've joked about the British not having a constitution, they do, it's just not written down in one document like ours. It isn't codified, but has been recognized by the courts.

https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/english-bill-of-rights

Just some random thoughts in no particular order. Evidence of indoor plumbing (and I believe even hot and cold running water IIRC) has shown up in Minoan civilization. The beginnings of what we call "civilization" keep getting pushed back. Gobekli Tepi in Turkey was abandoned around 6,000 BCE. One thing about "primitive" societies is that when you look closely you see some stuff going on that requires a lot of organization. One of the things that never seems to get commented on is that while our ancestors were acknowledged to have sophisticated knowledge of astronomical phenomena such as eclipses there's a point that interests me: if astronomer/astrologers could accurately predict eclipses, how long had they been studying that stuff to be able to come up with tables and devices for predicting them? One of the things I learned from watching "Time Team" was that the Neolithic tribes of England practiced extremely sophisticated animal husbandry. I don't have any idea how they governed themselves, but sophisticated farming and ranching as well as building large monumental structures takes a lot of cooperation. Graham Hancock has written some interesting stuff speculating on "lost civilizations" and the possible interconnectedness of civilizations across the world. I personally don't buy much of what he's selling, but then again, with stuff like that you get into the logical conundrum of trying to prove a negative when there's no hard evidence one way or the other. While the "Magna Carta" impacted a relative handful of nobles, it was the first time that any limits on the powers of a monarch had been spelled out. That's only a small step toward self-determination for the masses, but without it, none of the other steps would have been possible.
Bottom line, the less dogmatic we are about what we think we know about civilization evolved, the better chance we may have coming closer to the truth of the matter.
That's enough of my bloviating. You may now resume your disorder.

Poor Constantinople

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam.

Want to point out that you're willing to say that England/UK has a Constitution, despite the fact that it doesn't resemble what we have in the US and you're also willing to say that Native American societies don't have one as old as that we have in the US. Now, what the authors of the book point out is that there are circumstances where various societies (in lots of parts of the world, and different parts of history) where the societies obviously had to have acted under some kind of centralized ideal (be it a specific document, like the US Constitution, or an amalgamation of different documents/political ideals as one finds in the UK) but nobody gives it the same weight as they do modern political thought.

There are monuments, across all continents (save Antarctica, for obvious reasons), where they have been carefully constructed to ensure that they align with certain celestial events. For some reason, we tend to treat them differently, despite the fact that they required a sophisticated understanding of astronomy. Why is that?

There’s no easy way to explain them, so we don’t bother to try. It could all be coincidence…couldn’t it? Then there are those Egyptian mummies that are loaded with cocaine, which is of course not native to that side of the world. This raises questions no one in the establishment is in any hurry to try to answer with anything other than embarrassed silence

You mentioned Graham Hancock and that you don’t buy into most of his theories. We know that there was some sort of cataclysmic event around 12k years ago. We also know the story of Atlantis dates back to around this time and we know Gobekli Teiki existed around the same time. We also can date most flood stories to this time sooo? You tell me what the hell was going on. Seems to me that the world was more connected than we originally thought.

That's not what I was refering to, nor I think was @Paladin.

No shit.

Because of a lack of hard evidence you can’t prove anything one way or another. Absent proof Hancock’s stufff is just bullshit. Well written and entertaining, but speculative bullshit nonetheless.