For a few hundred years now, we have accepted a story about how civilizations advance. Human civilization started as small bands or tribes of warriors and hunter/gatherers, loosely organized in family groups. These societies may have been more egalitarian than our own, but that's largely because there was less power and wealth to be distributed unequally. All societies necessarily advance through Stone, Bronze, Iron, and Industrial Ages. One always leads to the other. All societies develop agriculture, and agriculture brings about a major change in the entire structure of society: taming the land requires land ownership, planning for the future, storing seeds and surpluses, and distributing the fruits of agricultural labor. That necessarily brings about the ownership of property, a top-down government to organize the labor and distribute the surplus, and increased inequality. Once you have agriculture, you can have urbanization, and you can't have cities without more government, authority, and bureaucracy. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back: once you have had your agricultural and urban revolutions, your civilization must continue to move in the direction that we perceive as forward, which goes through increasingly authoritarian states but ultimately reaches democracy, the pinnacle of human society. Inequality might suck, but it is the inevitable price we must pay for the luxury of agriculture and urbanization.
This book systematically tears down every single piece of that story.
Graeber and Wengrow build their argument very carefully, leading the reader every step of the way. They show that early human civilizations were far more varied and creative in their political structures than we give them credit for, and that they made deliberate decisions about how to structure their societies. Pre-agricultural societies could and did create cities, some of which thrived for hundreds of years. Societies worldwide experimented with various political structures, and there is nothing inevitable about any political system: political systems were deliberately chosen based on experimentation, a desire to be different from neighboring peoples, and careful deliberation about the results of a political system.
They also clearly show that societies do not inevitably go in a linear fashion from one age to another, but can go back and forth and skip around. Even more interestingly, they show that agriculture was not a revolution, and that lots of societies experimented with agriculture but didn't adopt it. They call this "play farming" - people might toss some seeds into the soils left by a receding river and come collect the plants the next season, but it took thousands of years, even in the Fertile Crescent, for people to really commit to the agricultural way of life. They also show that agriculture and the large-scale organization of labor does not necessarily require land ownership or a centralized government. People are perfectly capable of organizing labor in a communal fashion.
The accepted narrative is extremely Euro-centric: anyone who has studied (or, you know, talked to) Native Americans can tell you that agriculture does not have to require land ownership, monocrops, and authoritative governments. Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate that that entire narrative was built by Rousseau, who was engaged in a debate about the nature of governments which would not have taken place if Native American thinkers hadn't criticized European governments. In other words, the Native Americans that engaged with Enlightenment thinkers were sophisticated, intelligent, and participated in political discourse with Europeans.
Wengrow and Graeber also emphasize the importance of women in the history of humanity. They show that there have been societies where women wielded more political power than men, even if archaeologists have been hesitant to acknowledge it. They emphasize that in the history of technology, we have always primarily discussed the importance of weapons and tools associated with masculine labor, but have failed to acknowledge that women's crafts such as making textiles have had a far bigger impact on history. I genuinely appreciate this discussion of the importance of women's work to the creation of civilization, and I would like to see more discussion of it. However, they never explained what they define as women's work, or how they know it was done by women instead of men: given how they are throwing all of our other assumptions out the window, it doesn't seem safe to assume that textiles were always made by women everywhere.
Anthropology often makes me squeamish for several reasons, and one of the biggest is that anthropologists often make comparisons or generalizations across vast expanses of time and space, and often include times and places in which they have no expertise. With a lot of anthropological works, just getting one part of the source material wrong will invalidate the entire argument. Graeber and Wengrow are covering the entire expanse of human history, so naturally they can't be experts in everything they are discussing. However, they present such a giant heap of evidence that even if some of the details of their argument turn out to be wrong, or misinterpreted, the big-picture view of their argument will still stand, or enough of their argument will still stand to be a totally revolutionary view of human history.
This book has already generated quite a bit of controversy, and will continue to do so. I am sure that scholars will pick apart parts of their argument. It's even possible that a lot of it will be debunked. But in the meantime, this book brings up some very important questions that scholars need to answer, and opens up entire new realms of possibility not only for studying our past, but for understanding our present and our future. Ultimately, the reason Graeber and Wengrow even began asking these questions is because they're trying to understand how humanity ended up in its current place of vast inequality and authoritarianism, and ultimately, how we can get out of it. In other words, studying the political structure of societies ten thousand years ago isn't just an academic exercise, but one that could solve existential problems for people who are suffering today.
I want to end the review by quoting a passage that I found fascinating:
"‘Gardens of Adonis’ are a fitting symbol here. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks."
Agriculture, ceramics, mining, steam power, and fireworks only seem like revolutionary inventions with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, they were just silly little fun things that people do because people like doing silly little fun things. Just think how different the world would be if everything were a playful experiment instead of part of a struggle to survive. ( )
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