READING: Kwame Anthony Appiah: On Graeber & Wengrow

Yes, "The Dawn of Everything" does not play it straight. Why should anyone think it did?

Kwame Anthony Appiah: On Graeber & Wengrow: ‘The difficulty arises when what they present as a summary of the archaeology is at variance with the scholarship they cite. “Experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for… anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus Valley,” they say. Then we turn to the source material and find that experts are quite divided on the topic. My point was not that The Dawn of Everything mischaracterizes Kenoyer’s judgments about Mohenjo-daro’s political structure but that it doesn’t characterize them at all. I was observing, that is, a pattern about which views get a hearing. Wengrow says that “the most recent scholarship” supports Possehl, but the paper he has in mind—a fascinating theoretical overview by Adam S. Green, which indeed stresses the evidence for egalitarianism—gingerly dissents both from Kenoyer’s “managerial elite” model and from Possehl’s “stateless paradigm.” Green’s paper, exquisitely provisional, makes clear that the nature of Indus politics is a topic of contention, not consensus.

The Dawn of Everything likewise suggests that archaeological research has converged on the view that Teotihuacan, starting around 300 AD, embraced egalitarianism and collective governance and rejected overlords, even “strong leaders.” It’s what “all the evidence suggests.” We hear that “other scholars, eliminating virtually every other possibility, arrived at similar conclusions”; we hear that its self-conscious egalitarianism is affirmed by a “general consensus among those who know the site best.” But only a strategy of bifurcation would force us to say that the place was either purely autocratic or purely collective. What I observed was not that few archaeologists would countenance Pasztory’s view but that we get no sense that many have reached different conclusions.

Those archaeologists include the authorities The Dawn of Everything cites in support of Pasztory, such as René Millon, who cataloged evidence of hierarchy and militarism in Teotihuacan, and thought its governance might have become oligarchical; and George Cowgill, who explicitly demurs from Pasztory’s “utopian” account and proposes Renaissance Venice, a republic under a doge, as a model. The epigrapher David Stuart says that, in the late fourth and early fifth century, someone represented by an owlish glyph was the king of Teotihuacan, while other archaeologists conjecture that there might have been an elite assembly or aristocracy rather than a monarch; this glyph might have designated an office rather than an officeholder. Recent discoveries have rekindled such debates. Again, Graeber and Wengrow are free to reach their own conclusion as to whether Teotihuacan was “a utopian experiment in urban life,” but it cannot be said to represent a professional consensus.

As for the “at least seven centuries of collective self-rule” that Uruk enjoyed, per Graeber and Wengrow, is the proof really to be found in the wards and councils of the monarchical era? Or does the very coexistence of monarchs and councils suggest that we may be building castles, or communes, in the air? I don’t say that Uruk did or didn’t enjoy those seven centuries of “collective self-rule,” but unless the term is being used in a very permissive way, I struggle to see how this possibility qualifies as a settled fact.

With respect to Çatalhöyük, my discussion didn’t take up The Dawn of Everything’s broad political characterization of the place. It took up what inferences we should draw from the existence of female figurines, and the putative absence of equivalent male ones. Did such representations demonstrate “a new awareness of women’s status”? Graeber and Wengrow never use the term “gynocentric” with respect to Çatalhöyük; they use, in this context, the term “matriarchal” and devote a few helpful paragraphs to defining this term in a special way that sidesteps the “-archy,” the connection with rulership. (I avoided the term “matriarchal” because, without their careful definition, it risks implying a form of rulership The Dawn of Everything disputes.) Graeber and Wengrow, following Hodder, find it obvious that the female figurines, with their pendulous breasts and avoirdupois, could have nothing to do with eros or fertility but are “quite possibly matriarchs of some sort, their forms revealing an interest in female elders.” Here, questions arise. One is whether we’d weigh the evidence differently had The Dawn of Everything mentioned that most Çatalhöyük figurines that archaeologists have cataloged are of quadrupeds (or their horns).

Why does this matter? Because when it comes to a certain class of cases—prehistoric cities that they think lacked a ruling or managerial elite—Graeber and Wengrow appear to cherish their thesis a little too much and, like overprotective parents, tend to keep it away from the chilly drafts of adverse evidence. Which brings us to those Ukrainian mega-sites. In a 2017 article, John Chapman methodically challenges the view of them as “permanent, long-term settlements comprising many thousands of people,” a view he divides into a maximalist and a standard model. Drawing on evidence from his work in Nebelivka and calculations based on available evidence about the other sites, he concludes that

the only logical response is to replace the standard model (not to mention the maximalist model) with a version of the minimalist model that envisions a less permanent, more seasonal settlement mode, or a smaller permanent settlement involving coeval dwelling of far fewer people…

Perhaps there was a small year-round population; perhaps these were sites where “hundreds of pilgrims or festival-goers” showed up in a seasonal way; perhaps both occurred.

In this account, what we’d find on the mega-sites, even one as expansive as Taljanky, aren’t cities—that is, these settlements are remote from the dictionary definition of a city, from what we readers understand by the word, and, as best as I can judge, from what Graeber and Wengrow mean by it. They say most archaeologists will call “any densely inhabited settlement” of 150 or 200 hectares a city; yet one thing Chapman is confident about is that the “mega-sites were low-density settlements.”

Now, archaeologists sometimes use the word “city” differently; the idea is that if a settlement, including one that looks like a hamlet, is the biggest thing around, it might function as a city. A hundred people living in face-to-face autarky, a seasonal festival site like Burning Man: even these could, in the right circumstances, count as cities. The paper Wengrow cites, though it pointedly declines to define “city,” sets aside absolute scale as a prerequisite. For Graeber and Wengrow, however, a central question is whether lots of people can live in a dense settlement without rules and rulers. That’s why they say cities often emerged as “civic experiments on a grand scale.” In their concept of a city, absolute scale can’t be set aside.

Nor should we set aside the vigorous medieval arguments about the nature and origins of social inequality, as when The Dawn of Everything states that in the Middle Ages “‘social equality’—and therefore, its opposite, inequality—simply did not exist as a concept.” Many thought, as Pope Gregory did, that people, in their primordial, Edenic state, were equal in their liberty. Then some act of human sinfulness left us with masters and serfs. For Gregory, Christ’s redemptive sacrifice was meant to bring back our original freedom. Such arguments had real-world reverberations. “When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?” was an English saying that the priest John Ball declaimed amid the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, calling for a primordial classless society to be restored by force.

Wengrow’s cautions about “personal” politics are well taken; Lévi-Strauss’s emerging conservatism is no key to his thought. By contrast, the political tenets Lewis Henry Morgan espoused within the book that entrenched social evolutionism were integral to his intellectual vision. Thorstein Veblen’s theory of predatory and productive activities seamlessly connected his prehistory to his politics. And so it goes; we would do the great James C. Scott, whose studies have been invaluable to people from a range of ideological positions, a disservice to suppose that his political vision and his political science belonged in separate bins.

Yet this procession of caveats, I fear, risks obscuring The Dawn of Everything’s real triumphs. It is the work of two remarkable scholars, and almost every page is energized by their intelligence, imagination, and surly sense of mischief. When it comes to confident claims about dense large-scale settlements free of rulers or rules (or, for that matter, the Haudenosaunee attitude toward commands), readers might well adopt Gertrude Stein’s mot “Interesting if true.” But as I hope I made plain, there’s much more to the book than that. Graeber and Wengrow’s argument against historical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable. Readers who imagine foragers on the Sahlinesque model of the San will encounter foraging societies with aristocrats and slavery, while the book’s account of the Poverty Point earthworks is a riveting study of collective action. We get an intriguing proposal about the nature of the state. And this is just to begin a long list of fascinations. That “kaleidoscope of social possibilities” emerges vibrantly from these pages.

If readers should be a little cautious—possibilities may not be probabilities—they should be much more than a little grateful, as I am. “This book is mainly about freedom,” Graeber and Wengrow tell us, but it’s also for freedom. I’m glad of that; oddly enough, freedom needs advocates these days, and few have been as eloquent…

LINK: <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-inequality-an-exchange/>

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If I am reading Kwame Anthony Appiah correctly here, he is saying—very politely: “This is bullshit, but it is in the service of a good cause, for which we need much optimism of the will…” And this kind of annoys me, because what freedom needs is clear-eyed friends who don’t become the victims of demagogues and grifters. So as a result we need to closely observe what’s what, rather than listen to pleasing misrepresentations.

I do wonder if there is anything Graeber and Wengrow have to say that is not a bastardized, inadequate, and confused version of Aristotle. Aristotle, as I understand him, says:

1. Monarchy—which allows for a degree of freedom in the context of a strongly hierarchical social order in which power is checked by law and custom—is vulnerable to decay into tyranny, in which power becomes absolute, and freedom vanishes.

2. Tyranny is then vulnerable to revolution by its own grandees who fear lest they be the next ones purged, and so band together to create an aristocracy—which in its founding moment installs checks and balances to prevent the return of tyranny.

3. But aristocracy—which allows for a degree of freedom in the context of a less strongly hierarchical social order in which members of the elite compete for prestige and dominance and so check each other—is vulnerable to decay into oligarchy, in which the strong uneasily watch each other while they do what they want, while the weak suffer what they must.

4. And oligarchy is then vulnerable to a democratic revolution, which removes the oligarchs from their high places and creates a largely non-hierarchical social order (among insiders) with considerable freedom.

5. But democracy is then vulnerable to decay into demagogy, as it develops leaders expert at telling the people what they want to hear, who then tyrannize in the name of the majority.

6. And at that point the situation is ripe for the establishment of a monarchy—an honest master constrained by honor and, later, a constitution—to replace the demagogic alternation of rule by the mob’s favorites-turned-masters.

But, says Aristotle, a proper mixed régime can halt the wheel for a while, and produce order under law and individual freedom without the degree of hierarchy becoming oppressive. For a while.

As I understand it, the bulk of Graeber and Wengrow’s examples of “egalitarianism” are easily (and accurately) fitted into this Aristotelian schema…