Dawn of Everything Miscellaneous

Preface. I’ve put interesting bits that don’t belong in a single category here as well as summaries and links to new archeological discoveries, societies today living in balance sustainably, etc. Starting with the review from Science which summarizes the book nicely.

Ellis EC (2021) New views on ancient peoples. A bold reappraisal of human history upends long-held theories about early societies. Science 374: 1061.

With vivid narrative prose and rich detail, in their new book, The Dawn of Everything, the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow take readers on a myth-busting journey through the inner workings of prehistoric and historic societies around the world, showcasing the remarkable intelligence and agency of ancient peoples and the diverse societies and societal solutions that they helped shape. By the end of the book, the question of whether small bands of egalitarian hunter-gatherers were doomed to become highly unequal large-scale societies—a narrative advanced by everyone from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes to Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari—is poked so full of holes that it may never recover.

Our first guide on this journey is Kandiaronk, a 17th-century leader of the Wendat tribe, whose incisive “Indigenous critique” of Western society is brought to life from historical sources. In his words, “what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?”

Kandiaronk’s brilliance as a debater and social critic was unexceptional among Native Americans, maintain Graeber and Wengrow. Such skills were common in people living in societies governed by convincing, rather than coercing, collective action. Moreover, the Enlightenment’s calls to freedom, equality, and the rule of rationality were no European invention, they argue, but a direct response to Indigenous critique of Western civilization.

From Hobbes’s “brutes” and Rousseau’s “noble savages” to Marshall Sahlins’s “original affluent societies,” hunter-gatherer societies have long served as stand-ins for what is “natural” in human societies. But as the authors show, historical hunter-gatherers are no simple exemplar of anything.

Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are certainly part of the human story, but their culturally complex social relations and material exchanges can extend across vast regions. Historical hunter-gatherers built major permanent settlements, produced and stored surplus food in granaries, and built massive earthworks on scales similar to the first Eurasian cities. Many, such as the Calusa of Florida, were highly stratified, with kings, nobles, commoners, and even slaves taken captive from farming societies. Such societies may be uncommon now, but the authors argue convincingly that they were the prehistoric norm.

Did crops domesticate people, as Harari and others have argued? Not at all, maintain Graeber and Wengrow. Many early societies dabbled in cultivation for millennia without committing to full dependence on farming. New evidence from one of the world’s most famous first “towns,” Turkey’s Çatalhöyük, indicates that cereal farmers in this region may have rejected domestic livestock, preferring instead to remain hunters of “wild and glamorous” cattle and boar for millennia after their domestication. Indeed, many societies chose to shift seasonally from dense settlements and intensive gardening to more-dispersed hunting and foraging activities, and their social arrangements shifted accordingly. Agriculture, in other words, did not represent a point of no return but rather one of many cultural practices within the diverse lifeways of evolving cultures.

The notion of cities as technology-driven crucibles of stratified states is also called deeply into question. Some Ukrainian settlements that emerged more than 6000 years ago and consisted of more than 10,000 people predate and were larger than the first Mesopotamian cities and show no evidence of centralized governance, social hierarchy, or fortification. Nor was Sumerian Mesopotamia “an eternal ‘land of kings.’” Its first cities, write Graeber and Wengrow, were likely “organized into autonomous self-governing units” that operated for centuries before any sign of monarchy. Meanwhile, the scale of Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan, the world’s largest early cities, which evolved without wheels, plows, metallurgy or even domestic livestock, “makes the ‘city-states’ of Bronze Age Greece (like Tiryns and Mycenae) seem little more than fortified hamlets.”

Did Cortés negotiate with an Indigenous democratic “urban parliament” like “the republics of Venice” to form an alliance against the Aztecs? Was Teotihuacan once an “‘anti-dynastic’…utopian experiment in urban life”? To cast out one myth, another must replace it. Like Graeber, The Dawn of Everything is a rabble-rouser—a great book that will stimulate discussions, change minds, and drive new lines of research.

Graeber D, Wengrow D (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

Inequality

Films and books about the Kalahari Bushmen gave most people the impression that foragers represented a separate stage of social development, that they ‘live in small groups’, ‘move around a lot’, reject any social distinctions other than those of age and gender, and resolve conflicts by ‘fission’ rather than arbitration or violence. The fact that these African societies were, in some cases at least, refugee populations living in places no one else wanted, or that many foraging societies documented in the ethnographic record (who had by this time been largely wiped out by European settler colonialism and were thus no longer available for quantitative analysis) were nothing like this, was occasionally acknowledged. But it was rarely treated as particularly relevant.

Let’s return to those rich Upper Paleolithic burials, so often interpreted as evidence for the emergence of ‘inequality’, or even hereditary nobility of some sort. Many of those buried had pronounced congenital deformities; some were unusually short, with at least one case of dwarfism; while others were extremely tall. It seems extremely unlikely that Paleolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs.

Second, we don’t know how much the treatment of such individuals after death had to do with their treatment in life. Another important point here is that we are not dealing with a case of some people being buried with rich grave goods and others being buried with none. Rather it is a case of some people being buried with rich grave goods, and most others not being buried at all. The very practice of burying bodies intact, and clothed, appears to have been exceptional in the Upper Paleolithic (50,000 – 12,000 years ago). Most corpses were treated in completely different ways: de-fleshed, broken up, curated, or even processed into jewelry and artefacts.

PUNISHMENT AND THE LAW

Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’. Wendat leaders urged their subjects to provide what was needed; no one was compelled to do so, but they did in the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare, especially those with more wealth.

There are a number of things worth noting here. One is that it makes clear that some people were indeed considered wealthy. Wendat society was not ‘economically egalitarian’ in that sense. However, there was a difference between what we’d consider economic resources – like land, which was owned by families, worked by women, and whose products were largely disposed of by women’s collectives – and the kind of ‘wealth’ being referred to here, such as wampum (a word applied to strings and belts of beads, manufactured from the shells of Long Island’s quahog clam) or other treasures, which largely existed for political purposes. Wealthy Wendat men hoarded such precious things largely to be able to give them away on dramatic occasions like these. Nor could land and agricultural products, wampum and similar valuables, transform access to material resources into power – at least, not the kind of power that might allow one to make others work for you, or compel them to do anything they did not wish to do. At best, the accumulation and adroit distribution of riches might make a man more likely to aspire to political office (to become a ‘chief’), who could give all the orders he or she liked, but no one was under any particular obligation to follow them.

To the Jesuits, of course, all this was outrageous. Scandalized that native 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.

Göbekli Tepe in Southeaster Turkey 9500 to 8000 BCE

In both medium and message, Göbekli Tepe could hardly be more different from the world of early farming communities. Its standing remains were wrought from stone, a material little used for construction in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys. Carved on these stone pillars is an imagery dominated by wild and venomous animals; scavengers and predators, almost exclusively sexed male. On a limestone pillar a lion rears up in high relief, teeth gnashing, claws outstretched, penis and scrotum on show. Elsewhere lurks a malevolent boar, its male sex also displayed. The most often repeated images depict raptors taking human heads. One remarkable sculpture, resembling a totem pole, comprises superimposed pairings of victims and predators: disembodied skulls and sharp-eyed birds of prey. Elsewhere, flesh-eating birds and other carnivores are shown grasping, tossing about or otherwise playing with their catch of human crania; carved below one such figure on a monumental pillar is the image of a headless man with an erect penis (conceivably this depicts the kind of immediate post-mortem erection or ‘priapism’ that occurs in victims of hanging or beheading as a result of massive trauma to the spinal cord).

Archaeologists remain rightly cautious about linking such practices to conflict or predation; so far, there is only limited evidence for interpersonal violence, let alone warfare at this time.

Perhaps what we’re detecting in the House of Skulls, but in a rather different form, is a complex of ideas already familiar from Amazonia and elsewhere: hunting as predation, shifting subtly from a mode of subsistence to a way of modelling and enacting dominance over other human beings. After all, even feudal lords in Europe tended to identify themselves with lions, hawks and predatory beasts (they were also fond of the symbolism of putting heads on poles; ‘off with his head!’

Human remains are so far rare at Göbekli Tepe.

YANOMAMI

When it comes to cherry-picking anthropological case studies, and putting them forward as representative of our ‘contemporary ancestors’ – that is, as models for what humans might have been like in a State of Nature – those working in the tradition of Rousseau tend to prefer African foragers like the Hadza, Pygmies or!Kung. Those who follow Hobbes prefer the Yanomami.

Chagnon’s central argument was that adult Yanomami men achieve both cultural and reproductive advantages by killing other adult men; and that this feedback between violence and biological fitness – if generally representative of the early human condition – might have had evolutionary consequences for our species as a whole.20 This is not just a big ‘if’ – it’s enormous.

NOTE 18: The Yanomami slept with 6 to 10 in the same bed. If they really were ‘fierce savages’ there would be no Yanomami as they’d have all killed each other for snoring.

When Chagnon studied the Yanomami in the 1960s to 1980s, they were far from living in the ‘ancestral condition’. They’d been exposed to decades of European incursions, especially after gold was discovered on their lands. Yanomami populations were decimated by epidemics of infectious diseases from missionaries, prospectors, anthropologists, and government agents.

Chagnon claimed that men who achieved spiritual purity, unokai, had more wives and offspring than others. He never made it clear that this status was not just reserved for men who had killed, but also shooting an arrow of an already slain corpse, or killing via sorcery. Most were older, some the village headmen, this longevity would have ensured more offspring, which is unrelated to warfare.

IS PINKER RIGHT THAT WESTERN CIVILIZATION IS BEST? [This book questions that]

Whatever the unpleasantness of the past, Pinker assures us, there is every reason to be optimistic, indeed happy, about the overall path our species has taken. True, he does concede there is scope for some serious tinkering in areas like poverty reduction, income inequality or indeed peace and security; but on balance – and relative to the number of people living on earth today – what we have now is a spectacular improvement on anything our species accomplished in its history so far (unless you’re Black, or live in Syria, for example). Modern life is, for Pinker, in almost every way superior to what came before; and here he does produce elaborate statistics which purport to show how every day in every way – health, security, education, comfort, and by almost any other conceivable parameter – everything is actually getting better and better. It’s hard to argue with the numbers, but as any statistician will tell you, statistics are only as good as the premises on which they are based. Has ‘Western civilization’ really made life better for everyone? This ultimately comes down to the question of how to measure human happiness, which is a notoriously difficult thing to do.

If Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the ‘tribal’ stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety. But empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker’s conclusions.

SETTLEMENT OF NORTH & SOUTH AMERICA

It was long thought, for instance, that the Americas were first settled by humans travelling mainly over land (the so-called ‘Clovis people’). Around 13,000 years ago they were supposed to have followed an arduous crossing from Beringia, the land bridge between Russia and Alaska, passing south between terrestrial glaciers, over frozen mountains – all because, for some reason, it never occurred to any of them to build a boat and follow the coast.

But 17,000 years ago, people did build boats, following a coastal route that passed around the Pacific Rim, hopping between offshore islands and linear patches of kelp forest and ending somewhere on the southern coast of Chile. it’s possible that these first Americans, on arriving in such rich coastal habitats, quickly abandoned them, preferring for some obscure reason to spend the rest of their lives climbing mountains, hacking their way through forests and trekking across endless monotonous prairies. But it seems more plausible to assume that the bulk of them stayed exactly where they were, often forming dense and stable settlements in such locations.

Rising sea levels long ago submerged the earliest records of shoreline habitation in most parts of the world. Archaeologists have tended to resist the conclusion that such habitations must have existed despite the lack of physical remains; but, with advances in the investigation of underwater environments, the case is growing stronger.

OUR ORIGINS

In fact, biological anthropologists and geneticists are now converging on an entirely different picture of where we originated. Rather than everyone starting out the same, then dispersing from East Africa in some Tower-of-Babel moment to become the diverse nations and peoples of the earth, early human populations in Africa appear to have been far more physically diverse than anything we are familiar with today.

By any biologically meaningful standard, living humans are barely distinguishable. Whether you go to Bosnia, Japan, Rwanda or the Baffin Islands, you can expect to see people with the same small and gracile faces, chin, globular skull and roughly the same distribution of body hair. Not only do we look the same, in many ways we act the same as well

Rewind a few hundred millennia and all this was most definitely not the case. For most of our evolutionary history, we did indeed live in Africa – but not just the eastern savannahs, as previously thought: our biological ancestors were distributed everywhere from Morocco to the Cape. Some of those populations remained isolated from each another for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, cut off from their nearest relatives by deserts and rainforests. Strong regional traits developed. The result probably would have struck a modern observer as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves.

If we think humans are different from each other now, it’s largely illusory; and even such differences as do exist are utterly trivial and cosmetic, compared with what must have been happening in Africa during most of prehistory. Ancestral humans were not only quite different from each other; they also coexisted with smaller-brained, more ape-like species such as Homo naledi. What were these ancestral societies like? At this point, at least, we should be honest and admit that, for the most part, we don’t have the slightest idea.

It seems reasonable to assume that behaviors like mating and child-rearing practices, the presence or absence of dominance hierarchies or forms of language and proto-language must have varied at least as much as physical types, and probably far more. This was true at least down to around 40,000 BC.

In the 1980s and 1990s it was widely assumed that something profound happened, some kind of sudden creative efflorescence, around 45,000 years ago. Much of the evidence for this ‘revolution’ is restricted to a single part of the world: Europe, where it is associated with replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens around 40,000 BC. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the whole problem is a mirage. The reason archaeological evidence from Europe is so rich is that European governments tend to be rich; and that European professional institutions, learned societies and university departments have been pursuing prehistory far longer on their own doorstep than in other parts of the world.

If anything, then, Europe was late to the party.

WHAT TO MAKE OF RECENT FINDINGS?

Because 34,000 and 26,000 years ago isolated burials of individuals or small groups almost saturated with ornaments have been found, many argue that rather than egalitarian the thousands of years before farming, human societies were already divided along lines of status, class and inherited power.

In Europe, between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago public works were already a feature of human habitation across an area reaching from Kraków to Kiev, causing many to revise their view of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Some see this as proof that ‘hunter-gatherer societies had evolved institutions to support major public works, projects, and monumental constructions, and thus had a complex social hierarchy prior to their adoption of farming.’

One such amazing site was erected on a framework made of mammoth tusks and bones, taken from many tens of these great animals. The remains of impressive circular structures 39 feet in diameter have been found that clearly weren’t meat for ordinary camp- dwelling. For every structure built (such as the five at Yudinovo), there was enough mammoth to feed hundreds of people for around three months.

At these mammoth monuments were erected, inhabitants exchanged amber, marine shells and animal pelts over impressive distances

Evidence of institutional inequality in Ice Age societies, whether grand burials or monumental buildings, is sporadic. Richly costumed burials appear centuries, and often hundreds of miles, apart. Even if we put this down to the patchiness of the evidence, we still have to ask why the evidence is so patchy in the first place: after all, if any of these Ice Age ‘princes’ had behaved like, say, Bronze Age (let alone Renaissance Italian) princes, we’d also be finding all the usual trappings of centralized power: fortifications, storehouses, palaces. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling ‘states’.

Thomas Beidelman, for instance, observes that among the early-twentieth-century Nuer – a cattle-keeping people of South Sudan, had politicians and village ‘bulls’ (‘operator types’ we’d now call them) who played fast and loose with the rules, but also ‘earth priests’ who mediated local disputes, and finally prophets. The politicians were often unconventional: for instance, it was not uncommon for the local ‘bull’ actually to be a woman whose parents had declared her a man for social purposes; the priests were always outsiders to the region; but the prophet was an altogether more extreme kind of figure. He might dribble, drool, maintain a vacant stare, act like an epileptic; or engage in long but pointless tasks such as spending hours arranging shells into designs on the ground in the bush; or long periods in the wilderness; or he may even eat excrement or ashes. Prophets, as Beidelman notes, ‘may speak in tongues, go into trances, fast, balance on their head, wear feathers in their hair, be active by night rather than by day, and may perch on rooftops. Some sit with tethering pegs up their anuses.’ Many, too, were physically deformed. Some were cross-dressers, or given to unconventional sexual practices.

The Nile & Egypt

By 3000 BC, the political integration of its lower reaches with the Nile delta would produce the first territorial kingdom of ancient Egypt. The cultural roots of this and all later Nilotic civilizations lay in much earlier transformations, linked to the adoption of farming between 5000 and 4000 BC, relied heavily on livestock-herding, combined with annual rounds of fishing, hunting and foraging on the rich floodplain of the Nile, and in the oases and seasonal streams (wadis) of what are now the neighboring deserts, which were then still watered by annual rains. Herders moved periodically in and out of this ‘Green Sahara’, both west and east to the Red Sea coast.

New forms of personal adornment employed cosmetic pigments and minerals, prospected from the adjacent deserts, and a dazzling array of beadwork, combs, bangles and other ornaments made of ivory and bone, all richly attested in Neolithic cemeteries running the length of the Nile valley, from Central Sudan to Middle Egypt. Before there were pharaohs – almost anyone could hope to be buried like a king, queen, prince or princess.

The Lapita Culture 1600 to 500 BCE

Lapita groups seem to have avoided established centers of population. They gave a wide berth to the forager stronghold of Australia, and skirted largely clear of Papua New Guinea, where a local form of farming was already well established in the uplands around the Wahgi valley. On virgin islands and beside vacant lagoons they founded their villages, comprising houses perched on stilts. With stone adzes, a mainstay of their travelling toolkit, they cleared patches of forest to make gardens for their crops – taroes, yams and bananas – which they supplemented with animal domesticates and a rich diet of fish, shellfish and marine turtles, wild birds and fruit bats. Unlike Europe’s first farmers, the carriers of the Lapita horizon diversified their economy continuously as they spread. They oriented their lives around the needs of certain plants and animals; enclosing, protecting and breeding those species was a perennial feature of their existence and a cornerstone of their diets. All of them had become ‘serious’ farmers on lands largely uninhabited by existing populations.

The lowland tropics of South America

Well into the twentieth century, people spent the rainy season in riverside villages, clearing gardens and orchards to grow a panoply of crops including sweet and bitter manioc, maize, tobacco, beans, cotton, groundnuts, gourds and more besides. Cultivation was a relaxed affair, with little effort spent on keeping different species apart. And as the dry season commenced, these tangled house gardens were abandoned altogether. The entire group dispersed into small nomadic bands to hunt and forage.

In Greater Amazonia, such seasonal moves in and out of farming are documented among a wide range of indigenous societies and are of considerable antiquity. So is the habit of keeping pets. It is often stated that Amazonia has no indigenous animal domesticates, and from a biological standpoint this is true. From a cultural perspective, things look more complicated. Many rainforest groups carry with them what can only be described as a small zoo comprising tamed forest creatures: monkeys, parrots, collared peccaries, and so on. These pets are often the orphaned offspring of animals hunted and killed for food. Taken in by human foster-parents, fed and nurtured through infancy, they become utterly dependent on their masters. This subservience lasts into maturity. Pets are not eaten. Nor are their keepers interested in breeding them.

Basque culture

Tasks such as moving flocks to highland pastures, or the demands of milking, shearing and guarding herds – may require the combined efforts of 10 different households, and these households have to balance the scheduling of numerous different sorts of commitment. We begin to get a sense of the complexities involved. These logistical challenges were of striking complexity, resolved on a basis of intricate systems of mutual aid, all without any need of centralized control or administration. Basque villagers in this region are self-conscious egalitarians, in the sense that they insist each household is ultimately the same and has the same responsibilities as any others; yet rather than governing themselves through communal assemblies (which earlier generations of Basque townsfolk famously created in places like Guernica), they rely on mathematical principles such as rotation, serial replacement and alternation. There is no reason to assume that such a system would only work on a small scale. Around the middle of the fourth millennium BC, most towns were basically abandoned. We still don’t know why. What they offer us, in the meantime, is significant: proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.

Dreams

In 1649 Father Ragueneau wrote that the Wyandot people of Lake Ontario believed that secret desires are communicated in dreams in an indirect, symbolic language, difficult to understand, so they spent a great deal of time trying to decipher the meaning of one another’s dreams and consulting specialists, long before Freud wrote about dreams in 1899, an event which is widely seen as one of the founding events of twentieth-century thought. Of course, the Jesuits thought this was absurd and tried to convince the natives to find truth in Holy Scriptures.

‘Dream-guessing’ was often carried out by groups, and sometimes in the winter a town devoted itself to organizing collective feasts and dramas to make some important man or woman’s dreams come true.

Most traditions are not documented. Many other societies were entirely destroyed, or reduced to traumatized remnants, long before any such records could be written down. One can only wonder what other intellectual traditions might have been forever lost.

Dreams or vision quests: among Iroquoian-speaking peoples in the 16th and 17th centuries it was considered extremely important literally to realize one’s dreams. Many European observers marveled at how Indians would be willing to travel for days to bring back some object, trophy, crystal or even an animal like a dog that they had dreamed of acquiring. Anyone who dreamed about a neighbor or relative’s possession (a kettle, ornament, mask and so on) could normally demand it; as a result, such objects would often gradually travel some way from town to town. On the Great Plains, decisions to travel long distances in search of rare or exotic items could form part of vision quests.

In dreams, such secret desires are communicated in a kind of indirect, symbolic language, difficult to understand, and that the Wendat therefore spend a great deal of time trying to decipher the meaning of one another’s dreams, or consulting specialists. All this might seem like an oddly clumsy projection of Freudian theory, but for one thing. The text is from 1649 precisely 250 years before the appearance of the first edition of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), an event which, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, is widely seen as one of the founding events of twentieth-century thought.

‘Dream-guessing’ was often carried out by groups, and realizing the desires of the dreamer, either literally or symbolically, could involve mobilizing an entire community: Ragueneau reported that the winter months in a Wendat town were largely devoted to organizing collective feasts and dramas, literally in order to make some important man or woman’s dreams come true. The point here is that it would be very unwise to dismiss such intellectual traditions as inferior – or for that matter, entirely alien – to our own.

One thing that makes the Wendat and Haudenosaunee unusual is that their traditions are so well documented: many other societies were either entirely destroyed, or reduced to traumatized remnants, long before any such records could be written down. One can only wonder what other intellectual traditions might thus have been forever lost.

Any member of an Iroquoian society given an order would have fiercely resisted it as a threat to their personal autonomy – but the one exception to this norm was, precisely, dreams. One Huron-Wendat chief gave away his prized European cat, which he had carried by canoe all the way from Quebec, to a woman who dreamed she could only be cured by owning it. Dreams were treated as if they were commands, delivered either by one’s own soul or possibly, in the case of a particularly vivid or portentous dream, by some greater spirit. The spirit might be the Creator or some other spirit, perhaps entirely unknown. Dreamers could become prophets – if only, usually, for a relatively brief period of time. During that time, however, their orders had to be obeyed. (Needless to say, there were few more terrible crimes than to falsify a dream.)

Non-western views of property

We have learned that at least some of these societies developed a material infrastructure capable of supporting royal courts and standing armies – even though we have, as yet, no clear evidence that they actually did so. To construct the earthworks at Poverty Point, for instance, must have taken enormous amounts of human labor and a strict regime of carefully planned-out work, but we still have little idea how that labor was organized.

Even among those forager groups, famous for their assertive egalitarianism, he notes, there was one striking exception to the rule that no adult should ever presume to give direct orders to another, and that individuals should not lay private claim to property. This exception came in the sphere of ritual, of the sacred. In Hadza religion and the religions of many Pygmy groups, initiation into male (and sometimes female) cults forms the basis of exclusive claims to ownership, usually of ritual privileges, that stand in absolute contrast to the minimization of exclusive property rights in everyday, secular life.

These various forms of ritual and intellectual property are generally protected by secrecy, by deception and often by the threat of violence, such as the sacred trumpets that initiated males of certain Pygmy groups keep hidden in secret places in the forest. Not only are women and children not supposed to know about such sacred treasures; should any follow the men to spy on them, they would be attacked or even raped. Strikingly similar practices involving sacred trumpets, sacred flutes or other fairly obvious phallic symbols are commonplace in certain contemporary societies of Papua New Guinea and Amazonia. Very often there is a complex game of secrets, whereby the instruments are periodically taken out of their hiding places and men pretend they are the voices of spirits, or use them as part of costumed masquerades in which they impersonate spirits to terrify women and children.

Now, these sacred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist in societies where personal autonomy is taken to be a paramount value, or what we may simply call ‘free societies’. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.

If you own a car, you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from entering or using it. (If you think about it, this is the only right you have in your car that’s really absolute. Almost anything else you can do with a car is strictly regulated: where and how you can drive it, park it, and so forth. But you can keep absolutely anyone else in the world from getting inside it.)

To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that – quite unlike free societies – we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms.

Just as every man’s home is his castle, so your right not to be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned rests on the idea that you own your own body, just as you own your chattels and possessions, and legally have the right to exclude others from your land, or house, or car, and so on. As we’ve seen, those who did not share this particular European conception of the sacred could indeed be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned – and, from Amazonia to Oceania, they often were.

For most Native American societies, this kind of attitude was profoundly alien. If it applied anywhere at all, then it was only with regard to sacred objects, and many of the most important forms of indigenous property were immaterial or incorporeal: magic formulae, stories, medical knowledge, the right to perform a certain dance, or stitch a certain pattern on one’s mantle.

It was often the case that weapons, tools and even territories used to hunt game were freely shared – but the esoteric powers to safeguard the reproduction of game from one season to the next, or ensure luck in the chase, were individually owned and jealously guarded.

Quite often, sacra have both material and immaterial elements; as among the Kwakiutl, where ownership of an heirloom wooden feast-dish also conveyed the right to gather berries on a certain stretch of land with which to fill it; which in turn afforded its owner the right to present those berries while singing a certain song at a certain feast, and so forth.

Among Plains societies of North America, for instance, sacred bundles (which normally included not only physical objects but accompanying dances, rituals and songs) were often the only objects in that society to be treated as private property: not just owned exclusively by individuals, but also inherited, bought and sold.

The weight of duty is conveyed through terror, torture and mutilation: One or two months after the novice has submitted to circumcision, there follows the second principal initiation rite, that of sub-incision. The novice has now undergone all the requisite physical operations which have been designed to make him worthy of a man’s estate, and he has learned to obey the commands of the old men implicitly. His newly-found blind obedience stands in striking contrast to the unbridled insolence and general unruliness of temper which characterized his behavior in the days of his childhood. Native children are usually spoiled by their parents. Mothers gratify every whim of their offspring, and fathers do not bother about any disciplinary measures. The deliberate cruelty with which the traditional initiation rites are carried out at a later age is carefully calculated to punish insolent and lawless boys for their past impudence and to train them into obedient, dutiful ‘citizens’ who will obey their elders without a murmur, and be fit heirs to the ancient sacred traditions of their clan. Here is another, painfully clear example of how behavior observed in ritual contexts takes exactly the opposite form to the free and equal relations that prevail in ordinary life. It is only within such contexts that exclusive (sacred) forms of property exist, strict and top-down hierarchies are enforced, and where orders given are dutifully obeyed.

European Work & Property

Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature – which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it. The entire basis for dispossession, in turn, was premised on the idea that the current inhabitants of those lands weren’t really working.

The argument goes back to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argued that property rights are necessarily derived from labor. In working the land, one ‘mixes one’s labor’ with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself. Lazy natives, according to Locke’s disciples, didn’t do that. They were not, Lockeans claimed, ‘improving landlords’ but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum of effort.

The stereotype of the carefree, lazy native, coasting through a life free from material ambition, was deployed by thousands of European conquerors, plantation overseers and colonial officials in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania as a pretext for the use of bureaucratic terror to force local people into work: everything from outright enslavement to punitive tax regimes, corvée labor and debt peonage.

The ‘Agricultural Argument’ of having to farm the land makes no sense, even on its own terms. There are many ways, other than European-style farming, in which to care for and improve the productivity of land. What to a settler’s eye seemed savage, untouched wilderness usually turns out to be landscapes actively managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years through controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, fertilizing and pruning, terracing estuarine plots to extend the habitat of particular wild flora, building clam gardens in intertidal zones to enhance the reproduction of shellfish, creating weirs to catch salmon, bass and sturgeon, and so on. Such procedures were often labor-intensive, and regulated by indigenous laws governing who could access groves, swamps, root beds, grasslands and fishing grounds,

They simply had different conceptions of property. This is true, incidentally, even of people like the Hadza or!Kung; and, as we will see, many other foraging peoples actually had extraordinarily complex and sophisticated conceptions of ownership. Sometimes these indigenous property systems formed the basis for differential access to resources, with the result that something like social classes emerged.

Usually, though, this did not happen, because people made sure that it didn’t, much as they made sure chiefs did not develop coercive power.

We should nonetheless recognize that the economic base of at least some foraging societies was capable of supporting anything from priestly castes to royal courts with standing armies.

Ellis EC (2021) New views on ancient peoples. A bold reappraisal of human history upends long-held theories about early societies. Science 374: 1061.

Graeber D, Wengrow D (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

Dreams

Categories

Recent Posts