The Dawn of everything is an inspiring read. It presented the recent findings in archaeology and tell us a very different story about human history from the neolithic age to the indigenous community living nowadays.
Using new evidence and findings, the authors showed us how the prevailing narratives in human civilization and its “enligtenments” leading to the modern states: agriculture development, law and order, private property, and democracy were plain wrong and imaginations from the 18th century philosophers and historians.
What they presented is a slow process of moving in and out of farming, accumulation of botanic knowledge, adopting, abandoning, and reforming social arrangements, centuries of matriarchy and collective decision making in massive settlements and cities scattered with temporary establishment of kings.
It is very hard to summarize this book, as it is so compact and filled with many many case studies. Anyhow, I try to flash out a few key points and the rants on the persisting narratives (mainly natural state vs falling from grace) that anthropology get stuck on.
The original question the authors set out to answers is “How did inequality arise?”, focusing on whether inequality is an inevitable step in the progress of human civilization.
The alternatives anthropologists could draw on are egalitarian societies formed by bands of small hunter gatherers. Current anthropology posits that top-down governance is the result of organisation among a big group of people. However, the authors challenge such notion by presenting various ancient settlements reaching up to 100000 people without any kings or elite class. Moreover, recent, higher resolution studies show that ancient human indeed put top priority on preventing themselves from domination, that they put in a lot of measures to prevent anybody to hold absolute power such as enforcing annual rotations and other forms of electing chiefs and elders.
Exerting absolute orders over others by these chiefs typically did not span over a few months (i.e in organised hunts) or among their immediate subordinates. Indeed, people actively dissolve any power structure and returned to smaller group in gathering seasons. The chiefs instead had to appease to other villagers by providing services and distribute goods to gather the necessary man-power in the next building or hunting projects.
In modern terms, equality is defined as everybody enjoying the same standard of material goods. That was actually the common cases in most of the ancient settlements shown in the book; people’s house size and possession are similar. Expensive burials were rather reserved for the spritual supervior (crazy people?) rather than the chiefs. This first kind of equality was a product of religious institutes became a unifying force on cultures.
In addition, the equality ancient people enjoyed was that they could practice different rituals and beliefs within their own household; the settlement could accommodate very different people. The hospitality is an important force to free movement - welcoming far away immigrants who have different origin and even languages to form their own social circles. This entails the first type of freedom: Freedom of movement.
Via free movement, people were free to choose different ideology and values. This allowed tribes and cities of different cultures to form, such as Athens vs Sparta, highland vs coastal tribes. Moving in and out of annually flooded land allowed people to experiment with farming and evidences showed that there were ancient tribes that actively opt out from agriculture and permanent settlements.
Being free to move around allowed people to not subject themselves to a a particular ruling body, hence, the Freedom from domination. They were empowered to organise themselves and experiments with different social arrangements, the third and ultimate form of freedom that we have lost and can hardly conceive what it looks like to deviate from the existing form of top-down governance of a “state” or global body (i.e. WTO).
So, an obvious question was how did we not notice of these lost freedom and reached the rather peculiar conclusion that our current state of social hierarchy is a convergence from Enlightenment and “progress”? Here, the authors examine how some of our social constructs that deem important, especially for Western civilization, come about by examining ancient cities.
The impression of a city is a large settlement surrounding the administration buildings and palaces where the ruling elites resided; people follow the “law and orders” issued from the ruling class that has the monopoly of violence and together with the administration handling public goods and tax collection. Interestingly, the authors found that these 3 elements, sovereignty, administration and personal politics have independent origins.
Sovereignty was typically an authoritarian government in ancient time. The legitimacy of the absolute power exerted by the king was due to his revered identity as a god or messenger of gods and was never challenged. Coupled with religious institutions, the kings’ influence, and thus authority, extended through his state. Still, people living under the influences or paying tribute to kings could simply ignore them or just move away. The king violence could not expand outside his immediate subordinates without administration.
These are the kingdoms and dynasties that caught most historians attentions. However, the authors has showed in the book that in between these historical landmarks, there are centuries of “dark ages” of kingless cities, where the governing bodies were formed by priests, princesses or oracles.
Documentation (in decor, paintings in tombs or remains) of the use of hallucinating drugs in rituals, emphasis of interpreting dreams, and mythical visions (mental illness?) had led to the selection of spiritual leaders. In such period, massive monuments dedicated to women figures and communal buildings were built (ie in Knossos in Crete) while bottom up administration were established from local “wise elders” who won their seats with humility and servitude to their neighbors.
There were no inheritance of power, thus no dynastic nature, of these rulers. However, the authors pointed out that these were not necessarily primitive form of hierarchy and life in city were still thriving with craftsmanship and long distance tradings.
So they raise their second question: why were these alternative form of society overlooked, or is it fair to treat them as mere exceptions in history?
But now, we are getting close to the modern state, where sovereignty and administration combined to form an effective exploitative mechanism. Using the Inca as an example, bottom up organisation among farmers of many villages enable the Inca empire to tapped into the local administration for tax collections. So rather then presented as a powerful kingdom that organise the villagers, it is rather that the kingdom use what is already in place to extract wealth.
Personal politics, the third element of modern state, emerged in forms of competitive sports and wars. “Heroes” and warlords living in hillside castles marked the initial forms of monarchy. The praises on male violence in warfare showed signs of patriarchy. Interestingly, the authors argued that the branding of domestic violence as love/protection in western/modern culture had accelerated patriarchy and hence, the degradation of women rights. Such attitude reflect a change of mindset on “ownership”.
Ancient hunter gatherers exchanged luxurious goods mainly for “heroic acts”, mainly among tribal chiefs. Due to the nature of moving around, most people have limited personal possessions. And usually, there were no system of inheritance, thus no wealth accumulations. But how, precisely did the claims of “owning” became legitimate?
“Land owning”, from a tribal point of view is merely land management; tribes would tend the land with care and focus on replenishment and restoration after use. The authors went further to argue that no one really “own” the land, which provide legitimacy to not only use but also destroy the land. The conceptual changes went hand in hand with salve keeping. “Salve” had no friends because they could not make any decision about themselves. Other than war captives, some tribes actively kidnapped outsiders, who step in for the revered class of warriors from daily chores. The welfare of salves solely depends on whether their relatives that were willing to pay ransoms and the owner’s relative that may nor may not stand up for them. When transiting to permanent settlements, salves and lands turned into tangible properties and the authors argued there embarked the dehumanization and degradation of woman status.
They elaborated that the practice of salve keeping made concrete the framework of a household, especially led by a male. Such patriarchy arrangement convert all the other family members as well as salves into the property of the head of the household.
The following legitimization of domestic violence towards the salves slowly extended to relatives and members under the household.
Extending such arrangement to the tribal chief, which usually took care of widows, orphans, and outcasts as charitable acts, it generated a troop of “police forces” from orphaned young males, harem from female salves and widows, and spiritual compartment that legitimize his ruling; the typical components of monarchy were ready to be assembled.
Thus, the “enlightenment” that involved the invention of private property brought about patriarchy, propagated domestic violence and sprouted inequality. Upon closer examination. it does not look like any “enlightenment” at all.
Let’s recap the tow popular narrative in Anthropology:
“Fallen from grace” - human lived in small brands of egalitarian hunter gatherers, as the group size increases, inevitable top-down authoritarian rules were imposed to ensure effective organization.
“Natural State” - human were inherited violent, the establish of rule and orders and a top-down system allow large amount of people to organise and live in peace by effective redistribution.
Here, the Dawn of Everything lay out all the archaeological evidence to dispute these two narratives. Instead, the authors showed us that human were very good at self-organise, were capable to live without wars and extreme violence for centuries. They had the freedom to experiment different life style, rituals, and social arrangements. Most important, we could finally acknowledge the complex level of local administration and collective decision. It is only such modular arrangement of local villages enabled bottom-top construction of larger settlements, long distance tradings and exchanges, and finally a more sophisticated form of society.
The authors of the book set out to address some timely and pressing issues on equality but they went much further. By scrutinizing the incongruity of the framework dated back in 18th century and the evidences accumulated in archaeology, they finally arrived at the conclusion that we were misled and a new anthropology framework is needed.
They rant on the story told by western scholars for political means, especially the legitimacy of colonialism in Southern America. The mindset of these early explorers and historians that could not escape their own social arrangement - power european empires with guns, gems, and steel, to “save” and “enlight” the “barbaric tribes”.
The blanket statements that put blood-thirsty Mayan kingdom and democratic society of Teotihuacan together as “primitive” gave the Spanish conquerors good reasons to dehumanise indigenous people: enslaving them and confiscating their lands.
The book kinda reached the conclusion as Keith Jenkins’s Rethinking History that history is always situated literatures, a narrative representation serving the status-quo. And unfortunately, this narrative is plain wrong.
We cannot see it more clearly that such narrative robbed us the possibility to a better society, we were made lacking both the imaginations and vocabulary to exercise such freedom. Rather, we were left with these deeply rooted social problems, accepting them as part of the package of modern state.
Here, the author’s message to us is that we should be painfully aware that the rhetoric of “enlightenment” based on a Western colonialist background is unreliable and unhelpful to us.
But they end in a hopeful note that with the advances in archaeology excavation techniques, we could foresee a reform in Anthropology and finally how we view our own civilization and how we could use this knowledge to transform our modern society.