Or, why this is not a book about the origins of inequality
It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ’evil’ are purely humans concepts. p1
…[[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, which he wrote in 1754. Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ’the state’ – which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life; patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions… p2
Insofar as there has been any progress from the benighted state of affairs, a Hobbesian would argue, it has been largely due to exactly those repressive mechanisms that [[Rousseau]] was complaining about: government, courts, bureaucracies, police. p3
Hierarchy and domination, and cynical self-interested, have always been the basis of human society. It’s just that, collectively, we have learned it’s to our advantage to prioritize our long-term interests over our short-term instincts; or, better, to create laws that force us to confine our worst impulses to socially useful areas like the economy, while forbidding them everywhere else.
As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they:
simply aren’t true;
have dire political implications;
make the past needlessly dull.
This book is an attempt to begin to tell another, more hopeful and more interesting story; one which, at the same time, takes a better account of what the last few decades of research have taught us. Partly, this is a matter of bringing together evidence that has accumulated in archaeology, anthropology and kindred disciplines; evidence that points towards a completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years. Almost all of this research goes against the familiar narrative, but too often the most remarkable discoveries remain confined to the work of specialists, or have to be teased out by reading between the lines of scientific publications.
To give just a sense of how different the emerging pciture is: it is clear now that humans socieities before the advent of farming were nto confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, fat more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators. p4
Our main aim in this book is to start putting some of the pieces of the puzzle together, in full awareness that nobody yet has nothing like a complete set. p4
But to begin making sense of the new information that’s now before out eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required. p5
Revisiting what we will call the ‘indigenous critique’ mean taking seriously contributions to social thought that come from outside the European canon, and in particular from those indegenous peoples whom Western philosophers tend to cast either in the role of history’s angels or its devils. p5
…levels of social inequality have got out of hand, and that most of the world’s problems result, in one way or another, from an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. p6
Presumably, it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree. (inequality) p7
A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of socual organization. p8
The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production). much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together. p8
Framing human history in this way–which necessarily means assuming humanity once existed in an idyllic state, and that a specific point can be identified at which everything started to go wrong–made it almost impossible to ask any of the questions we felt were genuinely interesting. p9
For [[Jared Diamond]] and [[Fukuyama]], as for [[Rousseau]] some centuries earlier, what put an end to that equality–everywhere and forever–was the invention of agriculture, and the higher population levelis it sustained. Agriculture brought about a transition from ‘bands’ to ’tribes’. p10
As we will soon be discovering, there is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian– or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or even bureaucracies. p11
As we say, it’s all just an endless repetition of a story first told by [[Rousseau]] in 1754. (happiness) p11
Romito 2
We just want to point out how easy it would be to play the same game in the other direction–easy, but frankly not too enlightening. p15
Whatever the unpleasantries of the past, [[Steven Pinker]] assures us, there is every reason to be optimistic, indeed happy, about the overall path our species has taken. p18
But emperical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with [[Steven Pinker]]’s conclusions. p18
For anyone who has grown up in a city full of rough sleepers and panhandlers–and that is, unfortunately, most of us–it is always a bit strartling to discover there’s nothing inevitable about any of this. p20
If social scientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic, two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anything original, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists are expected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. p22
When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky–in a word, far less human than what was likely going on. p24
2. Wicked Liberty
The indigenous critique and the myth of progress
Fascination with the question of social inequality was relatively new in the 1700s, and it had everything to do with the shock and confusion that followed Europe’s sudden integration into a global economy, where it had long been a very minor player. p29
As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources… there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist theu weren’t really serious. p29
When he ([[Leibniz]]) lived, Church authorities still wielded a great deal of power in most of Europe: anyone making an argument that non-Christian ways were in any way superior might find themselves facing charges of atheism, which was potentially a capital offence. p30
As we will shortly see, the whole story we summarized in the last chapter– our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex–was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique. p32
The first thing to emphasize is that ’the origin of social inequality’ is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. p32
In fact, the terms ’equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early twentieth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World. p32
…but what is important, in this context, in that they opened a conceptual door. Writers like [[Thomas Hobbes]], [[Hugo Grotiues]] or [[John Locke]] could skip past biblical narratives everyone used to start with, and begin instead with a question such as: what might humans have been like in a State of Nature, when all they had was their humanity?
Each of these authors populated the State of Nature with what they took to be the simplest societies known in the Western Hemisphere, and thus they concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse ([[Thomas Hobbes]], for example, definitely felt it worse). p33
We will argue that indigenous Americans did indeed develop a very strong critical view of their invaders’ institutions: a vew which focused first on these institutions’ lack of freedom, and only later, as they became more familiar with European social arrangements, on equality. p37
We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sourses and examples. Beacause it was true. p37
What seemed to irritate [[Biard]] the most was that the Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they werem as a result, ‘richer’ than the French. The French has more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time. p38
…the Wendat were particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another… p39
One of the most striking things baout these seventy-one volumes of missionary fields reports is that neither the Americans, nor their French interlocutors, appear to have had very much to say about ’equality’ per se… when they do it’s almost always in reference to ’equality of the sexes’. p40
What they differed on was whether or not individual libery was desirable. p40
But in fact, in many ways, the authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty– or even, for that matter, theories of depth pschology – indigenous American attitudes are like to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones. p41
The ‘wiked liberty of the savage’, on insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’. p44
Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ’equality before the law’… p45
Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey order as they saw fit. p45
It was largely the speakers of Iroquoian languages such as the Wendat, or the five Haudenosaunce nations ot their south, who appear to have placed such weighton reasoned debate–even finding it a form of pleasurable entertainment in own right. This fact alone had major historical repercussions. Because it appears to have been exactly this form of debate – rational, sceptical, empirical, conversational in tone – which before long came to be identified with the European Enlightenment as well. And, just like the Jesuits, Enlightenment thikers and democratic revolutionaries saw it as intrinsically connected with the rejection of arbitrary authority, particularly that which had long been assumed by the clergy. p46
In other words, we find here all the familiar criticisms of European society that the earliest missionaries had to contend with – the squabbling, the lack of mutual aid, the blind submission to authority–but with a new element added in: the organization of private property. [[Lahontan]] continues: ‘They think it unaccountable that one man should have more than another, and that the rich should have more respect than the poor. In short, they say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.’ p52
In conclusions, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest… p54
Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist [[Gregory Bateson]] coined the term ‘schismogenesis’ to describe people’s tendency to define themselves against one another. p57
[[Gregory Bateson]] was interested in psychological processes within societies, but there’s every reason to believe something similar happes between societies as well. p57
…since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and , therefore, where everyone is equally poor. As societies evolve, [[Turgot]] reasoned, technology advances. p60
A few years later, [[Turgot]] would elaborate these same ideas in a series of lectures on world history. He had already been arguing – for some years – for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastorialism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization. Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are better understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development. p60
…an argument about freedom also became, increasingly, an argument about equality. p62
Were freedom and equality universal values, or were they – at least in their pure form – inconsistent with a regime based on private property? Did the progress of arts and science lead to improved understanding of the world, and therefore to moral progress as well? Or was the indigenous critique correct, and the wealth and power of France simply a perverse side effect of unnatural, even pathological, social arrangements? p63
…his work is informed by the same critical questions: why are Europeans so competitive? Why do they not share food? Why do they submit themselves to other people’s orders? [[Rousseau]] long excurses on pitie–the natural sympathy… p65
The one – major – difference between them is that [[Rousseau]], unlike [[Kandiaronk]], cannot really envisiage society being based on anything else. p66
To say Mi’kmaq thought is unimportant would be racist: to say it is unknowable because sources were racist, however, does rather let one off the hook. p72
[[Rousseau]] has been accused of many crimes. He is innocent of most of them. If there is really a toxic element in his legacy, it is this one: not his promulgation of the image of the ’noble savage’, which he really didn’t do, but his promulgation of what we might call the ‘myth of stupid savage’… p73
…it remains entirely unclear what ’egalitarian’ even means. p75
To be clear, it’s not that we consider the fact princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests – or for that matter, writing, cities and farming – only emerge at a certain point in human history to be uninteresting or unsignificant. Quite the contrary: in order to undersatand our current predicament as a species, it is absolutely crucial to understand how these things first came about. However, we would also insist that, in order to do so, we should reject the impulse to treat our distant ancestors as some sort of primordial human soup. Evidence accumulating from archaeology, anthropology and related fields suggests that – just like the seventeenth century Amerindians and Frenchmen – the people of prehistoric times had very specific ideas about what was important in their societies; that these varied considerably; and the describing such societies a uniformly ’egalitarian’ tells us almost nothing about them. p75
This is not, then, a book about the origins of inequality. But it aims to answer many of the same questions in a different way. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. To understand how this situation came about, we should trace the problem back to what first made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers and judges. But we no longer have the luxury of assuming we already know in advance what the precise answers will turn out to be. Taking guidance from indigenous critics like [[Kandiaronk]], we need to approach the evidence of the human past with fresh eyes. p77
3. Unfreezing the Ice Age
In and out of chains: the protean possibilities of human politics
The term ‘prehistory’ only came into common use after the discoveries at Brixham Cave in Devon in 1858… p79
We modern day humans tend to exagerate our differences. Between war, slavery, imperialism and sheer day-to-day racist oppression, the last deveral centuries have seen so much human suffering justified by minor differences in human appearance that we can easily forget just how minor these differences really are. By any biologically meaningful standard, living humans are barely distinguishable. p80
Rewind a few hundred millennia and all this was most definitely not the case. p81
Those elements that make up modern humans–the relatively uniform ‘us’ referred to above–seem only to have come together quite late in the process. In other words, 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. p81
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. p81
Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans. p81
Only after those other populations became extinct can we really begin talking about a single human ‘us’ inhabiting the planet. What all this brings home is just how radically different the social and even physical world of our remote ancestors would have seemed to us– and this would have been true at least down to around 40,000 BC. The range of flora and fauna surrounding them was quite unlike anything that exists today. All of which makes it extremely difficult to draw analogies. p82
…there is no ‘original’ form of human society. p82
It seems to ask the question: why do so many tens of thousands of years stand between the biological origins of humanity and the widespread appearance of typically human forms of behaviour; between when we became capable of creating culture and when we finally got round to doing it? What were we actually doing in the interim? Many researchers have puzzled over this and have even coined a phrase for it: ’the sapient paradox’. p84
In fact, 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… p84
[[Boehm]]’s own work is revealing in this regard. An evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate studies, he argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way… p86
In this sense, one could say [[Aristostle]] was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’–since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge. p86
But what as mistly intrigued scholars of different disciplines so far is something else: the apparent proof they offer that ‘hunter-gatherer societies had evolved institutions to support major public works, projects, and monumental contructions, and thus had a complex social hierarchy prior to their adoption of farming’. p90 (referring to [[Gobekli Tepe]])
Why, then, did [[Harari]] choose chimps instead of bikers? It’s hard to escape the impression that the main point difference is that bikers choose to live the way they do. p93
When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window into consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keely aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India, or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem. True individual self-consciousness, meanwhile, was imagined as something that few wise sages could perhaps achieve through long study, exercise, discipline and meditation. p94
There is every reason to believe that sceptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them. p97
For [[Levi-Strauss]], what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were averse to competition (they had little wealth to compete over anyway), they did appoint chiefs to lead them. The very simplicity of the resulting arrangement, he felt, might expose ‘some basic functions’ of political life that ‘remain hidden in more complex and elaborate systems of government’. Not only was the role of the chief socially and psychologically quite similar to that of a national politician or statesman in European society, he noted, it also attracted similar personality types: people who ‘unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward’. p99
…we can at least suggest they were seen as the ultimate individuals, about as different from their peers as it was possible to be. p103
…suggests we might have to shelve any premature talk of the emergence of hereditary elites. It seems extremely unlikely that Paleolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs. p103
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. p103
[[Levi-Strauss]] was simply highlighting some of the political implications. But these implications are important. What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Paleolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. p107
(Other circumpolar peoples, he noted, including close neighbours of the Inuit facing near-identical physical conditions, organized themselves quite differently.) To a large extent, he concluded, Intuit lived the way they did because they felt that’s how humans ought to live. p108
They were arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organization–successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states–and held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilization. It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of a year, between economic categories. p110
They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rist of authoritarian structures during certain times of the year then dismantling them… p111
If we are right, and if human beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again, the implications are profound. For one thing, it suggests that [[Pierre Clastres]] was quite right when he proposed that, rather than being less policically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so. p112
For the moment, the main thing to stress is that this flexibility, and potential political self-consciousness, was never entirely lost. p115
What’s really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. p117
Perhaps all these questions blind us to what really makes us humans in the first place, which is our capacity–as moral and social beings–to negogiate between such alternatives. p118
Be this as it may, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the earliest known evidence of human social life resembles a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. If there is a riddle here it’s this: why, after millenia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens–supposedly the wisest of apes–allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? Was this really a consequence of adopting agriculture? Of settling down in permanent villages and, later towns? Should we be looking for a moment in time like the one [[Rousseau]] envisaged, when somebody first enclosed a tract of land, declaring: ‘This is mine and always will be! Or is that another fool’s errand?’ p119
4. Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property
(Not neccesarily in that order)
As we’ve seen, our remote forager ancestors were much bolder experimenters in social form, breaking apart and reassembling their societies at different scales, often in radically different forms, with different value systems, from on time of year to the next. p120
In this chapter, we’ll do two things. First, we’ll continue our story forwards in time from the Paleolithic, looking at some of the extraordinary cultural arrangements that emerged across the world before our ancestors turned their hands hands to farming. Second, we’ll start answering the question we posed in the last chapter: how did we get stuck? How did some human societies begin to move away from the flexible, shifting arrangements that appear to have characterized our earliest ancestors, in such a way that certain individuals or groups were able to claim permanent power over others: men over women; elders over youth; and eventually, priestly castes, warrior artistocracies and rulers who actually rules? p121
But the overall direction of history–at least until very recently– would seem to be the very opposite of globalization. It is one of increasingly local allegiances: extraordinary cultural inventiveness, but much of it attained at finding new ways for people to set themselves off against each other. p124
If all societies are organized around certain key values (wealth, piety, beauty, freedom, knowledge, warrior prowess), then ’egalitarian societies’ are those where everyone (or almost everyone) agrees that the paramount values should be, and generally speaking are, distributed equally. p126
Different societies sometimes have radically different systems of value, and what might be most important in one– or at least ,what everyone insists is most important in one–might have very little to do with what’s important in another. p126
Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such as way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements. p128
All such behaviour, Woodburn insisted, is based on a self-conscious ethos, that no one should ever be in a relaiton of ongoing dependency to anybodt else… the real defining feature of sucj societies is, precisely, the lack of any material surplus. p129
All this is in a stark contract to most foragers, and all pastorialists or farmers, who can be characterized as having ‘delayed return’ economies, regularly investing their energies in projects that only bear fruit at some point in the future. Such investments, he argues, inevitably lead to ongoing ties that can become the basis for some individuals to exercise power over others; what’s more, Woodburn assumes a certain ‘actuarial intelligence’–Hadza and other egalitarian foragers understand all this perfectly well, and as a result they self-consciously avoid stockpiling resources or engaging in any long-term projects. p129
…but the freedoms which form the moral basis of a nation like the United States are, largely, formal freedoms. p131
…what the Hazda, Wendat or ’egalitarian’ people such as the Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones. They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid–what contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’–was seen as a necessary condition for individual autonomy. p131
…the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court. p133
But there was also a staggering increase in the number of hours that people were expected to work. p134
Technological evolution has not liberated people from material necessity. People are not working less. All the evidence, he argued, suggests that over the course of human history the overall number of hours most people spend working has tended instead to increase. Even more provocatively, [[Sahlins]] insisted that people in earlier ages were not, necessarily, poorer than modern-day consumers. In fact, he contended, for much of our early history humans might just as easily be said to have lived lives of great material abundance. p136
‘Abundance’ is not an absolute measure. It refers to a situation where one has easy access to everything one feels one needs to live a happy and comfortable life. By those standards, [[Sahlins]] argues, most known foragers are rich. p136
When it comes to labour and affluence, every new technological breakthrough seems to cause us to fall yet further. p139
If anything was being stockpiled at Poverty Point, it may well have been knowledge: the intellectual property of rituals, vision quests, songs, dances and images. p143
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. p149
Such societies might not have recognized private property rights in the same sense as Roman Law or English Common Law, but it’s absurd to argue they had no property rights at all. The simply had different conceptions of property. This is true, incidentally, even of people like the Hazda 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 powers. p150
If private property has an ‘origin’, it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself. The pertinent question to ask is not so much when this happened, as how it eventually came to order so many other aspects of human affairs. p163
5. Many Seasons Ago
Why Canadian foragers kepts slaves and their Californian neighbours didn’t; or, the problems with ‘modes of production’
Indigenous peoples of California were not pre-agricultural. If anything, theu were anti-agricultural. p165
…many Californians and Northwest Coast peoples did plant and grow tobacco… yet they comprehensively rejected the idea of planing everyday foodstuffs or treating crops as staples. p166
What we are presented with here is a collection of people with broadly similar cultural practices, but speaking a jumble of languages, many drawn from entirely different language families… p168
Art and technology from different Eastern Woodlands tribes, for instance, appeared to have much more in common than material from, say, all speakersof the Athabascan languages; or all people who relied mainly on fishing, or cultivated maize. p171
[[Mauss]] thought the idea of cultural ‘diffusion’ was mostly nonesense… because he felt it was based on a false assumption: that the movement of people, technologies and ideas was somehow unusual… The exact opposite was true, [[Mauss]] argued. p173
‘Societies’, [[Mauss]] wrote, ’live by borrowing from each other, but they often define themselves rather than by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.’ p174
[[Mauss]] concluded, it is precisely in comparing themselves with their neighbors that people come to thin of themselves as distinct groups. p175
We are looking for a key to this problem. It lies in the institution of slavery, which, as we’ve noted, was endemic on the Northwest Coast but correspondingly absent south of the Klamath River in California. p185
In legal terms, at least, a slave has no family, no kin, no community; they can make no promises and forge no ongoing connections with other human beings. p187
…the archetypical slaves are usually war captives, who are typically far from home and amid people who owe them nothing. There is another practical reason for turning war captives into slaves. A slave’s master has a responsibility to keep them alive in a fit state to work. Most human beings need a good deal of care and resources, and can usually be considered a net economic loss until that are twelve or sometimes fifteen years old… Seen another way, a slave-raider is stealing the years of caring labour another society invested to create a work-capable human being. p188
What needs emphasizing–since it will become extremely important as our story unfolds–is the profound ambivalence, or perhaps we might better say double-edged-ness, of these caring relationships. p191
Mere acts of violence are passing, acts of violence transformed into caring relationships have a tendency to endure. p191
In the technical language of behavioural ecology, fish are ‘front-loaded’. You have to do most of the work of preparation right away. As a result, one could argue that a decision to rely heavily on fish–while undoubtedly sensible in purely nutritional terms–is also weaving a noose for one’s own neck. It meant investing in the creation of a storable surplus of processed and packaged foods (not just preserved meat, but also fats and oils), which also meant creating an irresistible temptation for plunderers. Acorns and nuts, on the other hand, present neither such risks nor temptations. They are ‘back-loaded’. p197
Northwest Coast societies, then, were warlike, because they simply didn’t have the option of relying on a war-proof staple food. p197
It’s certainly an elegant theory, quite clever and satisfying in its own way. The problem is it just doesn’t seem to match up to historical reality. p197
So we must conclude that ecology does not explain the presence of slavery on the Northwest Coast. Freedom does. Title-holding aristocrats, locked in rivlary with one another, simply lacked the means to compel their own subjects to support their endless games of magnificence. They were forced to look abroad. p199
We are introducing them as a way to illustrate how the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always, at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way to live. p203
The intersection of environment and technology does make a difference, a huge difference, and to some degree, cultural difference really is just an arbitrary roll of the dice… p205
Perhaps [[Karl Marx]] put it best: we make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing. p206
Slavery, we’ve argued, became commonplace on the Northwest Coast largely because an ambitious aristocracy found itself unable to reduce its free subjects to a dependable workforce. The ensuing violence seems to have spread until those in what we’ve been calling the ‘shatter zone’ of northern California gradually found themselves obliged to create institutions capable of insulating them from it, or at least its worst extremes. A schimogenetic process ensued, whereby coastal peoples came to define themselves increasingly against each other. This was by no means just an argument about slavery; it appears to have affected everything from the configuration of households, law, ritual and art to conceptions of what it meant to be an admirable human being, and was most evident in contrasting attitudes to work, food and material wealth. p207
6. Gardens of Adonis
The revolution that never happened: how Neolithic peoples avoided agriculture
Was farming from the very beginning about the serious business of producing more food to supply growing populations? Most scholars assume, as a matter of course, that this had to be the principal reason for its invention. Buy maybe farming began as a more playful or even subversive kind of process–or perhaps even as a side effect of other concerns, such as the desire to spend longer in particular kinds of locations, where hunting and tradinf were the real priorities. p211
There were constant opportunities for foragers to exchange complementary products–which included food, medicines, drygs and cosmetics–since the local growth cycles of wild resources were staggered by sharp differences in climate and topography. Farming itself seems to have started in precisely this way, as one of so many ’niche’ activities or local forms of specialization. p227
It is wheat, the remind us, that has domesticated people, just as much as people ever domesticated wheat. p230
What they showed was the key genetic mutation leading to crop domestication could be achieved in as little as twenty to thirty years, using simple harvesting techniques like reaping with flint sickles or uprooting by hand. All it would have taken, then, is for humans to follow cues provided by the crops themselves. That meant harvesting after they began to ripen, doing it in ways that left the grain on the steam (e.g. cutting or pulling, as opposed to beating grain straight off the ear with a paddle), sowing new seed on virgin soil (away from wild competitors), learning from errors, and repeating the winning formula next year. For foragers seasoned in the harvesting of wild crops, these changes need not have posed major logistical or conceptual challenges. p232
In fact, the latest research shows that the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent was not fully completed until much later: as much as 3,000 years after the cultivation of wild cereals first began. p233
We need to understand this 3,000-year period as an important phase of human history in its own right. It’s a phase marked by foragers moving in and out of cultivation. p234
So long as it didn’t become too onerous, cultivation was just one of many ways in which early settled communities managed their environments. p234
…Catalhoyuk and its wetland location. Called ‘flood retreat’ , ‘flood recession’ or decrue farming, it takes place on the margins of seasonally flooding lakes or rivers. Flood-retreat farming is a distictly lackadaisical way to raise crops. The work of tillage, annually sifting and refreshing the soil. As the waters recede they leave behind a fertile bed of alluvial earth, where seed can be broadcast. p235
The more the uplanders came to organize their artistic and ceremonial lives around the theme of predatory male violence, the more lowlanders tended to organize theirs around female knowledge and symbolism–and vice versa. p245
The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production took something in the order of 3,000 years. p248
Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ’the Agricultural Revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. p248
All this raises an obvious question: if the adoption of farming actually set humanity, or some small part of it, on a course away from violent domination, what went wrong? p248
7. The Ecology of Freedom
How farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed its way around the world
In short, there is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from forager egalitarianism. p251
In the chapter, we’ll show just how much the picture is changing and point towards some of the surprising new patterns that are starting to emerge. p251
Invent agriculture–or so the story once went–and you set yourself up on a course that will eventually lead to Assyrian charioteers, Confucian bureaucrats, Inca sun-kings, or Aztec priests carrying away a significant chunk of your grain. Domination–and most often violent, ugly domination–was sure to follow; it was just a matter of time. p252
Archaeological sciense has changed all this. p252
None followed a linear trajectory from food production to state formation. Nor is there any reason to assume a rapid spread of farming beyond them to neighboring areas. Food production did not always present itself to foragers, fishers and hunters as an obviously beneficial thing. p252
[[Alfred W. Crosby]] went on to argue that the global ascendance of European economies since the sixteenth century could be accounted for by a process he called ’ecological imperialism’. p256
Since our species cam into existence, there have been only two sustained periods of warm climate of the kind that might support an agricultural economy for long enough to leave some trace in the archaeological record. The first was the Eemian interglacial, which took place around 130,000 years ago. p257
The second is the one we are living in now. p257
For at least the lat two centuries we have been entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which for the first time in history human activities are the main drivers of global climate change. p258
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, only to begin the whole process again the following year, often in a different location. p267
All this implies that at least some early inhabitants of the Amazonia were well aware of plant domestication but didn ot select it as the basis of their economy, opting instead for a more flexible kind of agroforestry. p270
…the truth is that Holocene developments in both hemispheres are starting to look increasingly similar, at least in terms of the overall pace of change. p271
Still, the basis on what is currently known, we can at least reframe our initial question and ask: why did Neolithic farmers in certain part of Europe initially suffer population collapse on a scale currently unknown, or undetected elsewhere? p272
Farming, as we can now see, often started out as an economy of deprivation: you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done, which is why it tended to happen first in areas where wild resources were thinnest on the ground. p274
Seasonally erected monuments like the of [[Gobekli Tepe]] or Lake Shigirskoe are as clear a signal as one could wish for that big things were afoot among Holocene hunter-fisher-gatherers. p274
…but since most construction was wood, very little of this habitation survives. p274
8. Imaginary Cities
Eurasia’s first urbanites–in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, Ukraine and China–and how they built cities without kings
These ‘invisible crowds’, [[Elias Canetti]] proposed, were in a sense the first human cities, even if they existed only in the imagination. p276
…there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighborhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads. Much of social theory can be seen as an attempt to square these two dimensions of our experience. p276
In many early cities, there is simply no evidence of either a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum. p277
It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did. p278
It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents. p280
Foragers may sometimes exist in small groups, but they do not – and probably have not ever – lived in small-scale societies. p281
Mass society exists in the mind before it becomes physical reality. And crucially, it also exists in the mind after it becomes physical reality. p281
[[Claude Fischer]] put it: ‘… urbanites live in small social worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate.’ p282
Cities were part of that process of concentration, since urbanites could, and many did, spend almost their entire lives within a few miles’ radius–something that would hardly have been conceivable for people of an earlier age. p282
Almost everywhere, in these early cities, we find grand, self-conscious statements of civic unity, the arrangement of built spaces in harmonious and often beautiful patterns… p284
…united by devotion to its founding ancestors, its gods or heroes, its civic infrastructure and ritual calendar, which always involves at least some occasions for popular festivity. p284
What makes these cities strange, at least to us, is largely what isn’t there. This is especially true of technology, whether advanced melaturgy, intenstive agriculture, social technologies like adminstrative records, or even the wheel. Any one of these things may, or may not, have been present. p285
Ecological factors often played a role in the formation of cities… p286
…these enormous settlements had all of the hallmarks of what evolutionists would call a ‘simple’, not a ‘complex’ society. p289
In consequence, the standard archaeological plan of a Ukranian mega-site ([[Nebelivka]]) is all flesh, no core. p291
It was ‘play farming’ on a grand scale: an urban populous supporting itself through small-scale cultivation and herding, combined with an extraordinary array of wild foods. p293
…but over eight centuries we find little evidence of warfare or rise of social elites. The true complexity of the mega-sites lies in the strategies they adopted to prevent such things. p294
…a village of 100 households is already way beyond [[Dunbar]]’s proposed cognitive theshold of 150 people (the number of stable, trusting relationships we are able to keep track of in our minds, before–according, this is to Dunbar–we are obliged to start putting chiefs and administrators in charge of social affairs)… p297
The flood-myth Atrahasis – the prototype for the Old Testament story of Noah – tells how the gods first created people to perform corvee on their behalf. p299
Even the most autocratic rulers of later city-states were answerable to a panoply of the town councils, neighborhood wards and assemblies – in all of which women often participated alongside men. p300
So, far from needing rulers to manage urban life, it seems most Mesopotamian urbanites were organized into autonomous self-goverening units, which might react to offensive overlords either by driving them out or by abandoning the city entirely. p304
Cuneform script may well have been invented at [[Uruk]], around 3300 BC… Bookkeeping in the city’s temples was writing’s main function at that point. p305
To get a sense of how pervasive some of these innovations were, consider that just about anyone reading this book is likely to have first learned to read in classrooms, sitting in rows opposite a teacher, who follows a standard curriculum. This rather stern was of learning was itself a [[Sumerian]] invention. p307
From this we can deduce that a primary economic function of this temple sector was to co-ordinate labour at key times of year, and to provide quality control for processed goods that differed from those made in ordinary households. p308
For [[Sumerian]]s the ultimate purpose of all these factories and workshops was to provide the gods and goddesses of the city with an illustrious residence… p308
While these products might not have been entirely novel, what the temples introduced was the principle of standardization: urban temple-factories were literally outputting products in uniform packages, with the houses of the gods guarenteeing purity and quality control. p310
…‘heroic societies’ and, moreover, these societies all seem to have emerged just where his analysis tells us to expect them: on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities. p311
…is there a causal relationship between scale and inequality in human societies? p316
But the important thing here is that even 2,000 years ago it was not considered in any way unusual for members of ascetic orders to make decisions in much the same way as, for example, contemporary anti-authoritarian activists do in Europe of Latin America (by consensus process, with a fallback on majority vote); that these forms of governance were based on an ideal of equality; and that there were entire cities governed in what was seen to be exactly the same way. p320
Yet it could be argues that [[Mesopotamia]] – with its standardized household products, allocation of uniform payments to temple employees, and public assemblies – seems to have largely embraced the first version. Ukranian mega-sites, in which each household seems to have developed its own unique artistic style and, presumably, idiosyncratic domestic rituals, embraced the second. The Indus valley appears – if our interpretation is broadly correct – to represent yet a third possibility, where rigorous equality in certain areas (even the bricks were all precisely the same size) was complemented by explicit hierarchy in others. p322
What we are saying is that archaeological evidence shows this to have been a surprisingly common pattern… p322
…a dramatic increase in the scale of organized human settlement took place with no resulting concentration of wealth or power in the hands of ruling elites. p322
9. Hiding in Plain Sight
The indigenous origins of social housing and democracy in the Americas
[[Teotihuacan]] had indeed changed its course away from monarchy and aristrocracy to become instead a ‘Tollan of the people’. p343
Should we view the whole episode as a passing deviation, a blip (albeit an extremely large blip) on the road that led from [[Olmec]] ierarchy to [[Toltec]] aristocracy and eventually [[Aztec]] imperialism? Or might the egalitarian aspects of [[Teotihuacan]] have a distinct legacy of their own? p343
So how did [[Charles Mann]] come to think there were? As an award-winning science journalist, but not a specialist in the history of sixteenth-century Mesoamerica, he was at the mercy of secondary sources; and this, it turns out, is where much of the problem begins. p347
The [[Tlaxcalteca]] were out to settle old scores. From their perspective, an alliance with [[Hernan Cortez]] might bring to a favourable end their struggles against the [[Aztec]] Triple Alliance. p348
What [[Cervantes de Salazar]] describes in these remarkable passages is evidently not the workings of a royal court but of a mature urban parliament, which sought consensus for its decisions through reasoned argument and lengthy deliberations… p353
To satisfy both sides of debate, [[Hernan Cortez]] would be invited into the city, but as soon as he entered [[Tlaxcalteca]] territory the city’s leading general, Xicotencatl the Younger, would ambush him, together with a contingent of [[Otomi]] warriors. If the ambush succeded, they would be heroes. If it failed, they would blame it on the uncouth and impulsive [[Otomi]], make their excuses, and ally themselves with the invaders. p354
Those who aspired to a role on the council of [[Tlaxcalteca]], far from being expected to demonstrate personal charisma or even the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprication–even shame. They were required to subordinate themselves to the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as the proper reward of ambition, and then–with one’s ego in tatters–a long period of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiation ended with a ‘coming out’ of the newly constituted public servant, amid feasting and celebration, p356
10. Why the State Has No Origin
The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics
However, with no consensus among social theorists about what a state actually is, the problem is how to come up with a definition that includes all these cases but isn’t so broad as to be absolutely meaningless. This has proved surprisingly hard to do. p359
On this definition, a government is a ‘state’ if it lays claim to a certain stretch of land and insists that, within its borders, it is the only institution whose agents can kill people, bear them up, cut off parts of their body or lock them in cages; or as [[Rudolf von Ihering]] emphasized, that can decide who else has the right to do so on its behalf. p359
Marxists offered one: they suggested that states make their first appearance in history to protect the power of an emerging ruling class. p360
…also introduced new conceptual problems, such as how to define exploitation. p360
…but its logic is entirely circular. Basically, all it says is that, since states are complicated, and complicated social arangement must therefore be a state. p361
The best way to go about this task, we suggest, is by returning to first principles. We have already talked about fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey orders; the freedom to reorganize social relations. Can we speak similarly about elementary forms of domination. p362
Land is only really ‘yours’, in this sense, if no one would think to challenge your claim over it… p363
In other words, ’landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. p363
We would like to suggest these three principles–call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma–are also the three possible bases of social power. p365
…administrative organizations are always based not just on control of information, but also on ‘official secrets’… p366