David Graeber (1961 to 2020) was an anthropologist and anarchist writer. The Dawn of Everything (2021), written with the archaeologist David Wengrow, says that early humans were not trapped in one way of life, but moved between equal and unequal ways of organising themselves, and that farming did not lead straight to kings and states. It rejects the idea of a single, dated ‘Fall’ from an original equality, whilst agreeing that “Something has been lost”, which it sees as our freedom to change how we live together; Therapeutic Shamanism shares much of this picture, and sees the loss as reaching deeper still, into our relationship with the living world.
Who was David Graeber? #
An anthropologist, activist and writer. He did his fieldwork in the highlands of Madagascar in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was also an anarchist, and wrote about anarchism as a living tradition of people organising themselves without rulers, in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004).1 He died on 2 September 2020, aged fifty-nine, “just over three weeks” after he and Wengrow finished The Dawn of Everything. Wengrow describes him as “an activist and public intellectual of international repute”.2
David Wengrow is an archaeologist. The two worked on the book together for more than ten years.
What does The Dawn of Everything say about the Fall? #
That the usual way of asking the question is the problem. For centuries, Western thinkers have asked how inequality began. Graeber and Wengrow say that asking after the origins of inequality “necessarily means creating a myth, a fall from grace”, a modern retelling of the first chapters of Genesis.3
They reject both of the old stories. One, from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, says early human life was nasty and brutish until states and laws tamed us. The other, usually credited to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, says we lived in small, innocent, equal bands until farming ruined everything. Arguing about whether humans are naturally good or bad, they say, makes about as much sense as “arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.”4
Yet they do not say nothing was lost. “Rousseau was not entirely mistaken. Something has been lost. He just had a rather idiosyncratic (and ultimately, false) notion of what it was.”5 What was lost, in their account, is a set of basic freedoms: “the freedom to move away or relocate”, “the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others”, and “the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.” Their big question is not how inequality started, but “How did we get stuck?”6
What does it say about early human life? #
That it was far more varied, and far more deliberate, than either old story allows. The book gives many examples of peoples who changed how they organised themselves with the seasons. Inuit hunters and fishers lived in small, patriarchal family bands in summer, then gathered in large shared winter houses run on much more equal lines. On the Great Plains, Cheyenne and Lakota peoples, once farmers who had largely given up farming to hunt bison on horseback, appointed police with real powers for the season of the great hunt, and dissolved them afterwards.
It also describes hunting and gathering peoples who were not equal at all. The Calusa of Florida were settled, complex foragers who never farmed, yet had a king. The peoples of the north-west coast of North America, also settled foragers, had nobles, commoners and slaves.7
What does it say about farming and cities? #
That farming was not a sudden revolution. In the Middle East the change from wild foods to farming took “something in the order of 3,000 years”, and for much of that time people were “trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you will”, switching back and forth. Large inequalities of wealth, they say, mostly came “millennia after” farming began.8
They also describe early towns and cities that seem to have run themselves without kings or palaces, such as the huge settlements of around 4100 to 3300 BC in what is now Ukraine, whose people combined small-scale gardening and livestock with hunting and foraging, and the farming city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico.9
Where does it agree with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In many ways, and Paul Francis found that the book strengthened the teaching rather than weakening it. Because it was presented as demolishing the idea that hunter-gatherers were egalitarian, Paul read it with trepidation, wondering whether it would demolish the arguments; it absolutely did not, and in fact strengthened them. On this reading of the book, when hunter-gatherers did develop hierarchical structures, “they looked at them and thought, ‘Oh, no,’ and demolished them again. And they did that over and over and over again”, until the Fall, when “we get stuck in it”.
Therapeutic Shamanism calls the belief that hierarchy is the only way of organising societies a “wonky thought” of Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer. Hunter-gatherer tribes governed themselves without rulers: “There were no permanent leaders or followers in hunter-gatherer communities. Instead, people temporarily took the initiative, or were temporarily assigned authority, by consensus and according to the task at hand.” This is anarchism, “order without top-down government”.10 And equality was something hunter-gatherers actively kept: “Hunter-gatherers did not just practise and embody genuine equality, they fiercely protected it, too.”11
Therapeutic Shamanism also agrees that farming did not lead straight to the worst of what followed. From about 11,000 BC to about 4,000 BC “we still seem to have been doing relatively okay”, and the first city-states “seem to have been at least relatively egalitarian” before more hierarchical cultures replaced them.12 The Fall itself was gradual, “a long, slow fall. It started off slowly, way back in time, then gathered pace”.13 See What is the Fall?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In three ways. First, it keeps a broad turning point. DomesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this, which began with farming around 11,000 BC, is seen as the start of the break from animism, and it accelerated with the rise of the city-states from around 4,000 BC. Graeber and Wengrow would resist naming any such turning point, though the Therapeutic Shamanism account is itself a slow, uneven story, not a single event.
Second, the book is about politics: who gives orders, who obeys, who can leave. Therapeutic Shamanism sees the change as also a change in consciousness and in our relationship with the rest of the living world: “The adoption of agriculture involved a profound shift in the human psyche. Rather than being a part of the land, children of the earth, and sharing the land with our non-human relatives and kin, we decided that we owned the land”.14 The Dawn of Everything touches on clans and their totem animals, but does not make animism, or our relationship with animals, plants and the land as fellow beings, one of its themes.
Third, the two read the exceptions differently. For Therapeutic Shamanism, hierarchical hunter-gatherer cultures, such as those of the north-west coast, were “extremely rare”, “very much the exception that proves the rule”.15 Graeber and Wengrow reject reading them that way, and give such cases a central place. Both views stand. Neither changes the larger point they share, that the way we live now is not the only way human beings can live, and that what has a history can change. See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
What do critics say? #
The book has been much argued over. One criticism comes from people who study hunter-gatherers. The anthropologist Camilla Power says that Graeber and Wengrow treat the idea of egalitarian ancestors as a story of “childlike innocence”, and never fully consider how much work it takes to keep an egalitarian balance in practice, a subject on which there is a long body of research.16 Graeber and Wengrow, for their part, distrust the word ‘egalitarian’, arguing that it hides how varied such societies were.
