The New York Review of Books (2022-01-13)

62 The New York Review

it is constrained by evidence, and under- pinned by scientific principles of discovery, interpretation, and refutation. Occasion- ally, it has the power to challenge myths and overthrow dogma. The strength of the past lies precisely there, in its unpredictabil- ity, its capacity to surprise and upset con- ventional wisdom. Today the information available to us, even for remote periods of the human past, reveals a kaleidoscope of social possibilities undreamed of in the philosophies of Hobbes and Rousseau, and also, it seems, in the philosophy of Appiah.

David Wengrow Professor of Comparative Archaeology University College London United Kingdom

Kwame Anthony Appiah replies:

The Dawn of Everything is a mammoth un- dertaking and, inevitably, it characterizes archaeological research its authors know only through the scholarly literature they have consulted—through the authorities they enlist. They’re entitled to sift through the evidence and present their own conclusions; I agree with Wengrow on this. The difficulty arises when what they present as a summary of the archaeology is at variance with the scholarship they cite. “Experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for...anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civiliza- tion of the Indus Valley,” they say. Then we turn to the source material and find that experts are quite divided on the topic. My point was not that The Dawn of Every- thing mischaracterizes Kenoyer’s judgments about Mohenjo-daro’s political structure but that it doesn’t characterize them at all. I was observing, that is, a pattern about which views get a hearing. Wengrow says that “the most recent scholarship” supports Possehl, but the paper he has in mind—a fascinating theoretical overview by Adam S. Green, which indeed stresses the evidence for egalitarianism—gingerly dissents both from Ke- noyer’s “managerial elite” model and from Possehl’s “stateless paradigm.” Green’s paper, exquisitely provisional, makes clear that the nature of Indus politics is a topic of contention, not consensus. The Dawn of Everything likewise suggests that archaeological research has converged on the view that Teotihuacan, starting around 300 AD, embraced egalitarianism and collective governance and re- jected overlords, even “strong leaders.” It’s what “all the evidence suggests.” We hear that “other scholars, eliminating virtually every other possibility, arrived at similar conclusions”; we hear that its self-conscious egalitarianism is affirmed by a “general consensus among those who know the site best.” But only a strategy of bifurcation would force us to say that the place was ei- ther purely autocratic or purely collective. What I observed was not that few archaeologists would countenance Pasztory’s view but that we get no sense that many have reached different conclusions. Those archaeologists include the authorities The Dawn of Everything cites in sup- port of Pasztory, such as René Millon, who cataloged evidence of hierarchy and milita- rism in Teotihuacan, and thought its governance might have become oligarchical; and George Cowgill, who explicitly demurs from Pasztory’s “utopian” account and pro- poses Renaissance Venice, a republic under a doge, as a model. The epigrapher David Stuart says that, in the late fourth and early fifth century, someone represented by an owlish glyph was the king of Teotihuacan, while other archaeologists conjecture that there might have been an elite assembly or aristocracy rather than a monarch; this glyph might have designated an office rather than an officeholder. Recent discov- eries have rekindled such debates. Again, Graeber and Wengrow are free to reach their own conclusion as to whether Teoti- huacan was “a utopian experiment in urban life,” but it cannot be said to represent a professional consensus.

As for the “at least seven centuries of collective self- rule” that Uruk enjoyed, per Graeber and Wengrow, is the proof really to be found in the wards and councils of the monarchical era? Or does the very coexistence of monarchs and councils suggest that we may be building castles, or communes, in the air? I don’t say that Uruk did or didn’t enjoy those seven centuries of “collective self- rule,” but unless the term is being used in a very permissive way, I strug- gle to see how this possibility qualifies as a settled fact. With respect to Çatalhöyük, my discus- sion didn’t take up The Dawn of Every- thing’s broad political characterization of the place. It took up what inferences we should draw from the existence of female figurines, and the putative absence of equiv- alent male ones. Did such representations demonstrate “a new awareness of wom- en’s status”? Graeber and Wengrow never use the term “gynocentric” with respect to Çatalhöyük; they use, in this context, the term “matriarchal” and devote a few helpful paragraphs to defining this term in a special way that sidesteps the “-archy,” the con- nection with rulership. (I avoided the term “matriarchal” because, without their careful definition, it risks implying a form of rulership The Dawn of Everything disputes.) Graeber and Wengrow, following Hodder, find it obvious that the female figurines, with their pendulous breasts and avoirdu- pois, could have nothing to do with eros or fertility but are “quite possibly matriarchs of some sort, their forms revealing an inter- est in female elders.” Here, questions arise. One is whether we’d weigh the evidence differently had The Dawn of Everything men- tioned that most Çatalhöyük figurines that archaeologists have cataloged are of quad- rupeds (or their horns).

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

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

Perhaps there was a small year- round pop- ulation; perhaps these were sites where “hundreds of pilgrims or festival- goers” showed up in a seasonal way; perhaps both occurred. In this account, what we’d find on the mega- sites, even one as expansive as Tal- janky, aren’t cities—that is, these settlements are remote from the dictionary definition of a city, from what we readers understand by the word, and, as best as I can judge, from what Graeber and Wen- grow mean by it. They say most archaeologists will call “any densely inhabited settlement” of 150 or 200 hectares a city; yet one thing Chapman is confident about is that the “mega- sites were low- density settlements.” Now, archaeologists sometimes use the word “city” differently; the idea is that if a settlement, including one that looks like a hamlet, is the biggest thing around, it might function as a city. A hundred people living in face- to- face autarky, a seasonal festival site like Burning Man: even these could, in

the right circumstances, count as cities. The paper Wengrow cites, though it pointedly declines to define “city,” sets aside absolute scale as a prerequisite. For Graeber and Wengrow, however, a central question is whether lots of people can live in a dense settlement without rules and rulers. That’s why they say cities often emerged as “civic experiments on a grand scale.” In their concept of a city, absolute scale can’t be set aside. Nor should we set aside the vigorous me- dieval arguments about the nature and ori- gins of social inequality, as when The Dawn of Everything states that in the Middle Ages “‘social equality’—and therefore, its oppo- site, inequality—simply did not exist as a concept.” Many thought, as Pope Gregory did, that people, in their primordial, Edenic state, were equal in their liberty. Then some act of human sinfulness left us with masters and serfs. For Gregory, Christ’s re- demptive sacrifice was meant to bring back our original freedom. Such arguments had real- world reverberations. “When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?” was an English saying that the priest John Ball declaimed amid the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, calling for a primordial classless society to be restored by force. Wengrow’s cautions about “personal” politics are well taken; Lévi- Strauss’s emerging conservatism is no key to his thought. By contrast, the political tenets Lewis Henry Morgan espoused within the book that entrenched social evolution- ism were integral to his intellectual vision. Thorstein Veblen’s theory of predatory and productive activities seamlessly con- nected his prehistory to his politics. And so it goes; we would do the great James C. Scott, whose studies have been invaluable to people from a range of ideological posi- tions, a disservice to suppose that his political vision and his political science belonged in separate bins. Yet this procession of caveats, I fear, risks obscuring The Dawn of Everything’s real triumphs. It is the work of two remark- able scholars, and almost every page is en- ergized by their intelligence, imagination, and surly sense of mischief. When it comes to confident claims about dense large- scale settlements free of rulers or rules (or, for that matter, the Haudenosaunee attitude toward commands), readers might well adopt Gertrude Stein’s mot “Interesting if true.” But as I hope I made plain, there’s much more to the book than that. Grae- ber and Wengrow’s argument against his- torical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable. Readers who imagine foragers on the Sah- linesque model of the San will encounter foraging societies with aristocrats and slav- ery, while the book’s account of the Pov- erty Point earthworks is a riveting study of collective action. We get an intriguing pro- posal about the nature of the state. And this is just to begin a long list of fascinations. That “kaleidoscope of social possibilities” emerges vibrantly from these pages. If readers should be a little cautious— possibilities may not be probabilities—they should be much more than a little grateful, as I am. “This book is mainly about freedom,” Graeber and Wengrow tell us, but it’s also for freedom. I’m glad of that; oddly enough, freedom needs advocates these days, and few have been as eloquent.

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The New York Review of Books (2022-01-13)

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