The Dawn of Everything

Cafe Society
21

I have read Lahontan’s Dialogues. The originals are in French which is clear and easy to understand except uses the “historical past tense” a lot which is easy but required brief review.

A lot of the specific arguments made by Graeber regarding the arguments made by the Wyandot Speaker were first made (AFAIK) by Barbara Alice Mann around 2001. She is an expert in Iroquois Law and political structures. A Speaker is not a Chief, more of a Foreign Affairs Minister, but the Jesuits probably did not understand the difference. The Natives were not at all naive, acted in accordance with tribal law, and this required many actions which the French never really understood but were sometimes able to exploit, although their deceptions were quickly noted.

Many French criticisms of Adario completely failed to understand his role and a partial smear campaign by Jesuits contributed to centuries of delays in recognition by many Western intellectuals that the aboriginals had very developed philosophical, religious and political thoughts. This is noteworthy as my Native friends during Uni sometimes complained that their thoughts were either trivialized or automatically treated as profound in a fuzzy New Agey-Mother Earth way (even if banal) but not on their other intellectual merits.

Mann, at least in “her” (she edits plus has the best parts) excellent and enlightening book Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands, does not explicitly mention Rousseau but easily could have done elsewhere. Perhaps Graeber and Wengrow were the first to connect this? Probably not but don’t know.

Mann’s book is a fascinating read. Graeber gives her credit in the notes but also did his own translations of Lahontan. The stuff I ordered on Lahontan looks like a compilation of stuff likely available online but is still useful. I find it interesting.

22

Part of the problem of making Native speeches better known was linguistic. Many later scholars spoke English but accordingly ignored highly relevant sources in French, Spanish, Russian and many difficult Aboriginal languages. This was a problem along with assuming natives to be too simple for complex structures (a theme of Graeber) and/or imbued with a simplistic “Great Spirit” mythos, and was not really much resolved until the last twenty years.

23

So, I’ve just finished chapter 3, where they talk about seasonality and festivals. We still have remnants of that. I love Halloween in part because it is a subversive festival where many ordinarily inappropriate actions are allowed. When i first moved to this neighborhood, i took advantage of that, carting my kids along so i had the right to knock on the doors of all my neighbors and introduce myself. In later years, i used that same license to check out the interiors of a few of the local mansions. (The mansion-owners, realizing this is the point, mostly let trick-or-treaters into their grand entryways rather than just handing candy through the door.)

24

So I’ve finally completed reading the book, and on the whole, I thought it was very well argued and painted a much more nuanced picture of the emergence of various kinds of social structures than is usually available in the popular literature, so it was definitely well worth a read. But I felt that it made a bit of a leap at a key point in the argument that I’m not sure was as well supported as it needs to be (or maybe I just missed something). Namely, the idea seems to be that the observed variance from the sort of ‘invent agriculture, become a hierarchical nation-state like construct’ implies conscious, deliberate choosing of social orders, which is something we today seem to have ‘lost’, having become locked into a kind of structure (that of the hierarchical nation-state) that we thus consider ‘inevitable’. But I’m not sure that this inference is actually supported by the evidence Graeber and Wengrow supply (or at least by how I understood their portrayal of the evidence).

First of all, I fully accept the facts of their account, at least for the purpose of discussion. Humans generally didn’t just settle down into hierarchical structures after the introduction of agriculture, didn’t just ‘rush to their chains’ after a period of ‘primitive communism’. But I’m not sure how much deliberation that implies. Not that I’m claiming that ‘primitive people’ weren’t capable of such deliberations—I think they were, just as much as we’re now. I’m just not sure that social structures really generally are the result of such deliberations, whether now or in ancient times; I tend to view them more through a statistical lens, as something more akin to phase transitions than as ‘engineered’, purposeful, goal-directed developments. (I’m not sure I’m right about this, but I think that this is missing as an option in the book.)

The fact that there doesn’t seem to be a ‘simple’ transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society doesn’t in itself contradict this idea: even simple phase transitions, such as freezing water, generally involve quite a bit of back and forth on the small scale, so a ‘traditional’ narrative of water just getting more and more solid upon temperature dropping could well be contradicted by a narrative of regions of water congealing and breaking up again, in something like a cyclical fashion with more complexity than the ‘traditional’ narrative allows for. But this doesn’t imply any conscious choice on the part of the water regarding whether to band together into ice or not; nor does it imply that water at -20°C, all else being equal, still has a choice regarding whether to be solid or not.

I think the main line of argument for the efficacy of conscious deliberation is the indigenous criticism of Western European society. But first of all, such criticism doesn’t necessarily entail anything about conscious choice—many people are critical of today’s society while being part of it, so this criticism might come from a society that differs from ours only through historical accident, rather than the interior critical forces. Furthermore, criticism of another society seems, to me, often to be a function of, rather than a constitutive element to, the society one belongs to: what’s familiar is often conflated for what’s better. The city I live in has an intense rivalry with a neighboring one, and each heavily criticized the other’s traditions and customs (if mostly in a playful manner)—but I don’t think that the customs of either city developed in a conscious effort to improve upon the other’s (perhaps, by way of ‘schismogenesis’, to differentiate itself from the other, but that’s not a solid basis for reasoned criticism, either). (Playing a game of ‘why are you doing it that way’, so to speak.)

Lastly, there’s an argument that, given the chance, people often choose to remain in or return to traditional societies, no matter whether they’re native to them or not. But I’m not sure if this argument is as persuasive as it seems, either. People often choose to join cults or sects, and it can be hard or impossible to persuade them to leave; that on its own doesn’t mean that being part of such a cult is a superior way to live. (That’s of course not to say that such a lifestyle might not be infinitely more fulfilling—I wouldn’t know, I’ve never tried it—but merely that the fact that people choose it doesn’t imply that it is. People don’t always make great choices on that front, which, after all, must be what got us into this mess, if social change is a question of deliberation.)

25

I don’t recall the book making that kind of value judgement.

I think you’re reading a bit too much into it. The point I got from it was much more like this:

Graeber and Wengrow were just countering a narrative of these pre-agricultural and pre-industrial societies as somehow being without any sophisticated political/social deliberation.

26

You’re right, it didn’t, and I didn’t mean to imply it did—sorry for phrasing this poorly. What I mean is, I think there’s an argument that people chose their way to live on the basis of conscious deliberation, and that thus, we can do so, too—there’s nothing inevitable about the way we live, no historical determinism, no ‘evolution’ leading inexorably to the present situation. But such choice implies that those making it consider the alternative they choose to be superior, in whatever way. But I don’t think that that’s typically why people join cults. So then, if joining a cult is similarly an example of rejecting their present social order in favor of a different one, that people do so doesn’t demonstrate the sort of ‘reasoned choice’ I take Graeber and Wengrow to argue for.

And as that, it’s an unqualified success, I think, and well worth reading.

27

I’ve only had limited experience with cults, but generally, I think that yes, people do believe they are making a superior choice. That’s kind of central to how cults work. Or at least, how people think they work, at least since the Stark-Bainbridge theory of religion first gained currency in the late 80s. Not all of the deliberation is necessarily conscious, but there is a whole lot of evaluation going on in the process.

I don’t think the Dawn of Everything means to imply all of the decision-making is conscious, just that it’s rational.

28

In terms of weakly supported conclusions, I think half the point of Dawn of Everything was to emphasize how conclusions will all be loosely supported, because so much is lost. The story we teach as settled fact is juat one version of filling in a handful of pieces. We lose track of which pieces are based on evidence, and which we filled in because they seem to lead most obviously to our current world as we understand it.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try figure out the past, propose ways the puzzle could be completed. But we have to remember always which parts were hypothetical reconstructions, and revaluate when new evidence surfaces.

I feel like the book was very clear about this. It wasn’t claiming anything about the past was “true”, just proposing models that were, they felt, better fits for current known evidence than the current consensus. I definitely bought the argument that the current concensus isn’t any better supported.

29

How could it be a “mistake”? It allowed people to settle and form complex communities because there was now enough food concentrated in one area to allow it.

30

The book argues that the cause and effect there is not at all cut and dried.

31

Oh, thanks for bumping this thread. I should get back to the book. Every time i read another chapter, i enjoy it. But I’ve been putting it down and reading lighter stuff. Like the SDMB, or the Chronicles of Narnia.

32

Well, my first instinct is to say that joining a cult is never rational, but then, I suppose that’s just my own limited perspective talking. There may be situations where you’re so marginalized that all of society’s regular offerings are worse yet, and joining a cult would be rational.

But maybe that’s a side discussion. My expectation still is that in general, joining a cult isn’t a product of rational deliberation, conscious or otherwise, but I can’t really point to any data backing this up.

I think that’s a good perspective—and the inevitable blanks that we fill with what seems ‘obvious’ to us are thus really constructed to serve our unexamined prejudice and preconceptions.

33

Stark & Bainbridge’s point was largely that joining a cult (or any religion) is often largely the result of a cost-benefit analysis process. This may be largely unconscious, and the variables in the calculus may be very different from what you or I would choose, but there are pros and cons being weighed. The “brainwashing” narrative of cults is not so favoured anymore. Nor the notion that cults only prey on the marginalized - look at Scientology, or NXIVM.

It’s the same for, say, NA Natives encountering European colonists and rejecting their lifestyle (or previously captive Europeans rejoining) There was a weighing-up of outcomes there, how could there not have been? Sometimes we have actual Native accounts that articulate their thinking, but even without those, we should still start off by assuming some rationale there, until given a clear reason to reject that premise.

34

I would also say that I’ve talked with people who have left cults, and they don’t want to go back. Whereas it was pretty common for people who’d left the native American community to strive to return. Contemporary European Americans commented on it at the time.

(I also have friends who have joined religious groups that have some cult-like features, such as Lubuvitch. And they are very articulate about the benefits of belonging. A lot of the benefits are around community.)

35

I think a lot of the best parts of this book are where it points out the unexamined prejudices of the archaeologists who wrote the “standard story”. I found that quite enlightening.

36

I’m about 3/4 of the way through the book, examining my prejudices and preconceptions.

37

Hmm, I don’t think I get it. On balance, it seems like you’re getting a worse deal upon joining, say, Scientology in a sense that I can’t reconcile it with my notion of rationality that joining could be called a rationally justified decision. Meaning, virtually any given actor, on any metric I can think of, would be objectively worse off joining than not. But if that’s the case, then this seems to argue against such choices being generally rational.

38

Cults are perhaps generally an exercise in appealing to emotions, misrepresentation, psychological manipulation and social pressure. What this exactly has to do with the excellent book discussed in this thread is somewhat abstract. The formation of communities involved local adaptations and trying things out - but were probably rational, largely agreed upon, and not mere manipulations.

39

I was merely trying to give an example that, to me, seems to argue against the notion that choosing one social setting over another supports the idea that such choice is generally a result of deliberation. But you’re right, this has grown into a distraction, and I’ll drop it.

40

I only recently managed to get this from the library. Am working my way through it slowly, partly because I have other things to be doing, partly because I don’t always have enough concentration available to read it properly; but it’s fascinating so far.