As Colin Thomas described in his review for BRHG, this is an important – but also deeply flawed book. Despite the intriguing revelations and approaches explored, the basic flaw in my opinion is a need to take aim at a straw man which is simply an expression of the authors’ disdain for anything smacking of ‘materialism’, and their expressed scorn for a whole field of anthropology and archaeology that just happens to fall prior to their own designated era of study. There is also a lack of clarity and in some cases connection between the examples given, and the vague notion of the centrality of ‘play’ which seems to imply that for example the first kings were just conceptual ‘play kings’ and not related to any material circumstances. Trouble only brews, according to Graeber and Wengrow, once these ‘innocuous’ institutions cease to be play and become ’serious’.
The Dawn of Everything is an interesting book with valid and pertinent things to say, but unfortunately like many professional academics Graeber & Wengrow can’t resist rubbishing everyone they see as potential theoretical rivals (eg. the historical materialists described very crudely therein), even if such a polarised critique is unnecessary, misinformed or even plain disingenuous. One of the biggest points of contention has been the one with fellow anthropologists/archaeologists (often themselves aligned with the general anarchist or libertarian Marxist approach, but studying the period before the one covered by Graeber and Wengrow). These academics quite understandably object to the pair’s dismissal of their entire field of research as ‘irrelevant’.
The Indus Valley cities and the ones in Mexico and Ukraine that Graeber and Wengrow exemplify are in fact urban centres that defy attempts to define them in hierarchical terms, which does make them fascinating. Even a cursory glance at a wide range of global societies in different eras and places from an anthropological and historical perspective also shows in most if not all cases varying degrees of ‘primitive communism’ in operation, most especially at the lower ends of the social scale, even in cases where a clear and unambiguous hierarchy is discernible. It remains however incomprehensible as to why Graeber & Wengrow ignored the material dating from our earliest origins 100,000 to 10,000 years ago, which offers the clearest evidence of a ‘universal primitive communism’ applying right across this board (by far most of humanity’s time on the planet), before the wide range of social diversifications that seem to start around 10,000 years ago. Even more intriguingly, the existence of culture – costume, burial rituals, musical instruments etc – are all supported from the earlier period’s remains, here with no evidence of any hierarchies – even the ‘temporary, spontaneous’ ones Graeber & Wengrow postulate – to make material culture possible. The question of how or why later social diversification started is not addressed – it is instead seen as somehow ‘natural’, but initially at least only an expression of ‘play’. The sporadic, uneven growth of hierarchy from 10,000 years ago is not lineal however, so it’s not as if Graeber & Wengrow would have fallen into a ‘historical materialist trap’ had they acknowledged this truth, and arguably if they had done so – it would have better cemented their own arguments. They do correctly show how hierarchy and exploitation in pre-capitalist societies alternately waxed and waned according to the epoch, the internal class struggles and social revolutionary interventions, migration to escape oppressive relations, ecological and environmental circumstances etc, but they fail to account for how global capitalism alone endures by sustaining an ingrained and inflexible, brutal hierarchy that is utterly unique in history, and one that is obviously also extremely dysfunctional to human happiness or even survival. Maybe because in order to explain the differences, Graeber & Wengrow would have had to acknowledge some value to a (complex and non-lineal) historical materialist approach…
Kevin Boylan
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