On Graeber and Wengrow and Institutional Flexibility

As Claude Lévi-Strauss often pointed out, early Homo sapiens were not just physically the same as modern humans, they were our intellectual peers as well. In fact, most were probably more conscious of society’s potential than people generally are today, switching back and forth between different forms of organization every year.  Rather than idling in some primordial innocence, until the genie of inequality was somehow uncorked, our prehistoric ancestors seem to have successfully opened and shut the bottle on a regular basis, confining inequality to ritual costume dramas, constructing gods and kingdoms as they did their monuments, then cheerfully disassembling them once again.--David Graeber and David Wengrow (2018) "How to change the course of human history: (at least, the part that’s already happened)" in Eurozine.

I start with a cute observation: the position attributed to Lévi-Strauss is itself an echo of one of Adam Smith's central claims in the Wealth of Nations:

It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures, and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people. In those barbarous societies, as they are called...Every man too is in some measure a statesman, and can form a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of the society, and the conduct of those who govern it. 

For according to Lévi-Strauss (and as it happens Graeber & Wengrow) and Smith, and unless social conditions conspire against it, we are  capable of what we may call natural political theorizing--the imaginative effort of reflecting on institutional arrangements, perhaps even counterfactual institutional arrangements. 

Smith famously thought that the extensive division of labor corrupted our natural capacity in certain kinds of wage laborers (see also this passage). For Smith we are primarily shaped by our environment. It is no surprise (recall) that his initial example of technological innovation and liberty (!) is due "one of those boys, who loved to play with his companions," because in children our natural inventiveness and play-fullness is not yet destroyed.

If I understand the larger argument of David Graeber (recall these posts) & David Wengrow, one I heard extended last week at a public lecture, they think there is quite a bit of archaeological and anthropological evidence that humans deploy their natural capacity for "play" and what above I called natural political theorizing to experimenting with institutional arrangements even alternating among them on a regular basis. They think this was once well known, but (shades of Kuhn loss) lost: Scholarship does not always advance. Sometimes it slides backwards.  I quote an extensive passage before I comment:

Why are these seasonal variations important? Because they reveal that from the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. Anthropologists describe societies of this sort as possessing a ‘double morphology’. Marcel Mauss, writing in the early twentieth century, observed that the circumpolar Inuit, ‘and likewise many other societies . . . have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder. Property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, another social structure entirely took over as Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone. Within them, the virtues of equality, altruism, and collective life prevailed; wealth was shared; husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Seals.

Another example were the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast, for whom winter – not summer – was the time when society crystallised into its most unequal form, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastlines of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations, still ranked, but with an entirely different and less formal structure. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter, literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year..

Quite independently, archaeological evidence suggests that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving in broadly similar ways: shifting back and forth between alternative social arrangements, permitting the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year, on the proviso that they could not last; on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. Within the same population, one could live sometimes in what looks, from a distance, like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes a society with many of the features we now identify with states. With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given social structure and reflect; to both make and unmake the political worlds we live in. If nothing else, this explains the ‘princes’ and ‘princesses’ of the last Ice Age, who appear to show up, in such magnificent isolation, like characters in some kind of fairy-tale or costume drama. Maybe they were almost literally so. If they reigned at all, then perhaps it was, like the kings and queens of Stonehenge, just for a season.

There are really three main points to Graeber & Wengrow's argument: first, there is a polemic against the idea that in the state of nature, or in pre-history, societies are naturally "tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers" (without any or much private property) and that the rise of inequality is the consequence of the invention of property and new forms of social instutions. The most famous version of the account is to be found in Rousseau, who treats it (as they note) as a fiction.**

Second, Graeber & Wengrow attack the impoverished taxonomy used to classify different kinds of political societies. They claim the historical record shows (for example) cities are possible without bureaucracies or without large inequalities (including standing armies; they claim that "in those parts of the world where animals and plants were first domesticated, there actually was no discernible ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic Forager to Neolithic Farmer" instead there were hybrids of various forms. 

Third, the first two points are part of a larger argument that is meant to undermine a species of fatalism about theorizing about social organizations. The record shows that humans are capable of reflecting on and experimenting with many different kinds of social organization; as they put it in the sentence just before the passage I quote at the top of this post, "those same pioneering humans who colonised much of the planet also experimented with an enormous variety of social arrangements."

Now, in their criticism of social fatalism, I much prefer Graeber & Wengrow's argument over Foucault's (which, to simplify in reductive fashion, emphasizes contingency of our present arrangement, but somehow can't imagine an alternative to the status quo). So, I prefer not to close with a critical worry. Even so, in reading their sentence of the pioneering humans I had to think of the Cambian explosion so wonderfully described by Gould. Perhaps, we humans are a bit like the Burgess Shale fossils: after a period of immense social diversification, our social Baupläne have been narrowed down quite a bit.+

I am not sufficiently expert to suggest an explanation for this reduced experimentation (beyond Smith's point that societies with extensive division of labor reduce inventiveness and play). Perhaps, after the bout of experimentation, our ancestors increasingly started bumping into each other again and resource competition among societies of homo sapiens caused the winnowing; perhaps the invention of written language was a decisive technological shift in favor of certain extractive political economies. I am not suggesting that we are doomed to the status quo.++ Given the challenges facing humanity, we should, perhaps, allow our imagination more play and experimentation, 

 

 

* The way he phrases it, Smith seems to have in mind Hume's famous essay, Of Commerce, where Hume claims that history shows that "in most nations, foreign trade has preceded any refinement in home manufactures." (In my book I emphasize Smith's disagreements with Hume's essay.)   

** It is natural to read Smith as embracing a stadial theory, too. I do so routinely myself. But it is worth noting that despite embracing socially conditioned human plasticity, Smith also thinks that "to cultivate the ground was the original destination of man, so in every stage of his existence he seems to retain a predilection for this primitive employment." That is to say, one can combine socially conditioned plasticity with the attribution of robust (innate) dispositions. (I have learned this from Bart Wilson.) For the record: I have no interest in defending Smith's claim here.

+From the vantage point of human history, the 193 members of the united nations are vastly more alike than what has come before. 

++Graeber & Wengrow seem to suggest the experimentation has never ended.

Comments

[Enzo Rossi]

I would've thought that a more complex society simply raises the cost of experimentation. One has to move around more variables, there are higher sunk costs in the status quo, etc.

[Eric Schliesser]

That may be so. But wealthier (and de facto complexer) societies also have more resources to experiment with and often more margin for error. So, I don't think it is conclusive either way.