Jim Cross wrote: ↑Tue Oct 26, 2021 2:58 pm Lou,
I have ordered the book but it is on pre-order so it isn't even available yet. So these few reviews are from prepublication copies.
The problem is that the view Graeber and Wengrow are attacking is NOT the consensual contemporary anthropological view. Sometimes to my own frustration anthropology consistently has pointed to the uniqueness of circumstances and cultures and has been loathe to find commonalities across cultures. Nobody in contemporary anthology ascribes to some fixed set of stages from hunter-gatherer to modern state.
Of course, there are unique circumstances and variabilities as well as commonalities.
Everywhere we look in the world where we have found large populations we have found some form hierarchical organization with inequality. In almost all cases, these political units have been also been expansionistic.
Go around the world.
1- Middle East,- Egypt, Babylonia, the Greek and Roman empires, the Persian Empire
2- India - Rajahs and Sultans
3- China - the Chinese Empire and Dynasties
4- Southeast Asia - Khmer empire
5- North America - Mississippian culture
6- Mesoamerica - Olmec, Maya, Aztec
7- South America - Inca (we don't know much about Amazonia)
Nobody is saying that these diverse cultures were the same or followed the same trajectory but there are commonalities between them.
Can you point to a single place where you have a large population and no hierarchical organization?
You can probably find cultures on the cusp that may have preserved some degree of equality and eschewed hierarchy.
The question for Graeber and Wengrow would be how and why is it that such similar forms of organization come about almost everywhere?
Unless they can explain that, then trying to find a different future by looking to the past is going to be problematic.
My view is naive and simple: The structures you describe are more effective for expansion, conquest and domination, which does not mean that they were more civilized or more evolved in their worldview. It just means that, in the expansion of population and struggle over the scarcities that their own ways helped to produce, they are the victors until a systemic crash arrives, which is where we may be now.The question for Graeber and Wengrow would be how and why is it that such similar forms of organization come about almost everywhere?
My enthusiasm for the thrust of G&W is based on its challenges to an evolutionary model that asserts modern is necessarily higher than an earlier shamanic. Mark Vernon raises precisely this question in a more critical way in the above youtube review posted by Dana. He does not assert the absence of hierarchies but instead points out that spiritual hierarchies do not necessarily compel large material inequality. It's an intriguing point.
Returning to the Kogi example that we often argue about, they are civilized, practice some form of agriculture and have limited population expansion and ecologically destructive ways. Yes, they have a hierarchical priesthood organized around spiritual ways. It's not an effective structure for conquest but seems rather good at warning its "Younger Brothers" (us) about the foolishness of our ecological ways.
Interestingly, the dominating colonizing structure seem heavily allied with the materialist metaphysic.