Lou,Lou Gold wrote: ↑Tue Oct 19, 2021 8:48 pmJim,Jim Cross wrote: ↑Tue Oct 19, 2021 1:28 pm Lou,
This sounds like a ridiculous premise with little more validity than conventional explanations. And the critique of conventional explanations seems like straw man arguments.
I doubt anybody believes there was a sort of monotonal march from small bands to massive civilizations. All civilizations rise, expand, shrink, expand, fail. The ways people live through all of it are varied with all sorts of different types of groupings depending upon circumstances - ecology, technology, climate, political interactions. Prime example is the Mayan civilization which likely evolved from small bands of hunter-gatherers through small agricultural communities to city states and back to small agricultural communities embedded (at present) in world civilization. Virtue isn't always on the side of indigenous any more than evil solely on the side of civilization.
I don't get your point. The book's authors, according to the quoted selections of the review do not bifurcate indigenous and civilized. They assert a diversity of indigenous civilizations and a fluidity not unlike the Mayan example you offer. They don't equate good/indigenous or evil/civilized and neither do I. And yet, this seems as a persistent 'fig in your mind'. Why?
I went back and read what you posted and actually read the entire review in The Atlantic. I haven't read Graeber. I still don't see your point in objecting so much to mine.
Let me quote part of what you posted:
So if that is not "indigenous good, civilization bad" then I don't know what is. The book is framed on the idea that in some idealized moments in human history there were some indigenous people somewhere that were kind, generous, and free. Perhaps there were such moments but the only thing the example would prove is that societies and cultures are not universally screwed up. What about the contacts of English and the Spanish with indigenous? What did the Spanish encounter? In Mexico, at least, an indigenous civilization that relied on massive human sacrifice and whose subjects couldn't wait to side with the Spanish to overthrow their rulers.The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the “indigenous critique.” In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”
The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom.
If the encounter mentioned with the "Native intellectuals" was with the Iroquois, then there are more problems. While the Iroquois Confederacy was a bright light as far as having a semblance of Western values (which these authors claim to be originally indigenous values), some of shine begins to dim if you look too closely. The Iroquois were primarily agriculturalists that grew corn, beans, and squash and they were expansionists, warring with Algonquin tribes. They had to expand their territories to support their large population. In 1649, an Iroquois war party, consisting mostly of Senecas and Mohawks, destroyed a Huron village. Then they destroyed the Erie and the Mohicans. The Iroquois went on raids to secure captives for slaves. The "Native intellectuals" may have had high-minded principles but they likely applied them selectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#Expansion
All in all, this sounds like a deeply flawed book. Scholars have looked past Hobbs and Rousseau for decades. There have been over a hundred years of anthropology and hundreds of monographs on different cultures that demonstrate the point that there are many ways to organize a society. Their argument with " conventional account of human social history" is an argument against ideas that haven't been prevalent for over a hundred years.