Dawn of Everything Chapter 4

"Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property"

The first thing that jumps out at me is the theory vs. observation problem I've previously mentioned I consider one of the potential flaws of anthropology. The problem is dependence on the ethnographic record of current human cultures that appear to us to resemble those we imagine in the past. G&W stipulate that contemporary Nuer and Inuit cultures exist in a dialogue with modernity and thus are not "windows on our ancestral past". But at the same time, they admit they are using these societies to "show us possibilities we would never have thought of" (120). I don't see an alternative, but I think it's dangerous if we don't keep constantly reminding ourselves that we're only guessing.

An example of this is the observation that "biological relations constitute on average no more than a mere 10 per cent of total membership" when "forager bands gather into larger residential groups"(121). The source they cite is a 2019 article in the *Journal of Human Evolution* called "Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: Foragers do not live in small-scale societies" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31182209/) that suggests, "The flexible size and composition of foraging groups link individuals across their "estates": spatially explicit storehouses of ritual and relational wealth, inherited across generations through maintaining expansive networks of social interaction in a large and complex society. We propose that human cognition is tied to development of such expansive social relationships and co-evolved with dynamic socio-ecological interactions expressed in large-scale networks of relational wealth." This is a finding that seems to support not only the idea that hunter-gatherer bands (if those in the past are similar to those of the present) could be very "cosmopolitan" and draw members from a very wide population, but also to say something about the relationship between wealth (which apparently consisted to a large extent of intellectual property) and influence. This is apparently tied to a theory called the "Social brain hypothesis", which once again connects these human societies with primates in a way G&W had been criticizing when people like Pinker did it.

Still, the idea is attractive, that there were continent-spanning networks that worked like totemic moieties, allowing people to think of themselves as members of extended clans. This would certainly be necessary to create the condition for that "first freedom" they will refer to throughout the book, the freedom to bug out. In that context, does the "scale" of individual lives tend to shrink as populations or population densities rise? Why? Does this have to do with an increase in regional differences? Does this differentiation happen when, although greater and increasing actual numbers of people may be traveling, as a percentage of the overall population this group is declining? Something like this happened in American history, when although the number of farmers continued to increase into the 20th century, they ceased to be the majority of the population or the largest occupational group. So although they continued to increase in gross numbers, their cultural influence was reduced and other groups like urban workers became relatively more significant. G&W talk about the growth of regional cuisines and other cultural markers, which seems benign and unsinister in this framing -- but is it on the same spectrum as the seeking of difference that creates the type of "othering" they later call Schismogenesis?

This may be a spot where the anarchist orientation of one of the authors leads them to a conclusion that might be questioned. G&W say that "the proliferation of social and cultural universes...must have contributed in various ways to the emergence of more durable and intransigent forms of domination" (123). While this may be true, an increase in hierarchy may have been only one of the effects of this flowering of diverse cultures. There doesn't seem to be space here for the idea that *some degree* of hierarchy may have been useful and chosen by people -- we've seen this already in their discussions of seasonally-shifting social organization. It seems to take on a different character (or characterization) here, when we're beginning to talk about more permanent social arrangements.

G&W move on and return to the question of what egalitarianism might mean relative to other terms like equality. They suggest that a society is egalitarian if whatever most of the people believe is the most important social value is distributed equally. Seems to me that in a lot of cases, this is a question of access. Knowledge can't be distributed equally, if people have to apply themselves to gaining it. At best, access to knowledge is the thing that can be equalized. Maybe this is one of the sources of inequality they don't examine? The specialization that ensues when people follow their passions? If one of those pursuits happens to be the chief value, then some people may end up with more of it. It seems like there's a next step required, where a society has to shift its values and say, unequal achievement in X doesn't lead to some people having power over others. But this seems to require a self-conscious decision to change the chief social value to this question of power.

They then return to the "property arrangements" they say have been the focus of our questions about equality. In a discursive footnote, they agree with James. C. Scott that "an affinity exists between grain economies and the interests of predatory elites", but they also claim that "in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything like those states" (127). I'd like to see some examples of places where large-scale agriculture was possible and practiced, and hierarchical states *never* emerged. G&W differentiate between "immediate return" and "delayed return" economies, suggesting that some contemporary forager societies "self-consciously avoid stockpiling resources and engaging in long-term projects" in order to avoid the creation of hierarchy (and of course, projecting this backward and suggesting people in the past probably did this too). They seem to be confused that Woodburn's description of foragers differs from the Wendat idea they described earlier that did not imagine that differences in wealth would inevitably lead to differences in power. The point might be that the Wendat had lived in a world where they didn't see this happen all around them; today's foragers see it everywhere. Wouldn't this suggest that if we could regain a Wendat point of view, we might be able to have delayed returns and egalitarian autonomy? Or, as they say the Wendat had, play chiefs and real freedoms. (129)

They say Marshall Sahlins' 1968 "The Original Affluent Society" was the most influential anthropological article ever written. It is, however, another "speculative prehistory" (135). It doesn't seem like anthropologists can really extricate themselves from this habit. They jump from Sahlins' challenge of the meanings of terms like "abundance" to the idea that maybe agriculture wasn't an obvious choice for foragers in rich environments (137). Not only did foragers and pastoralists have more free time, there are studies that suggest they were more healthy (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110615094514.htm). I'm not entirely sure what to make of this comparison of increasing overall population to an apparently lower standard of living for many of these "new people". I DO think there's a very interesting story to be uncovered here, about quantity and quality.

Next comes a review of recent findings at Poverty Point in Louisiana, the Jomon period in Japan, and the "Giant's Churches" in Scandinavia. They excuse people with no access to professional archaeological literature, but say that "professional researchers...have to actually make a considerable effort to remain so ignorant" (146). While I suppose this is true, there HAVE been many indications that this paradigm shift is happening, albeit maybe not as quickly as they want. The legacy of European and American colonialism does seem to be a cause: it's easier to evade guilt if the people we pushed off their lands had no "culture" of their own. What they call the "Agricultural Argument" was a thing in American history (148). This was a claim that natives were not "improving" the land and thus had no claim to it. The points made by Bruce Pascoe about Australia have been made by William Cronon and others about the Americas. John Locke's claim that property rights derive from labor seems to me, like so much of Locke's writing, incredibly self-serving.

They then do away with the "particularly silly" idea that there's something wrong with foraging peoples who opt for the richest environments that provided abundance for little effort. They deal very briefly with new information showing that the Americas were peopled much earlier than had been believed (until only a few years ago). Then they reopen the question of the importance of intellectual property, which they say was often thought of as sacred knowledge. The connection between religion, "private" property, and power is a very interesting, big topic, I think. The Roman legal construction of property (usus, fructus, abusus, 160) probably oversimplified the discussion of property rights, once Europeans encountered natives. It also seems to focus attention on things that can be destroyed as the carriers of value, rather than more sustainable assets such as knowledge.