Yeah so I’m in the third chapter and after the first I was so confused by the thesis that I’ve mainly just been listening for the interesting anthropological anecdotes. Really love the fact that I recently found this channel and you also decided to focus on Graeber, whose work I’ve been increasingly interested in, and help me work through it all. The topic of political anthropology is relatively new to me and I find it so fascinating due to how much it breaks down ideological walls. Keep up the good work!
it’s definitely filled with amazing anthropological and historical anecdotes - but then it prevents us from learning anything from them! Hopefully I’m fixing that!
This series was recommended to me by a friend when we are talking about some of the disagreements we have with the theses presented in "The Dawn of Everything", and I am really surprised with the quality of your videos and with how well-researched and well-articulated they are. Definitely some of the best content I came across recently. Keep up the good work!
I found you from a reddit thread about the origin of patriarchy. Really cool channel, you're very well spoken and clearly educated and highly knowledgeable. I know nothing about these topics but hopefully watching your videos will change that!
your channel is by far one of my favorites EVER. your delivery and humor make it insanely easy and fun to digest an hour long video, i feel like i'm sitting at a friend's house just discussing stuff, very chill and approachable. leftist circles need more of this and less of that stuffy academic posturing that turns so many people away. when my material conditions improve a bit i would love to join your patreon, in the meantime i'm gonna spread your channel around as much as i can. keep fighting the good fight! 💪
hey thanks so much i love to hear that. honestly i’m pretty surprised people can manage to watch 1h10m of this, even though i do like it myself! no worries about money, take care of yourself and your friends/family first!
Hard to describe how much I appreciate and esteem this channel. Thank you Daniel. What you’re doing is incredibly valuable and important. I’m especially enjoying how you’re disentangling this book.
Great video. I have really enjoyed listening to Graeber and Wengrow, so I was somewhat skeptical at the title of this video. But at the same time, I did feel some kind of contradiction in my mind about my own conclusions and/or ideas about human development throughout time. And the idea that people used to have flexibility in social roles sounds interesting, but I have to admit, I don't know what to do with that now that you mention it. I thought maybe I just needed to think about it more. But I find your criticism very clear, concise, and convincing.
Another great video! Plus I'm loving the new intro music! Man, the thing you said about Occupy's epic failure being a causal factor in the decline of anarchism and re-emergence of tankies... that hurts, that really hurts. I hadn't thought of it before but it makes sense. The fact that the material conditions that made political/economic hierarchy possible existed for a long time before this hierarchy actually emerged gives me hope for the future. Because as you said the conditions to eliminate that hierarchy have already emerged. Just like it was for our ancestors, it may also take us a long time for our social structure to catch up to the new material conditions, but it seems almost inevitable that it will eventually. Of course we will have to work hard to make it happen, but the table has tilted back in our favor.
"as we'll see in future episodes we can't predict the future but despite obvious reasons to be pessimistic the material conditions of the advanced industrialized world that we live in today actually recreates a lot of the same conditions that make equality possible in immediate return hunter-gatherer societies in all sorts of interesting and key ways and when we look at that we'll see that the ingredients for a much more egalitarian and libertarian world are all there" Holy shit, I'm sooooo excited for this! Just when I thought this series couldn't get any better. Btw, have you heard of the Open Source Ecology project? It has great potential for helping make material autonomy even more accessible. I think it could be an important supplement/support to revolutionary class struggle. Sadly I'm becoming quite disillusioned with David Graeber. Not because he's wrong, that's forgivable, it's because this book seems so intentionally misleading and dishonest. It really upsets me. Not to mention the subtle way this book is undermining the very political goals he intended to support. Wtf, Graeber.
I can’t know for sure if occupy caused tankie resurgence, but I’ve definitely heard a few leninists cite occupy as a turning point away from anarchism for them if they’re older, or else as an example of why anarchism is pathetic etc if they’re young. Also I think for younger people there’s reading stalinist history without having any contact with anyone who lived through it. I think the reason it took a long time for hierarchy to emerge after agriculture is more about it being easy to escape, and that the more populated the world got, it became easier and easier to enforce hierarchy and harder and harder to escape it - but for us and for the future, you have to keep in mind that the time frame in terms of a lag is extremely short - like the internet has only been around since like 1992 or whatever, algorithms, computational power - all very recent - if it takes another 50 or 100 or even 200 years that’s still pretty damned fast for a major change. likely it will take economic crises or environmental crises to get average people to be more receptive to new ideas, but it’s hard to imagine things going on as they are, the system as it is just eats itself over time, and now that it’s so globalized there is nowhere for it to go. I have not heard of the Open Source Ecology Project i’ll look into it! It’s really hard for me to assess Graeber at this point - like his writing is so exciting and imaginative and inspiring, but it’s so laden with bullshit and right wing crap. As I’m reading the book closely now, and remembering his other work I think he actually does not believe that a totally free and equal society is possible at all, and that such a thing is childish and not possible or desirable for humans. About dishonesty - on one hand he says in the book that he acknowledges material world affects things like social structure, but says that he wants to focus on the agency and choice and freedom aspect more - so that seems like an excuse - but then he’s constantly shitting on theories and writers and then acting like their ideas make no sense, but then hiding the explanations they provide for their theories … plus we live in an era where everyone already thinks everything is a matter of choice and agency, and nobody has any clue about how material factors affect culture or social structure. We don’t need yet another book making us shortsighted and confused … I basically think he was an ideologically incoherent mess .. a lot of the stuff people criticize anarchism for. And a lot of what seems like academic dishonestly is actually incredible laziness and sloppiness, which is standard in academia, it’s crazy. It’s also extremely hard to write a huge book like that. I’d be curious to see what his reactions would have been to the sorts of critiques I’m making in these videos, but that can’t happen. And I think the stuff i’m critiquing is mostly Graeber not so much Wengrow, except maybe the ice age stuff, so I don’t know that he would have much to say about it. I dunno.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I'll take your word for it regarding your assessment of Graeber. Still disappointing for him to be such a confused mess but better than him being outright manipulative and dishonest. I had evicted him from my heart but I guess now I can let him back in, even if I'm shaking my head.
Thank you for shedding light on complex political theories and their implications 🙌 🙌 I have one question... What can individuals do to challenge oppressive hierarchies?
in general the key to that is join up into groups to leverage your bargaining power in various ways … you can’t really change anything at scale without being organized into a larger coalition
This book is now being released here in Brasil, and this weekend one of the country's two biggest newspapers published an interview with Wengrow about it. I've got almost zero reading on anthropology and had Graeber as an author whose work I would like to know better (even though all the no-demands debacle). I had never heard about this book and got really excited with the ideas discussed at the interview, about democratic practices popping up in originary communities on several continents and about the debate over how the colonizers contact with the ideas about democracy and freedom of the peoples they were trying to colonyze might have ignited the development of the narratives we still have in common sense (and above all, in right wing common sense) about pre-history and "human nature". I've shared the interview with friends and some FB pages, but then a friend asked me if I was aware of some critics the book had received, and the first link he recommend me was this video. I started watching it planning to just skip over some bits to get a hold of the main ideas before watching the whole thing another night, but couldn't let go of it and had to watch it to the end. So, thank you, really, the content you're building here around this book is just great, it seems like an obligatory companion for reading it if someone wants to get a hold of how all these examples they bring can be organized in a whole body of knowledge. I was thinking about your comment at the beggining about how Graeber and Wengrow's book try to fill an existing gap (even if they fail at it) of organizing lots of reference in a thread that can be followed by people interested on the subject (specially people like me, that didn't have a prior formal contact with anthropology and it's main theories) and I've found out I really couldn't remember any author or book being recommended to me as an introduction or general presentation of the field, with it's main frameworks, categories, debates, contemporary researches, etc, as I've seen about other fields. So, I wanted to know if you have any book or maybe even video series to recomend with that intent (even if it may be dated against more recent theories). As I'm reading István Mészáros's Marx's Theoy of Alienation right now, I was wondering if you're aware of all the "ontology" debate in Marx, Lukács and Mészáros work, and weather it is discussed (even if negatively) at left-wing anthropology circles. Again, thank you for the great job you're doing and for all the references you're sharing with us, I will watch all the videos you've released.
@@MrZevers yes, i was just going to write that unfortunately, there’s no really great introduction to these topics that I know of. i think it’s useful to read the book to get your mind going about the questions to think about, and to watch / listen to my stuff to clean up all the garbage and get re-oriented in the right direction. and while there isn’t one comprehensive introduction, check out the stuff that I put in the bibliograhies, lots of great mind blowing stuff to read. and no i don’t know anything about the ontology debate, sounds a bit esoteric for me, but might be relevant, i really just don’t know anything about it
I don't agree that the message of the book is that humans choose their political arrangements and that materialist considerations are therefore irrelevant in explaining the development of particular social and political phenomena. The message that I took from the book was that certain political arrangements, once they arise, retard the otherwise natural development of the human ability to imagine alternative systems. The point is not that we are free to choose, the point is that we have the natural capacity to imagine, and that when that capacity gets blunted (through political systems in which we are excluded from the dialectics of group decisions) we are more likely to accept the political situation we are in as inevitable or natural.
but what you’re saying is perfectly compatible with what I said, and they in fact make both of those arguments. they do specifically say in chapter 5 that they want to focus on conscious choice, and over and over they argue that this or that social arrangement was a conscious choice in defiance of any sense. and they never say that material conditions are irrelevant, but they do specifically argue against or insult or ignore every material explanation for all the phenomena they describe, and they even go so far as to making things up in order to drive that point (see my episode 10.4 or read walter scheidel’s critique of the Hiding in Plain Sight chapter for some surprising examples of this). I don’t see how you can read this book and not get the message that social structures are a matter of choice.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 You do it by not starting with the assumption that the authors are trying to make that assertion. You have at least explained why you personally find it to be so challenging not to bring this assumption to the reading, but rest assured this is not an assumption that most readers will bring, and therefore they will not be limited to the interpretive options that are open to you, and therefore the text will not have the dialectical impact that you seem to fear it will have for the vast majority of people who read it.
Like I explained above, I read their first preview articles with an open mind, and came to my conclusions BY READING THE TEXT and because I KNOW THE SOURCE MATERIAL THAT THEY ARE MANGLING. My preconceived notions about the book come from READING THE PREVIEW CHAPTERS OF THE BOOK. These preview chapters say the exact same thing as the book. I am trying to convey what the actual source material is to the audience so that you can see what I see. That you have completely missed all of this makes me guess that this episode is the only one you’ve seen. I don’t know what a “dialectical impact” is but I do know from experience is that people in general have very little understanding of how material factors affect ideology and social structure and values, and that people already generally think that everything is a choice. I also know from experience that people also generally don’t think egalitarian human social organization is possible because they think it’s against human nature. I also know from experience that before this stupid book came out and the stupid preview articles from the book, I used to be able to explain to people that human beings are capable of egalitarianism and I used to point to how most human beings were probably living in egalitarian societies until deep into the holocene era, and now after the book came out half the time people tell me (totally incorrectly) that Graeber and Wengrow have debunked that idea or that (totally incorrectly) Graeber and Wengrow have shown that the latest scholarship has debunked that idea. So on the one hand I see Graeber and Wengrow reinforcing everyone’s bad ideas about agency and materialism that they get from media and the education system, and then I see that they’ve injected total bullshit into their heads that makes people think humans have always had inequality. I see that the book gives people hope that we can change our social system, but I also see that it prevents readers from having the tools to actually do anything to make that happen. It’s just feel good pablum. If it does any good it’s because it’s asked the right questions and pointed people in the direction of anthropology, and then maybe people will stumble on all the literature on immediate return societies, and it also give me the opportunity to tie up a lot of loose ends in anthropology and present a very coherent materialist framework for understanding social structure and hierarchy and equality which at this point is scattered around hundreds of academic articles.
I love this video, and your channel. One thing that makes me hesitant to share it at times is the bad-faith ridiculing (complete with insulting imagery) of the ideas/points you are criticizing. (one example being the big bird/dora the explorer/etc analogy). Your arguments are strong enough that they won't lose their potency even if you present the opposing side in a fair or positive light. Thinking along the lines of the Srsly Wrong style. (just my two cents!)
hi - i appreciate the criticism - i go back and forth on whether it’s constructive or not to be mocking in that way, but ultimately I keep coming back to how very insulting and upsetting the book is to me, because of how badly it distorts what fellow left wing anthropologists think and say, and how dishonest that is. I feel like they’re just taking advantage of their readers’ ignorance in order to pump them full of what they think is a hopeful positive message. so i feel like it’s fair game to use humour to point those things out… but maybe you’re right, and I’m sure it does turn some people off. though I would say that I am presenting their arguments in a fair light, in that I’m not misrepresenting them, even if I am mocking them. no? Oh wow, and I just saw that you subscribed to the patreon despite your criticism! I really appreciate that! I haven’t actually heard Srsly Wrong yet, I guess I should ASAP!
I agree with the response. His ridiculing humor appeals to me, but I dont think it was bad faith. He wasnt misrepresenting their ideas at all. And as far as ridicule goes, it was pretty tame, imo. It was used to express his feelings about the book in a way most people will understand. Plus, imo, it makes the whole thing less dry and more relatable. He speaks to his audience frankly and hes open about how he feels without being pc for the sake of being pc.
I get what you are saying, but this is a myth that people on the left love to cling to. For some reason they think that you will score some points for civility, *when civility has mostly been used as a weapon and a limiting condition by those who have the luxury of being civil all the time* (which is much easier to do when one is in power). The definitions of civility are also established by these same people in power, who will move the goalpost on ‘what is civil?’ whenever it suits them.
I am a big fan of David Graeber's writings and I am happy that you are building in the same direction. I work in a lower-class environment (but publicly employed) where there are a lot of far-right and racist leanings, and people are confused about roles and places in the power hierarchy.
i find a lot of people have some racist or right wing ideas, but they’re basically on the left, though they’re attracted to the messaging of the right and then end up voting for things they don’t want all the time. that’s why i started this series, but i ended up presenting in a way that connects iwth a more educated audience. in the future i’m going to be doing stuff to try to connect with a more apolitical audience and less university crowd.
These are great critiques so far. I'm telling myself that your are helping me concretely many of the things that are irking me as I read this book, but honestly I might just be the kind of person that believes the last thing I hear. Either way good arguments!
haha, apparently that’s how trump chose pence as VP - kushner knew that he agrees w the last person he speaks to so he made sure he met him at the right time and he switched from christie to pence
Thanks so much for this. I think for laymen out there, they tend to think of scholars as "the truth" and so it's useful to see they are as subject to errors or muddled thinking as anyone. Keep up these great videos!
this is a long comment, sorry! i read the essay about the demands controversy you cited, and interpreted it quite differently. the 90% rule was adopted within days of the initial occupation; it wasn't done to counter the demands wg. one of the main organizers of the Demands Working Group straight up says they assembled a coalition to show up and overwhelm the GA when they couldn't reach the supermajority. elsewhere, interviewing some of the antidemands faction, it comes up that the demands wg didn't participate in the GA, and only showed up to try to get their demands foisted on the movement. they went on to speak to journalists as representatives for the movement, they complained that some influential radicals in the Facilitating Working Group would not go forward on an initiative unless there was consensus as a bad thing. i also don't understand why the criticism of the 1381 peasant revolt was that they made demands, then lost everything, followed by a criticism of occupy, which refused to make demands, but restarted the NA socialist movement. the argument at the time, reflected in the essay, was that a movement that makes demands ceases to be revolutionary. where occupy went wrong was its inability to defend itself, and its endless catering to liberals and moderates (who did not defend them when the police presence became unrelenting). occupy oakland is usually pointed to as the most effective occupation, and they broke a lot of the rules committed to in zuccotti, and i believe its most lasting impact has been the relative embrace of combative direct action in the social movements since. ----- i will have to rewatch the entire video, but im several chapters in and i don't follow the materialist argument you're making. they give examples of seasonal societies that adopt hierarchy in one part of the year, and others that do the opposite in the same part of the year, others that have the same structure thru the whole year, all in varying material conditions that show that there isn't a hard rule of social structure relating to relative scarcity. some societies adopted hierarchy during the wet season while others did just the opposite. describing some societies as generally free outside of religious rituals seems generally dishonest to me though. it seems a lot like saying that i'm free whenever i'm not in court. the existence of the state contextualizes literally everything, so i disagree with them and with bob black (in Wild Justice) who believes that everything that isn't resolved by a police officer is technically anarchist. hegemony shapes everything, and i just don't believe it can be coherently argued that a society is totally uninfluenced by periodic displays or executions of overwhelming force. the role of religion as the second most common precursor for politogenesis (behind patriarchy, a precondition for all known stateless societies that became states) as summarized by gelderloos in Worshiping Power seems relevant. i havent gotten to their explanation of gendered domination yet (though im aware of Graeber's argument in Debt about the origin of patriarchy), and im curious of how it may square with camilla power's review from a few years ago. you mention that they ignore 200K years of egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, but it seems like the sampling they have could be extrapolated back forever. some societies were egalitarian, some werent, and some were in between. to me it strengthens the argument that there isn't a default state of egalitarianism that is no longer attainable now that we live in societies with complicated technology, regular surpluses, and simplex (or totally anonymous) interdependent relationships. it echoes gelderloos' argument that anti-authoritarian societies were the ones that made a conscious choice to be so, rather than an inevitable structure arising from material conditions. finally, the snark was a little over the top here. you're making important arguments, but i feel you are unfairly misrepresenting them, which can make it seem like you arent acting in good faith.
About the occupy article - are you getting that from your own experiences or something? The article I cited doesn’t say any of what you’re saying, and it’s a harsh critique of the anti-demands organizers, exactly as I presented it. Maybe your narrative is correct but that’s not at all how Kang describes it. And didn’t Occupy Oakland actually make demands? The criticism of 1381 wasn’t at all that they made demands - where did you get that?? The criticism of the 1381 peasants is that they didn’t understand how their political system worked such that they stupidly believed the King when he told them that he was going to meet all their demands, whereas they should have just deposed him and taken over the country. The parallel to Occupy is the stupid confused ideas about how politics works, not the existence demands or no demands. About societies that change structure seasonally - it’s not about a hard rule relating to more or less scarcity = more or less hierarchy, or about winter = hierarchy or summer = equality or vice versa - that’s not how materialism works when it comes to dominance hierarchy. It’s about the conditions particular to each society that give some people advantages that they could use to dominate others at some parts of the year, but not at other parts. In some societies that would be in winter, and other societies that would be in summer. You’ll see when I cover that part of chapter 3 what I mean specifically for those societies, but I explain it in a more general fashion in the video i’ll be releasing next week. Dominance hierarchy is not a “choice” it’s something that’s imposed by some people on other people against their wishes. If people are choosing it, then it’s a democratic hierarchy which is an entirely different beast, and the authors confuse the two, which is one reason why the book is a big stupid mess of nonsense. I don’t understand this sentence that you wrote: “describing some societies as generally free outside of religious rituals seems generally dishonest to me though.” I don’t know what you’re referring to, and I don’t remember saying that, so I can’t respond. Please rephrase and specify. About their explanation of gendered domination in Debt and in Dawn of Everything - it’s total nonsense! They’re babbling on about sumerian temples, which is ludicrous, because you had gendered domination in australia 4000 miles away from any urban centre. Gender domination starts with patrilocal residence, which is a formation that favours defence, but that puts women at a severe bargaining power disadvantage. It exists in various hunter gatherer bands and probably existed on and off in the palaeolithic in places where there was a lot of competition. The relationship between male dominance and patrilocal residence is well known and it’s shocking that the authors are pretending that male domination is some kind of mystery. The reason they do that is because the whole book is predicated on the nonsensical idea that social structure (including dominance hierarchy) is a choice rather than a power struggle where conditions often determine the winners and losers. Patrilocal residence is the result of conditions (frequent conflict) so they can’t go there and they can’t argue against it, since it’s so obviously correct, ergo they need to pretend that it’s some kind of mystery or that it’s sumerian temples. Graeber makes the same stupid argument in Debt. I don’t remember what Camilla Power said specifically that you’re referring to, but I know that she understands very well that patrilocal residence causes male domination, and I generally agree with her on most things. As for Graeber and Wengrow’s rejection of egalitarian origins - if you read chapter 3 carefully (i’m just finishing my edit of the review of the part dealing with this) you’ll notice that they actually don’t present any evidence at all against egalitarian origins! Zero! Nothing at all! Their one single argument against egalitarian origins is that since people came in different shapes and sizes and lived in different environments, then we have to assume that they had a wide diversity of social arrangements in terms of the existence or absence of dominance hierarchy! That’s literally their only argument! And if you understand how dominance hierarchy works (which I wouldn’t expect you or most people to!), you would understand that is a completely idiotic assumption. Everything else they say in that section is just smoke and mirrors designed to make you think that they’re presenting contrary evidence to egalitarian origins, but they just aren’t. They’re just citing a bunch of irrelevant facts and presenting them as if they somehow contradict egalitarian origins. They pretend that anthropologists believe that all humans were the exact same kind of immediate return small bands egalitarian hunter gatherers for 250,000 years, which no one believes anymore - and then they’re talking about upper palaeolithic societies that were organized a little differently but that were also probably egalitarian as well, which even they admit by the end of the chapter. They criticize Christopher Boehm for believing in egalitarian origins, but they conveniently leave out the part of his book where he explains his reasoning, and then they pretend to be all confused about why he believes what he believes. I cover this in the episode I’m releasing next week. And all the stuff they say about monumental architecture is abject nonsense - gobleki tepe was built in the holocene era, after the end of the palaeolithic. It has nothing to do with the palaeolithic or human origins. it was built in conditions that didn’t exist and that were not possible in the palaeolitic. and mammoth houses are not monumental architecture by any stretch of the imagination - most of them are small igloo sized tents, and the biggest ones are 30ft by 30ft, and they’re very similar in size to structures that the relatively egalitarian arctic inuit built in recent times. And even the authors say by the end of the chapter that all the rich burials are likely also from egalitarian societies. I actually don’t believe that - but either way, upper palaeolithic europe is completely different from the conditions that humans originated in. So if their was some hierarchy in upper palaeolithic, so what? I would expect there to be some hierarchy in those conditions. It’s simply not relevant to our origins. Read Boehm and Sarah Hrdy and you’ll get a better idea of why people believe in egalitarian origins, and you’ll also see how deceptive or at least sloppy and incoherent Dawn of Everything is. What’s dishonest is not my well deserved snarkiness, it’s this fucking piece of shit of a book! Everything in this book is predicated on the audience not knowing anything about the subjects being discussed. If you do know the literature you see immediately what complete garbage it is - so much so that most of it isn’t even wrong, it’s just nonsense. I can’t explain to you how awful this book is without going over every paragraph with a fine toothed comb and teaching you the ABCs of human origins and anthropology - which is what I’m ending up doing unfortunately… I’ve done 4 episodes on this stupid book, and I’m only half way through chapter 3. At least that’s true for chapters 1, 3, 4 and 5. The rest of the book I don’t have enough knowledge to have a strong opinion on besides parts here and there. There are some parts I really like, but given how badly they mangle the parts I do know about, I just can’t trust the rest.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 my opinion/experience is only a couple sentences starting with "where occupy went wrong". everything preceding it is described in the essay you cited. the author is obviously partial to the demands faction, tho i felt they did a good job of attempting impartiality. not familiar with what happened in sacramento, i fully expect that each occupation had it's own culture (one of the colorado occupations nominating a dog as the leader comes to mind). even in the reply just now, you refer to the demands they made on the king instead of just actually putting their society into place that they wanted. that's what occupy tried to do, generally speaking. the comment on the religious stuff was me agreeing with something you said in the video about GW's several mentions of temporary hierarchy during religious ceremonies. i'm not sure that GW are advocating an idealism; i dont see the book as a refutation of a dialectical materialism. many/most people do consider that society has developed in stages relative to scarcity though, who is the audience they are writing to, and that seems like a positive contribution to me. these guys are teachers that have a pretty good idea on common myths from engaging with thousands of students over the years, and it matches my personal observations as well. looking forward to what you have to say about materialism in the video. i didn't catch a refutation of egalitarian origins either. the way i read it (especially the early parts of the book where they lay out the project) was that they are saying it doesn't really matter; that there aren't material circumstances which doom a society to hierarchy and states, since we observe hierarchical and non-hierarchical societies in every kind of material conditions. they make a note about the mammoth houses, anticipating the criticism. their argument is that their monumentality is relative. i guess you disagree. im only familiar with Mothers and Others, and have gotten an understanding of boehm second hand. sounds like i will need to pick up a book though. must say that it's exciting to be collectively digesting a book. never in my life have so many people been reading and discussing the same book at the same time.
Ooops - i means occupy oakland made demands, i don’t know why i brain farted sacramento. Colorado leader seems like a questionable move, but very entertaining! The difference between 1381 and Occupy in terms of transforming society vs making demands is that the 1381 revolutionaries were actually in a position to transform their society. Occupiers were not. Occupy was however in a great position to put pressure on the government, but they neglected to do so for reason that in my opinion were very misguided and foolish. I don’t see how Occupiers expected to transform society by doing nothing… The point of my critique is that in both cases the 1381er and Occupiers did wasted the leverage they had, though the amount of leverage was very different. I think Graeber and Wengrow very much are arguing an anti-materialist position when it comes to dominance hierarchy. The point of the book is that we can choose our own social structures and we’re not bound by material conditions. That’s the opposite of how we need to look at things if we want to change our society. Dominance hierarchy is caused by conditions which give some people advantages over others. If you want to eliminate a dominance hierarchy you need to identify those conditions and fight to change those conditions. If you try to change society without changing those conditions, even if you succeed at first they changed will be reversed due to the conditions that generated the hierarchy in the first place. Graeber and Wengrow’s approach confuses dominance and democratic hierarchy and doesn’t help us understand how hierarchy works or what to do about it. That’s why I’m wasting so much time on the book! I agree with you that the authors argue that you have hierarchy and equality in all sorts of different conditions, but in Chapter 3 they very explicitly argue against egalitarian origins and insist multiple times that inequality has no origins. You should definitely read Boehm, it’s very easy to read, and whether you end up agreeing with it or not, you can see that Graeber and Wengrow did not give his thesis a fair treatment. The thing with the mammoth houses besides is that they’re literally just tents similar to what relatively egalitarian inuit built recently. They take a few hours to make. The biggest ones are 30ft by 30ft, also similar to assembly houses inuit built. They’re cool, but the authors present them as if they somehow disprove egalitarian origins, which doesn’t even make any sense. Basically they put forth a false premise that anthropologists all think every human was a 100% egalitarian immediate return hunter gathether society with no agency or variation, and then they talk about mammoth houses as if this proves that wrong. It’s smoke and mirrors. The book is an amazing read, and very fun and exciting, and I don’t fault you or anyone else for loving it - if I’d read this 20 years ago it would have been my favourite book ever! But it’s very half baked and the worst parts are predicated on readers not knowing the subject matter, and it hampers our ability to actually reverse dominance hierarchy. And yes, it’s very cool to have these interactions!
Thank you so much for making this. I have wanted to give many of these same explanations to people but couldn't with even a fraction of the thoroughness and eloquence you have.
Absolutely fantastic!! I've been writing a giant newsletter article on the source of much of humanity's problems and how we can begin to build a better world, and these videos play a large part in inspiring and educating that process! Super excited to see your next videos. Hopefully can support you more materially in the near future as well.
So if IR hunter gatherers had more or at least the same leisure time, this refutes the idea that leisure time was responsible for abstract thinking (science, philosophy, math, religion..etc). But then what was the cause for that? Was it specialization and division of labor? more complex relations to the environment ? elaborate social relations? The other question I have is was this in one way or another inevitable? in the sense that with enough time, things were going to change to more abstractions and complex relations? Also is it true that IR HG societies were less violent on avg? after one controls for things like modern medicine. And is it true that they were happier? what are the rates of depression , suicide and mental illness like on those societies?
Why do you think IR foragers don’t have abstract thinking! They certainly do have philosophy and religion, and everyone has some version of science and math. the cause of highly developped math and science is the need for highly developed math and science, plus of course the time to develop it. they are less violent in terms of war with other societies which is almost nil, though this has a lot to do with the state stamping down on wars. But they all have a strong anti aggression ethic, and they don’t have the problem of feuding that so many horticultural and pastoralist societies have. compared to western countries though, they do have a significant amount of murders, because literally everyone has deadly weapons so when a serious fight breaks out it can be deadly.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 thanks for the answers. What I mean is in the relative sense, they have much much less of it. I am not sure if abstract thinking developed simply because there was a need for it. Some did but all of it? What was the need for Greek science and philosophy? What did Copernicus , Newton and Galileo gain by developing laws of motion of the planets? The use came hundreds of years later. The Islamic science of the middle ages was driven mostly by patronage, so was much of renaissance science. I wonder if you can do a vid on the religion and type of math IR HG societies have. Thanks alot, jus subbed.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 by the way, this is a tour de force - my favourite one of your videos so far. Practically a summarization of my anthropology and geology degrees. Great work!
Love your work man - I am posting it far and wide. Can you link me to the article you mentioned which challenges the book's theory about 'egalitarian cities'? I find this claim highly dubious.
i don’t know enough to evaluate - from what i do know i think it is possible, but that the scope of the egalitarianism would be much less than like a gender equal immediate return hunter gatherer band, and that the cities were probably smaller than they make them out to be. I can imagine like a haudenosaunee type society becoming wealthy and sedentary by becoming specialized in trade in some broad economy for other civilizations and managing to maintain relative equality in the process. Anyhow, i’ll post a bibliography in the next week or two, but here’s the article i was referring to: www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/
While I was reading that book I realized that while I enjoyed many of the stories and anthropological discoveries they talk about I just couldn't really follow their overarching narrative. There are no catchy theses that just make immediate sense (say what you will about Diamond/Fukuyama/Harari but they do have those). So it all left me kinda confused in the end, if someone would have asked me what it was all about I would have really struggled to come up with a good answer. Your videos really helped me to de-pudding my brain. Would love to hear your thoughts on some of the other explain-it-all books (e.g Origins of political order / The WEIRDest People in the World)
thanks! it’s interesting how people get different impressions about what the message of the book is. i’ve noticed a few people saying the same thing as you, that it has no thesis, and others saying it’s about how we have the power to shape our social structure and other people saying some weird stuff that clearly isn’t in there at all! i thnk you’ll like the next episodes where i go through the details of chapters 3-5 and give the answers that they omitted.
I am halfway through the book and it seems that their thesis is that we passed in and out of different forms of social organization. That there was much more fluidity and experimentation. The question I think they are raising and hopefully they will answer by the end is how did we get stuck? I look forward to more of your videos on the topic. I don’t think they discard a material analysis. They have a material analysis of why slavery existed in the Northwest coast and how those in California that found slavery and the hierarchy of those to their North avoided the same modes of production. Am I mistaken?
hi! I do think you’re incorrect there - I don’t have detailed notes for chapter 5 yet (about the california vs pacific northwest coast cultures) as I’m working on the critique for chapter 3 right now, but from what i remember and looking at it quickly again, the whole point of that chapter is to argue against the behavioural ecology (i.e. materialist) explanations for why those cultures are different, and replace is with the idea of “schizmogenesis” - meaning that the cultures in the sound purposefully made their societies differerent to the cultures in the north not because of economic reasons but because they just didn’t like the ways of the people in the north. The authors even imply that these societies could have been farmers at the beginning of the chapter, insinuating that even hunting and gathering was just a random preference and not related to environmental conditions and considerations. all of this is a terrible explanation for the differences in the two culture zone, and the materialist ones really explain it all quite nicely in my opinion (and the opinion of just about anyone with any expertise in this) and I’ll explain why i say that when I cover chapter 5. and you’ll see when they finish the book, that they don’t answer their question of how we got stuck at all! they can’t possibly answer it because 1. they don’t understand how dominance hierarchy works - they think it’s an experiment or a choice rather than something that some people impose on others. 2. they refuse to look at materialist explanations for how we got stuck. for example their whole theory about how about fluidity and experimentation implies that people were just experimenting randomly and not as an adaptation to circumstances, which they expressly try to downplay. the whole point of the book is to make it look like social structure is something we can just choose a new social structure if we want to. i agree that it’s possible to change our social structure, but not because social structure is a random choice we can make, but because the material conditions we live in today make it possible to do that.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I agree they lean into the "schizmogenesis" hypothesis a lot, but as part of that analysis of living in opposition was also a re-ordering of their material lives. One example given was the avoiding of fishing as a primary source of food even though it would have more of a caloric reward for the effort to put it. Which to me points to they were aware that how they shaped their material relations would prevent falling into a hierarchical/slave society like that of the North. I didn't read that as just a choice to live differently but a much deeper awareness that their material relations shaped their cultural lives. I am just a normie when it comes to material analysis so I could be very off in what I am seeing in the book. But I am seeing material analysis weaved throughout the book. Sometimes as an explanation of how things came about and sometimes societies not being essentially victims of the material conditions but reshaping them to rework their social lives. I think the book could have used a lot more structure and could have been much more explicit in their material analysis, I also really like your Ernie analogy. In a world without intellectual property law I could imagine that this book could be rewritten into a much more cohesive narrative.
so it’s basically impossible to completely escape materialist analysis, and graeber and wengrow even admit that material conditions limit our choices, but basically the point of the book is to de-emphasize the role of material/circumstancial influences and highlight agency and choice. so for example, from memory (so i might be getting some details wrong) with the california example you’re talking about - the consensus explanation for the differences in their economies is that in the south, either there’s not enough salmon to base an economy on, or else if you do create a salmon based economy you will be subject to raiding and attacks from other people who will try to steal your stored salmon. therefore people choose acorns even though acorns are way more work and less nutritious etc. meanwhile in the north, they don’t have acorns or any good alternatives to salmon, so they have a salmon economy which ends up leading to their hierarchical social structure because it means that some people can monopolize the best territories (and they end up being the chiefly or noble classes) while others end up with less productive territories (and they end up as commoners) while the chiefs go raid for slaves to do the most boring labour for them to keep them in power. graeber and wengrow are arguing something completely different - they’re saying more or less what you said, that people in the sounds didn’t like hierarchy and they didn’t like the people to the north so they chose to focus on acorns. the authors are making it more about aesthetic and moral preference and trying to negate the practical argument: acorns may suck, but they suck less than getting constantly raided.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I will have to re-read it then. Because what I took away from it was your first points. That they chose not to fish not because of aesthetics but because of the potential consequences of having a fishing based economy, ie...increased violence and hierarchy. They bring up that increased violence and susceptibility to raiding in the North was because fish are processed and then stored vs acorns that are stored unprocessed and are instead processed upon use. So the already processed food would be much more enticing for raiders since all the hard work was already done. They also bring up that the North didn't have the option of acorns. And they did have a whole theory of how slavery and hierarchy developed in the North due to the large processing demands of the salmon runs, I don't remember all the details though. However I agree that it gets lumped in and overshadowed a bit by the "schismogenesis" which it would be easy to take away as just being cultural/aesthetic changes. So I think the material arguments are there, but I like you would love to see them explored much more.
@@MarvinRoman i could be wrong, but the way i remember it, they brought up all those arguments that you (and I) listed in order to refute them! and i remember them making some weird argument about how the need for slaves wasn’t about material wealth it was about something else like glory or something, i forget. I’ll look at it properly when i review the chapter
How is David Graeber not considered an outright reactionary? It sure does sound that way to me. It seems like the main purpose of this book was almost purely reactionary. I almost went to Occupy in my late teens but never actually did because it never quite made sense to me and now I know exactly why. Either David Graeber was a conservative or the world's most incompetent revolutionary.
if you read the book, Graeber and Wengrow’s goal is to convince us that social structure is a choice, so why don’t we choose something less oppressive. definitely not a reactionary goal by any means. he’s written a lot of great stuff, and some dumb stuff. this is one of the dumb ones, because the premise is foolish. i think that when he was a student he was exposed to some hippie teachers who romanticized egalitarian foragers into a caricature, and that gave him a prejudice to think that all the literature on them isn’t accurate. and as a result, he came up with a lot of stupid shit…
Thank you for debunking and lighting this book. I read it 2 months ago and I still can't precipitate its essence. I can't figure out what the message of it is. It does not say anything about what we can do everyday. This is a ode to freedom, autogestion and diversity in social structures. This is still narrow minded. There is a ton of bibliography but i don't feel that this is "thruth". But the book is ultra solid, so much little details, they debunked so much.. my prof is saying that everything is a qjestion of social status and in one little line, they destroy it and say "children have play enough". It was hard to read through, especially about Indus and Chinese civilisations.. go so lost. And in south america too.. so much material. This is monumental.
i don’t know enough about the indus valley or other ancient civilizations to have an opinion on those sections, but the stuff in the first five chapters is a lot of b.s.! they pretend to debunk stuff that no one believes anymore since 50 years ago and often 100+ years ago. everything is definitely not a question of social status either though!
I kept waiting in vain for an explanation of the red Star Trek shirt, and then I started wondering if the dude would get killed off by a super computer or tortured by the Romulan Tal Shiar. In all seriousness, though, this was a thoughtful and humorous exploration of the material. Cheers.
I really appreciate what you’re doing with this channel, and enjoyed this video. However, as a review of the Dawn of Everything, it’s a hatchet job and a caricature, based on the false premise that the ‘thesis’ of DOE is that all humans everywhere at all times have a ‘choice’ in what political and economic forms their societies take and that material conditions have no bearing on anything. If I missed where they stated this absurdity as the book’s ‘thesis’, as you’ve repeated numerous times, please clarify where it is they say that. Yes they talk about ‘experimentation’, ‘play’, ‘theatre’ etc but they at least respect their readers intelligence enough to assume that they won’t make the cartoonish logical leaps you’re promoting here, basically putting inane ideas like ‘women got to choose patriarchy’ or ‘slaves got to choose slavery’ into G&W’s mouths (and using the cherry-picking of right wing opportunists as if they actually represented the authors intentions). It’s a shame you took such an antagonistic approach to the book and it’s authors because otherwise you may have been able to have a dialogue with Wengrow that might have actually been illuminating. Ironically, the real ‘thesis’ of DOE was that we need to re-open the book on human origins and begin conversations (like this one!) about how we can use the discoveries of the last 50 years of anthropological and archaeological research, including immediate return foragers but also bringing in evidence for early egalitarian cities, evidence for early political revolutions, an indigenous critique of European values etc etc Many times in interviews Graeber and Wengrow both said this was book was intended as a first foray into this re-evaluation of the origins of human society and in no way intended as the final word on the subject - they wanted to open the conversation, (and not just in specialist circles) so that we could broaden our political imaginations. It’s funny because that’s also how I understand Occupy’s legacy. Opening the book on what a reconstituted 21st century Left might look like and allowing space for open questions. Turns out that, in the years since Occupy, hyper-capitalism and the climate crisis has led a lot of young people to the conclusion that Marxist-Leninism offers a swifter and more decisive strategy for dealing with these existential issues than Graeber’s more open-ended brand of anarchism. I think occupy opened space in the global political imagination in a pretty unique way, and perhaps the young tankies rehabilitating Stalin owe as much to occupy as does the Bernie campaign and BLM, not so much because of its failure to make demands of the state, but because of the questions it raised and the energies it unleashed. (It is a fun little trick to blame the rise of Marxist-Leninism at the expense of anarchism as a Left tendency on the failure of anarchists to act more like Marxist-Leninists)
Hi - a few people have said similar things in terms of me presenting a cartoon version or disingenuous version of their thesis - but I really think this is what they’re saying. Of course they’re not explicitly saying “women choose patriarchy” because that would be idiotic idiotic, but they basically say that when they go off about people “consciously experimenting” and choosing etc and then as an example they talk about how inuit had patriarchy in the winter but not in summer… And they’re not saying the material world has no influence on social structure or on anything, because again, they know that’s ridiculous, but then every part of the book is designed to focus only on agency and to ignore material influences. They consciously excised every part of the sources that they cite which offer material explanations for the phenomena they describe, and which would answer their thesis questions which they themselves fail to answer! The only big exception is in chapter 5 when the whole point of the chapter is to argue against material explanations for social structure. This stuff happens way too much for it to be by accident. So what I’m doing is just taking their approach to it’s logical conclusion, which is a way of making fun of it, which is why i’m presenting their thesis in such a cartoonish way. I think this will be more clear once I do chapter 3, 4 and 5 where i’ll get into the sources they cite and show what they’re leaving out, and you can see for yourself what they’re doing. I think they did such a good job writing it and making it seem so exciting and interesting, that it’s easy to miss how crazy it actually is. Every time I read the book I think “wow this is so exciting and fun” and then the more time that passes and the more time i have to think the more angry i get at what a mess they’ve made, and how they’re making it harder for me to teach people how social structure actually works… Before the published the book I was going to write Graeber an email like “wtf are you guys doing with these articles? Don’t you know that A B C? You should really consider this stuff” and I just started it and then he died like a week later. I had figured their book would be better than the crazy “how to change the course of human history” crap they put out, and that they wouldn’t literally be saying people choose their social structure - kind of like Bullshit Jobs book was way better than the stupid article graeber wrote which literally said that business owners make people work long hours on purpose to prevent a revolution… but the book is just as weak on that point. It’s clear that the book isn’t meant to be the final word, but the whole thing is a giant attack on materialism. Like I would have been annoyed if they had done a good job arguing against egalitarian origins, but they just did a hack job. And I do love a lot of the egalitarian cities stuff and the Kandiaronk chapter (which I gave a good review of execpt the conclusion) and the Tlaxcala chapter - but I don’t have a ton of experise in any of that stuff, so I’m suspicious of it given how they’ve hacked up the stuff I do know about. Again, maybe this will make more sense once I get into the details of it. If you don’t already listen to it check out the Fight Like an Animal podcast Ethnogesis pt 4 episode - the host loves Graeber, loved How to Change the Course of Human History, but then reads DoE and comes to the same conclusions as me more or less (but isn’t as snarky about it). And for occupy - I guess you can argue that the socialist resurgence sparked by occupy spilled over into leninism and stalinism, but when i hear those people speak, they often cite occupy as a reason why they think anarchism is foolish etc. And I don’t think it’s marxist leninist to make demands of the state! People make demands of their enemies all the time. Ignoring your enemies and letting them kill you is not anarchist practice, it’s upper middle class college kid overeducated pretzel brain.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I’m just saying that the choice, for better or worse, not to make demands of a state they considered illegitimate, was consistent with anarchist theory. The demand to ‘get money out of politics’ does to some extent legitimate an electoralism that is perhaps irredeemable. Here is Malatesta on the subject: “We must do what we can to prevent the fallacy from taking root that a good parliament might be possible, which would be just as harmful as the theory that there might be such a thing as a good king.” (xxi) “Electionists…compare what is done in the electoral struggle with what would happen if nothing were done; while instead they should compare the results obtained when other methods are followed and with what might be achieved if all effort used to send representatives to power…were employed in the fight to directly achieve what is desired.”
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 idk if I agree it’s an attack on materialism. I think it’s more an attack on a kind of determinism prevalent on both right and left when materialism is the ONLY lens through which these question can be viewed. And on common narratives of ‘progress’ or ‘fall’ that are also prevalent on right and left. Have you read Graeber’s article on modes of production? Anyway, I look forward to your future episodes. Try to get Wengrow on for an interview.
@@devonchurch3187 i guess, but there’s good and bad anarchist theory! also, i still see pressuring the government as being compatible with those quotes - forcing the government into doing something good doesn’t make the government good, you can do that to the worst king for example. and the second quote - well we have the results today of this! occupy was not strong enough to directly achieve what was desired, so it didn’t predictable accomplish anything directly besides raise awareness temporarily, and much more would have been achieved by pressuring government. and putting pressure on government isn’t “electoral struggle” like running for candidates, promoting them etc. it’s saying “do this or else…” you can do that to hitler.
is that the one about how in malaysia stories were determing power classes instead of material conditions? i very much think he came to the wrong conclusion from his experience there - i don’t remember the details of that but there were clear material/practical conditions that allowed that to happen. he was just so set on debunking materialism. i think bullshit jobs book had an element of that, even though it’s a great book overall. he misses out how those little wastefull fiefdoms in the corporate world actually reinforce power, even if they cost profit. wengrow we be a great inteview, but i think one big negative or my harsh approach to the book is he’ll probably be really pissed if he sees this stuff… he’s mostly been ignoring materialist critics, saying he won’t fall into the “trap” of arguing with them. the only time i saw him engage in any debate with with the NYRB reviewer Appiah about archaeological detals. im pretty sure most of the stuff i’m critiquing was graeber’s work - wengrow isn’t a big anthro or history expert, he’s an ancient egypt expert. he wrote the tlaxcalan stuff which i think is really cool, and stuff about palaeolithic societies being huge in scope, which i agree with, and lots of stuff that i have no knowledge of to praise or critique either way. the only thing that i think he wrote that i strongly disagree with is qualifying “mammoth huts” as “monumental architecture”! google mammoth hut, they’re like little tents for like 4 people max. they look cool, but i wouldnt even qualify them as architecture, much less monumental!
I have a question. Maybe you can clarify. At the section titled "why social structures change or remain the same" you give an explanation for why some pastoral groups were/are male dominated. It makes sense to me, if the men of the group band together for defense it makes sense why the sisters of those men or the women more generally would be the ones to leave, and why it would be women from the outside coming into the group. Seems straightforward, if you have a bag of red and blue balls and you remove all the red you'd only be left with blue balls in the bag. But what I don't understand is why is it the MEN are the ones that band together for defense? Why not the women? I can imagine a society where the women are the ones doing the defending and the men have to be the ones that go to other groups. What was/is it about the men of the group that lead those groups of people to structure their society like that? What's the material reason for "choosing" that? (I put choosing in quotes just because I wasn't sure what sounded better, if you prefer to replace it with the word becoming, be my guest) if as you say all pastoral societies mare male dominated, then there must be something that is shared in common with all those different groups that lead them to that social structure. Specifically that the MEN stay while the women go. What exactly is it? I saw from an earlier comment of yours that you have a masters in anthropology, im not trying to argue or get into a name calling match here, I genuinely just want some sort of explanation to my question. Thanks.
The reason that all pastoralist societies are patrilocal and male dominated is because it’s easy and beneficial to steal herd animals - so in order to protect your wealth and fight off raiders, it’s better to have your bands organized according to related men. Why men instead of women? Because men are generally significantly stronger and aren’t spending long periods nurising or preganant etc, even though women can be effective warriors too. Male dominance isn’t a choice that women make, but patrilocal organization probably is a choice that they will agree to because women and men alike understand that patrilocal organization is the best way of insuring the defense of the group. You can see this happen in real time when societies who don’t organize this way adopt cattle - within a generation or two they switch to patrilocal residence. Similarly, in societies where men go off to long distance hunting or raiding for long periods in the year, those societies end up organizing according to related women - matrilocal residence - because the women are the ones who need to take care of local politics and property. It makes more sense that related women will get along better and be better to manage politics together, and also women have the bargaining power advantage to make that choice, even if men don’t like it because they’re the ones at the home village. make sense? i don’t sense any name calling, it’s legit questions!
Hi 'What is Politics' (Don't know what to call you. Do you have a web handle of some kind?) I'd be really interested to see the article you mentioned that challenged G&W's presentation of the case for egalitarian cities. I've seen this argued both ways for Mohenjo Daro and some of the cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation and have been unable to draw any definite conclusions. I'm not a specialist or even an academic, but it is a debate I'm very interested in. If the article is not available online (I'm guessing it isn't) I have access to an academic library and may be able to get it anyway. As always, thanks for all the work you put into this. It's by far the most useful, detailed, series on these topics online. 'Beyond excellent' as the Analogist says below.
hi, thanks! yes, it’s here: www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/ and there’s a response from Wengrow and then a counter-repsonse from the author Appiah. I don’t know enough to really have a firm opinion, though based on what Graeber and Wengrow did with the chapters that I am knowledgable about, i’m super skeptical of the other stuff.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Brilliant! Much appreciated. Thank you. You clearly have a well organised filing system. Me: not so much. Yes, I've read accusations of poor scholarship from several experts in fields that the Davids touch on. That has left me very sceptical of everything they write. Not a bad thing perhaps. It's only an impression, and I wouldn't make any claims for it, but as I read The Dawn of Everything, I was repeatedly struck by the idea that G&W had grown so in love with being counter cultural and the desire to be original that their imaginations had begun to run away with them. They were certainly enjoying themselves. Maybe we need people like that. It's a shame though that this book has the potential to do so much damage. Thanks again.
@@richardfield6801 i think it’s a combination of the fact that the book isn’t really scholarship or to be super accurate, it’s just meant to pump people up and make us feel like we can choose a different social structure - and also i think a lot of people who write big borad books like this are often just super lazy, and they have a theory or an idea that’s cool that they’re excited about and then they just try to find sources to cram into their theory without really taking the time to really understand the sources or to deal with what happens when things don’t actually fit in with their theory.
So much of what you stated about the book's contents is reductive in the extreme, or outright misreadings, it feels to me that rather than making a critique of the book you are lampooning a white anglo liberal read of it (in the best of cases), or flat out failing at literacy. DoE is a pretty extensive recount of stuff that some of us who've been reading anthropology from the last few decades under a particular perspective (Sahlins, Clastres, Scott, etc.) would be familiar, condensed in one book. Also, knowing Graeber's other work one would think you'd know the dude never intended to give a direct answer to questions but to start conversations around certain things (which arguably has been a success on a lot of his previous work). Folk reading theory aren't meant to always at all times be spoonfed future projections on what to do and shit, lest you do some dumb utopianism. It ain't my favourite book of them, and I think it can be really messy in organisation at times, but this review to me clearly has some weird bone to pick.
since you’re not giving any specific examples of anything that you disagree with in my presentation, i can’t really respond to anything. I don’t know what an ‘anglo liberal read’ is supposed to mean. I’m pointing out that their arguments are not coherent, and reducing them to their absurd conclusions in order to do that. the one thing i can respond to is you say ‘ the dude never intended to give a direct answer to questions but to start conversations around certain things’ but what I’m trying to point out (and will be going in detail in the next few episodes) is that there are actual well known answers to the questions that Graeber and Wengrow ask - but they usually just ignore them and pretend they don’t exist, even when they cite authors who have presented answers! And they will present caricature versions of arguments that they want to contradict, but they don’t actually present any of the logic behind those arguments. all of this paints a really misleading picture to readers, my focus is in what’s in chapters 1-5 because that’s where I have enough knowledge to know how misleading and crazy their presentation is. the rest of the book, might be brilliant, I don’t know enough to judge (aside from a few idiotic assertions, like their absolutely stupid explanation for male dominance!)
and by the way, i have a master’s degree in anthropology you stupid jackass. federico clearly has no idea what he’s talking about, and seems to have learned all his anthropology from this stupid book - and you clearly know even less than he does but you’re 5x as arrogant about it. and if anyone doesn’t know their Marxist anthropology (aside from you who doesn’t even know what Marxist anthropology even is) it’s Graeber and Wengrow, as evidenced by this really stupid book.
Excellent analysis and communication of your analysis - thank you! I dig Graeber but I was keen to hear a critique - this was high quality, your critique was rigorous and robust, balanced and good-spirited. I was disappointed to see Graeber and Wengrow cite Jared Diamond, whose work seems rather questionable.
they were criticizing diamond if i remember - but in general i think his work is better than theirs in dawn of everything! diamond is naive and credulous when it comes to idiotic concepts like “good corporate citizenship” but his work is generally sound. guns, germs and steel is excellent, and most of the critiques of it that i read back in the day were just tantrums for jealous babies as far as i could see. he messed up a couple of details which is normal for a books of that scope (like for dawn of everything) but his general thesis is solid (whereas graeber and wengrow mess up a lot of things in ways that aren’t very excusible and their main thesis is deficient).
Thanks so much for all of your videos/podcasts so far! I've seen almost all of them and I've been sharing them around. If you don't mind, I had some questions: 1. Is Cultural Materialism what you're presenting in this series? 2. What counts as 'material conditions'? Is it the social culture of farming/hunter-gathering, or the physical stuff like the farms or hunting grounds? For example is it the fact that the Himba practice Immediate Return, despite knowing about other modes of production? Or is it the physical existence of maize and wheat in the Himba's environment which pressures them to become agriculturists? (Similar to that quote "We didn't domesticate grains, the grains domesticated us"). I ask because that determines how hard it is to change society, according to the theory. Is it enough to change our culture of production e.g. by making everything a cooperative? Or do we need to invent technology that's conducive to Immediate Return-like behavior? E.g. a 3-D printer for medicine so we're not dependent on Insulin corporations.
Hi thanks! It’s more or less cultural materialism but they tend to call it “behavioural ecology” these days because some cultural materialist stuff from the 70s-90s got a bad name for being overdeterministic and cartoonish. And my focus isn’t exactly the same as most behavioural ecologists, i’m focusing on social structure here, and they tend to be more focused on what people eat or do for a living, and they aren’t as focused on how conditions establish differential bargaining power as I am. So material conditions is a bad term because it makes people think of the environment - but it’s more than the environment, it’s any practical thing around you that limits or influences your choices. So would include both the things you mentioned, environment and mode of production. It also includes things like population density, whether you’re getting attacked or not by other people, and genetic predispositions (like people prefer freedom to being dominated, people prefer easier work to harder work). The Himba are agro-pastoalists not hunter gatherers, but for example the Mbuti and Lese both technically live in the same rainforest, but the Mbuti live in the actual rainforest by foraging and the Lese live by cutting down the rainforest to plant gardens. The things they do for a living results in completely different social structure, and world view of each culture. And you can explain what each culture chooses to do for a living, in part by history (the lese farmers came from outside and don’t know how to forage) but also from “material” factors like Lese population density is too high to survive by foraging in that environment. Yes it does imply that it’s hard to change social structure, but it means that you want to change the conditions that generate certain things, which is one thing humans are capable of (in the right conditions). So the Lese are very male dominated because patrilocal residence puts women at a strong bargaining power disadvantage. Patrilocal residence is an adaptation to frequent attacks which is no longer the case among the Lese, so if you wanted women to have more rights, the ultimate goal would be to get rid of patrilocal residence. If that’s not possible you’d work on getting the isolated women to form coalitions and get to know eachother more. It’s not always simple. In our society I think all the tech and productive capacity is such that we can definitely change our social structure. But we’d first need to rip power away from the powerful and then establish institutions that generate conditions that incentivize equality and don’t leave room for some people to amass more and more power over time.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thank you so much! This is a really in-depth and detailed reply. You've given me a lot to think about. Looking forward to the next episodes!
What the book appeared to say to me was that people "go along" with certain social structures ("choice") because they don't recognize the problems at first OR because, like they clearly state in the book, the use of violence to maintain inequalities - their key principle of domination. I think the idea isn't that humans "choose" their social arrangements so much as attempt to use their capacity to imagine new ones, hence they mention the essential freedom of movement as a key to reinventing societies and discuss how the limitation of that freedom could have led to hierarchical social arrangements. Or they don't consider all the possibilities so their construction of societies is prone to hierarchical "infiltration" through mechanisms they hadn't forseen. So obviously people at some stage "go along" with the social order, including as you mention, women in highly patriarchal societies, or the peasants who didn't overthrow the king, because they aren't fully aware of their potential or their oppression. I'm not trying to critique your position btw, just thinking through things out loud. I've only just finished reading the book and haven't had too much time to think about it I'd love to hear your response. Anyway, thank you for a thought provoking video and for making liberatory (and entertaining) content!
thanks - sure violence is used to control people. but why are some elites able to control people by violence, but in other societies, people can’t do that, even though they want to? why do people in some societies just “go along” with oppressive structures, but in others they don’t? there are explanations for this, but the book doesn’t even ask those questions. and if you look at further episodes like the one about the inuit women, you’ll see that the authors do think people “choose” their social structure consciously. it’s just not a very coherent idea.
Thank you for expanding on the theoretical and empirical basis for the "egalitarian origin," and having now learned about it, The Dawn of Everything does feel incomplete for failing to address the potential association between immediate-return foraging and egalitarianism, even if they would have ultimately sought to disregard the theory. However, as someone without any training in the field, a couple of issues with the theory immediately came to mind. 1) Survivorship Bias. This idea is somewhat implied in your "arguments against" section, but to stating it explicitly, the risk of survivorship bias would seem to be a fundamental stumbling block in any attempt to draw conclusions about prehistoric hunter-gathers from contemporary examples. Granting the assumption that most human cultures of the paleolithic were of the immediate-return foraging variety, then the societies which remain have gone through a rigorous selection process, and are rather unique in their ability to have persisted in this form. As a result, one can not in principle determine whether any particular cultural feature observed across modern immediate-return foragers is generalizable to all immediate-return foragers or is a feature which is heavily correlated with the propensity of such a culture to survival and resist change (making it over represented in the contemporary sample). Of course this doesn't disprove the theory that immediate-return foraging incentivizes the formation of egalitarian social structures, but suggests that it is also important to consider the possibility that egalitarianism is one of the features which uniquely allowed these particular immediate-return foraging cultures to persist. I find it interesting that many of these groups seem to be stridently egalitarian, that is they have practices whose specific purpose appears to be the preemption of hierarchy formation, which to me would suggest (perhaps naively) that their lifestyle is not inherently resistant to developing a hierarchy. Why have cultural practices opposing hierarchy if it isn't a risk? 2) I question the assumption that the majority of early human hunter-gathers were immediate-return foragers. It is my recollection that there is evidence of Homo erectus cooking nearly 1 million years ago, and it is logical that cooking would inevitably lead to smoking, and hence a means of meat preservation. The contention that archaic humans cooked for hundreds of thousands of years without discovering smoking seems improbable, so they had the technology. Couple this with the fact that many early human groups appeared to be large game hunters who quarry included proboscideans (mammoths, mastodons), which would have almost certainly provided more meat than could have been consumed immediately, and my naïve assumption would be that many (if not most) groups would have some forms of delayed-return. They presumably had the preservation technology and the transitory food surplus, and the energy expenditure and risk involved with downing massive megafauna seems difficult to justify if the vast vast majority of the resultant food was not being utilized. This is doubly true in temperate climates, where not only is there a second low effort/technology preservation method available in the form of freezing, but the cyclical nature of the climate creates huge seasonal disparities in available resources. Plant abundance severely diminished in a temperate winter, and the energy expenditure required for hunting increases dramatically as one must content with the cold and snow. I have a hard time believing that the majority of human group living at higher latitudes weren't storing food for the winter. On this point, you mention the Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi) who apparently lived in what is now Quebec and Labrador as an example of an egalitarian group. I don't know anything about them (beyond what I saw on Wikipedia), but I would be surprised if they were strictly immediate-return foragers given the environment and climate of the region. My assumption would be that immediate-return foraging would be mostly limited to sub-tropical regions with abnormally high year-round abundance of utilizable resources. It might be notable that our closest living ancestor, other great apes, who do not practice delayed-return foraging have a geographic distribution which is limited to just such areas, in contrast to the widespread range of our ancestors. I imagine these are objections which have been thoroughly debated amongst anthropologists, and I'd be curious to see how they are addressed if you have any good resources.
1. The survivorship bias argument doesn’t make sense to me. The argument isn’t that people who practice immediate return nomadic foraging today have done so continually since the dawn of humanity. People adopt immediate return strategies because they make sense in certain conditions. where those conditions were met in the palaeolithic we’d expect to see that form of organization, and where they aren’t we’d expect to see other kinds. People would move back and forth two and from immediate return foraging as conditions changed. in terms of why they have consciously egalitarian practices - people have a propensity to want to dominate eachother and take advantage of eachother. where it’s not possible for that to succeed in a stable fashion due to conditions, attempts to do so would cause a lot of chaos and discord. so practices emerge to stabilize an egalitarian order (versus having a chaotic egalitarian order - condition favouring equality ultimately of one sort or another). 2. just because something is possible doesn’t make it useful or a good idea. Modern nomadic foragers usually know some farming and other storage techniques but don’t use them because they aren’t practical. why smoke and carry around all this heavy crap with you around all year, when you can just go hunt and get food when you need it? smoking and storing food is for people who are semi sedentary and who can’t easily access food all year. it could be that people moved back and forth from immediate to delayed return systems at different times. delayed return systems usually imply harsher conditions or more scarcity or competition. this is one of the reasons why it seems more likely that immediate return was probably more common before the world was full. in upper palaeolithic europe i imagine that people smoked mammoth and stored it - arcaeology shows that many upper palaoelithic cultures were semi sedentary like recent inuit, and they lived in extremely harsh conditions. there’s not much reason to think things were similar in africa when we were emerging as a species. i don’t agree about tropical environments etc. recent foragers live in some of the most difficult environments on earth (they are able to continue to forage because other people don’t want their land - that’s a form of survivorship bias, but it’s toward harsher environments than would have been common in the past). yes you need food to be available continuously for immediate return but you’d be surprised by the environemnts that this is possible in - the kalahari desert seems like an inhospitable wasteland, but it’s been home to immediate return foragers for thousands of years. you just have to know where to find the food and how to get it. I’m don’t remember the details of what montagnais naskapi ate and the jesuits but i don’t remember anything about food storage, and they generally seem like they were immediate return foragers for various reasons, nomadic hunting, gender egalitarianism etc. they might have been highly egalitarian delayed return foragers which also existed. their immediate return organization may have been possible due to trade with other non forager cultures so that they didn’t need food storage. fully nomadic immediate return central african foraging for example is likely only possible because they have trade relationships with farmers, otherwise they would lack carbohydrates. fully nomadic immediate return big game hunting is thought to be (via quantitative studies) as the most calorie efficient form of economy so anthropologists assume that people will choose that if it’s possible.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Wow, thank you for the rapid and detailed response. Feel free to just cite some references instead if that would be easier. Now on to my challenges (maybe confusions). 1. I guess this is an empirical question, but isn't it thought that most modern hunter-gather groups have lead a similar lifestyle for quite a long time? It was my understanding that they tend to be quite genetically and linguistically distinct from their pastoral/agrarian/industrial neighbors, suggesting at the very least that they have not recently fractured from a non-hunter-gather group (though it is possible that they change their strategies over time). Regardless, there need not be cultural continuity to the paleolithic in order for survivorship bias to still warrant consideration, so long as cultures in question are old enough that they came under sufficient selection pressure (from threat of change, assimilation, or antihalation). How young is the youngest known immediate-return hunter gather group, and is this shorter than the average survival time of a newly contacted hunter gather group? 2. I would have to imagine that the efficiency of immediate-return hunting is a function of ecology, climate, seasonality, and geography, such that even in areas were it is possible it would not always be most efficient (I would be interested to see a reference to the quantitative work if you have it handy). To think of just a simple example, edible nuts are extremely easy to collect and store (though sometimes costly to process), but generally are highly seasonal. I would therefore expect an ecosystem in which they occur in abundance to skew towards delayed-return foraging, at least with regards to this particular resource. With this in mind I did a quick search for articles on the subject and found "Modeling Modes of Hunter-Gatherer Food Storage" (Morgan, 2012) which discusses potential nut storage techniques of the Mono people in California. I found the opening line of the introduction to be pertinent to our present discussion "Despite over three decades of modern thinking about the economics of hunter-gatherer food storage, this critical component of many foraging economies and important factor in the evolution of complex social systems remains poorly understood, leading Kuijt (2009:641) to recently lament that “archaeologists have yet to develop a detailed understanding of the scale of economic contributions of food storage in preagriculturalist communities.”" This suggests that the field lacks a consensus theory on the utility and role of food storage in hunter-gather societies, reinforcing my skepticism in the assumption that early human societies were predominantly immediate-return hunter-gathers
@@recurrenTopology i don’t have references to throw at you, it’s time consuming enough just to answer off the top of my head! look at the bibliographies in my episodes. you can find good bibliographies to start off with jerome lewis’ egalitarian social organization among hunter gatherers, and kelly’s the foraging spectrum 1. yes most are thought to have existed for a long time, particularly the hadza and kalahari people, but others like the central african forager groups (mbuti, bendjele etc) are thought to have only been there for a few thousand years. the might have been doing immediate return foraging before but we don’t know (or i don’t know), they might have been doing delayed return foraging or even non foraging - there are several known historical examples of people switching to hunting and gathering form pastoralism or agriculture. i don’t know the ages, but again the survivorship bias is about being in the sorts of territories that other people don’t want or can’t survive in. there’s nothing to indicate that it’s the most resilient or whatever, we have all sorts of kinds of hunting and gathering, the assumption is that they are all adaptations to various conditions and we’d see them wherever similar conditions exist for long enough. 2. you need to read ethnographies - almost all environments are seasonal and all nomadic people have seasonal differences in social organization (like more concentrated in cooler season and more dispersed in hotter season) and that doesn’t incentivize delayed return - when the season for nuts is over you have other resources in season. when you go far back in time, you have a world empty of humans so you likely have the choice of the best environments until the world starts to get close to carrying capacity for immediate return foraging, and then you’d expect to see more delayed return strategies. you also have frequent climate fluctuations in the palaeolithic which would have increased and decreased carrying capacity every couple of generations or so, so that’s another factor. from the quote you gave of the the article you cited, that doesn’t suggest to me that people lack understanding of utility of food storage, but rather that they don’t have the tools to measure how much food storage was being doing prehistorically. most likely the original humans were immediate return foragers because we started out in a favourable environment (like bonobos vs chimps) and then as we expanded out we’d remain mostly immediate return, but then whith climate changes you’d find pockets of delayed return as people get stuck in an unfavourable environment for a period of time until favourable conditions return, and then eventually as the world starts to fill up and people get pushed into worse environments (like europe) then you’d see more delayed return systems, which is what you do see in the upper palaeolithic.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Only brought up references in case that was easier. If we were discussing something in my field it'd probably be easier for me to just provide references as opposed to summarizing ideas, so I figured I'd extend the option. Also, please feel free to ignore me or reply at your leisure, I completely understand if you have other things you'd rather do with your time. I've paged through a few of the references in the bibliography, so hopefully that will increase the level of our discourse. 1. Survivorship bias is a general concept from experimental design and data analysis. A canonical example is Wald's analysis of bomber survival in WW2, in which he studied the distribution of damage to planes returning from bombing runs. Failing for the survivorship bias, one might be tempted to consider that distribution as representative of the areas of the plane most likely to get hit, and reinforce the plane accordingly. This would be a mistake, however, because it was precisely damage to areas areas of the plane not seen in the return sample which caused the missing planes to crash. I think you would agree that the world has become increasing inhospitable to hunter-gathers with the rise of pastoral and agricultural societies, so this implies a selection process. It is a fundamental experimental/statistical truism that data from a subset of examples which have passed through a selection process is potentially non-representative on account of survivorship bias. While environmental availability is certainly one potential source of survivorship bias (and is in fact used by Singh as an argument against extrapolating from modern examples), I see no grounds for considering it the only feature that could be subject to bias. Briefly searching through the anthropological literature I am very surprised to have not the issue discussed in these terms, as I think it would be a natural criticism levied by anyone coming to the problem with a mathematical or statistical background. Honestly, the more I read the more I'm left with the impression that this is a serious unresolved issue in the field. 2. Why is an environment suitable for immediate-return foraging necessarily more favorable than one suitable for delayed-return strategies? To use an example from another field, the North Atlantic is tremendously productive, however its abundance of forage fish (whale food) is highly seasonal (rich in summer, sparse in winter). To take advantage of this productivity, baleen whales have evolved to ability to store large amounts of energy as blubber and live off these reserves while nearly fasting for half the year. This does not make the North Atlantic an undesirable habitat, in fact higher latitude areas with seasonal abundance are the only marine habitats that support large baleen whales (there did used to be tropical baleen whales, but they went extinct following decreases to the productivity of equatorial regions after the formation of the Panama isthmus). Similarly, I imagine there are many environments that would be ill suited for immediate-return economies, but that are exceptional for delayed-return strategies. Why think archaic or early modern humans would avoid such environments if they possessed the technologies to thrive in them? Our LCA with chimps and bonobos likely lacked the ability for alternative foraging economies, as they do, but I don't see why one should confidently assume such strategies didn't develop long before the Holocene. It seems entirely plausible to me that homo Erectus in Europe learned to survive winter by living off a frozen elephant, or stored seasonal fish abundance by smoking it. Their migration out of Africa suggests they were able to adapt to a variety of ecosystems (in a way chimps and bonobos can not), so why should we assume that food storage wasn't one such adaptation?
1. i hear what you’re saying about survivorship bias, but again I don’t think that it’s a fruitful way of looking at it. i think it makes sense to ask if a world full of only foragers would have very different dynamics for hunter gatherers than our current world, and if the foragers we see in recent times are not representative of ancient foragers because the conditions they live in are just too different - but i don’t see the idea of “we only see the types of societies that survived the changes in the world” because it assumes those societies are all static and either survive or get wiped out rather than adapting to conditions. i suspect that this is why you don’t see any discussions of this idea - behavioural ecology which is a quantitative approach to anthropology is math and data oriented, so it’s not like people are avoiding math questions. 2. apparently, according to behavioural ecologists, nomadic immediate return foraging with big game hunting is the most efficient system in terms of calories and nutrients expended vs gained. If this is correct, then you will assume that people will choose this kind of foraging whenever possible, and that other systems are a compromise of some sort. as far as i know there is zero evidence of homo erectus or anyone smoking anything until more recent times, though there is some evidence of vegetable processing in the middle palaeolithic which might suggest delayed return system (though not necessarily). you do have more convincing evidence of delayed return in upper palaeolithic europe and in some other pockets around the world at the same time. hunting a mammoth and sitting around for half the year eating it sounds good superficially, but then you’re narrowing your diet to an extreme, as you’d be consuming all the vegetable foods in that area after a few weeks and have nothing but meat for months. if you have the choice, you’d probably just let the rest of the mammoth rot and move on to a differnt camp with more fruits and berries and vegetables around. maybe you can smoke it and transport it, but transporting takes a lot of effort, and you’d only do that if that’s easier than hunting again in a new place. again, immediate return nomadism is supposedly the most efficient system. another example is pacific northwest coast societies who fishd half the year in one place, and smoked and stored the fish and stayed in sedentary villages, and went out hunting for a couple of months in the off season to compliment their diets. storing all of that fish makes you a target for raiding and war and requires all of this military preparation and defensible storage facilities etc. the war and storage and defense is so onerous that further south in california where acorns were available as food, the foragers there oriented their entire economies around extremely annoying to process laborious acorns, despite the fact that they had the choice of basing it on fish. i’m sure people were doing delayed return strategies at various times and places, but only when immediate return wasn’t viable.
Great to see a new video from you! I love your insight, thanks for your work👍 I love "believing nonsense that isn't true is not liberating" ""The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." Spock
You said that pre-Holocene humans couldnt have developed sustainable agriculture because of low nitrogen levels in the soil. Can I have a link on that ? Ive never heard of that explanation before.
here: www.researchgate.net/publication/200033448_Was_Agriculture_Impossible_during_the_Pleistocene_but_Mandatory_during_the_Holocene_A_Climate_Change_Hypothesis and it was C02 and not nitrogen, i made a mistake speaking from memory - and the harsh and quick temperature fluctuations are also cited as a main reason why agriculture wasn’t viable until the holocene. for some reason this article never got a lot of mainstream coverage but i see it cited in journals more frequently
@@notanothermichael4676 you’re welcome - ill be putting up a bibliography for this episode, i just didn’t have time cause i had to rush to get it out before xmas holidays kills viewership
A lot of questions came to my mind when I was watching this video. I feel a little disheartened by the fact that I can't even trust an anarchist anthropologist like Graeber to give an accurate picture of the state of the knowledge. I'm convinced anthropology is crucial for political theory, but I find myself stumbling around the field not knowing which sources to trust. Do you have plans to make a video with reading suggestions referencing leftist anthropologist who haven't given up on materialism? is there hope that you might one day review Gottner-Abendroth's work on Matriarchal societies? Or give an overview of the debate around female cosmetic coalition theory?
that’s exactly right - people afraid of materialism because they think that if hierarchy or equality can be explained by material factors then there’s nothing we can do about them, which ignores that humans, especially in advanced industrial civilizations have enormous powers to change material circumstances. i haven’t yet read her book on matriarchal societies yet but i have it - i don’t think i’ll be doing more super in depth reviews like this, but I will read it and might discuss it if it’s interesting. I might get into female cosmetic coalition stuff but need to re-read the stuff on it because my knowledge isn’t in depth enough to say anything. I will have Camilla Power on very soon so I’m sure she’ll have something to say about that! for reading suggestions, each episode has a bibliography - i don’t feel like there’s any great book (that i know of) that really presents an explicit materialist theoretical outlook the way I’d want to, and not in a political way. A lot of stuff is a mishmash of materialist and idealist outlooks without a lot of coherences. There are a ton of loose ends and ideas floating around that need someone to tie them all together like I’m trying to do here. Marvin Harris was doing that sort of thing in the 70s and 80s and his stuff is worth looking at, but i’m not satisfied with it, and feel like some of it is outdated and that he he had lots of ideas but not all of it was verified or correct. à I feel like you just have to read a bunch of stuff and just think for yourself. Maybe i’ll put out an ABC theory book based on this video show at some point. To me all that stuff about materialism being colonialist etc, is more right wing shit disguising itself as left wing stuff, designed to make us powerless to use anthropology to actually do anything useful in the world. It’s a reaction to actual radical scholars in the 60s and 70s that actually wanted to make the world a better place. There was a useful critique in there because materialism as an inherently practical outlook can be used to bad purposes, and if it’s not sophisticated ignores individual agency and historical particularities, but as always with elite academia any good idea very quickly because a bunch of crap that serves power and defangs anything radical. That stuff is such sanctimonious hypocritical bullshit, and is ironically very racist in its own way. the same person who will have a completely materialist understanding of western people (politicians for example) will never attribute the same human motives to someone from a different society, as if people from other cultures are extra terrerstrials… Many people in indigenous societies have materialist understandings of things on top of their specific religious or comological cultural explanations for things - every human has materialist explanations for things - and you saw that in that insurrectionaist book you talked about! it’s impossible not to have materialist views of things, even a 4 year old does, people are just invested in being blind to it in certain areas because it’s a threat to power or ego or both.
Around 41:00 it would be interesting to compare chimpanzees to bonobos since the first are more hierarchical and violent while the latter are more much less violent (can't tell about their hierarchy). The interesting thing is that there are more body differences between males and females in chimpanzees (males are much larger and stronger) than among bonobos (males and females are almost the same size). One of the differences between both groups' environments is the availability of food: while the chimps leave in a seasonally variable resources environment, the bonobos live in an constantly more or less resource abundant environment. Chimpanzees, it seems, can't practice immediate return hunting and gathering - at least not as much as bonobos do. AFAIK, Bonobos were identified in 1974.
sure i’ll probably do that when i do an episode about animal politics - and yes in bonobos their more egalitarian structure is associate with more resource availability, and chimps get more patriarchal and more hierarchical the scarcer resources are. but chimpanzees and bonobos both practice immediate return foraging. immediate return foraging is when you eat what you collect without extensive processing. most mammals are immediate return foragers
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Just a nit-pick, but I would guess quite a large fraction (though likely not a majority) of mammals actually are not immediate return foragers. Two of the largest mammal groups, rodents and shrews, commonly stash a considerable proportion of their collected food. It could also be argued that mammals whose phenology involves periods of substantial fat accumulation followed by extended fasting, as seen in bears and whales for example, are functionally not immediate return foragers.
I like the fact that somebody did this. Because I've been wanting criticism of their work. This makes me like their work more. Because your critique doesn't destroy their work. The part that I dislike is that big bird has a narrative that is widely accepted in Conservative cycles- not Anthropologie circles.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 The Big Bird narrative of the progression of history that is widely accepted by most people in the US. That 1970s ideology of early peoples life was short and brutal is still a difficult narrative to overcome.
Thanks again for taking the time to do this. For sure you're performing a valuable public service. Maybe Wengrow will watch your videos and in a few years come out with a more scholarly sequel or updated version that takes out all the offending parts and replaces them with something more acceptable along the lines of what you've been suggesting. Lord knows the speed of technological change in the field is breathtaking and he may have to. Some of these changes you probably know more about than I do. For example, Lidar and related technologies, in conjunction with “big data” and related analytical tools, bioarcheology, osteoarcheology, drone technology, including underwater drone technology, and of course artificial intelligence are going to change everything in the field. The sorts of cherry picking they resort to throughout the book just won’t be tenable anymore. People with access to the data, which is going to be practically everybody who wants it, will be able to come up with a complete set of relevant data. One of my favorite new sets of tools are devices that will sift through whatever you call the unprocessed archaeological excavation material, sort it, (obviously humans will still have to do a lot of this), tag it so the provenance will be maintained, AND pick out the poop for special processing. The special processing can tell all sorts of things including how old the poop is, what species it was from, the age, sex, etc. They can even tell a lot about the social structure if the site was occupied by a group, and they have other corroborating data. P.S. Once Covid dies down If you live in a number of places in the U.S.(NYS for sure) and probably elsewhere you are probably going to find your skill set in high demand, although I’m not sure what the pay scale is. Media, legal, anthropological/archaeological, and administrative/organizational skills aren’t a combination of skills you find in too many people.
interesting, i’m not an archaeologist so i don’t know much about these new technologies you’re talking about. i wonder if it will totally change the picture we have of prehistory, or just give us new details. i really doubt wengrow would change the book or add to it in the way i’d want, i think the whole point of the book was to emphasize the idea that “we can choose our social structure” and so they purposefully left out all the things i want to focus on. i don’t think it was accidental or neglect etc. im not sure my specific skill set will be useful outside of youtube and tenant law! we’ll see…
Another quick question! I’m really interested in early experimentation with things that are commonly presented as having started at a later date. I was listening to an interview with Rebecca Wragg Sykes who wrote the book “Kindred” about Neanderthals recently, and she talked about a specific Neanderthal culture - just one, and isolated too I think - who started experimenting with long flint blades similar to the ones that Homo Sapiens made, in a way that no other Neanderthals have yet appeared to do. Then they just stopped showing up in the archeological record. Are there any good resources you’d recommend on very early attempts at subsistence farming that didn’t stick around? That sounded really intriguing.
yes, it’s super interesting! it shows that people had subsistence stress always but didn’t have the option of sustainable agriculture until after the holocene i know of two articles: www.persee.fr/doc/paleo_0153-9345_2013_num_39_2_5519 journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422 the first one talks about 35 000 years ago - i was going to cite that instead of 23 000 years ago, but then i couldn’t find the article until after i recorded it… same thing with the 250 000 years vs 70 000 years at fulton’s cave. i know i read 250 somewhere but can’t find it…
I would say that they made the blades due to home sapiens interaction and were subsequently assimilated, based solely on your comment. I'm probably wrong, knowing nothing more of the context. Just comment happy atm
Please, bibliography needed! Can't afford to go back to school to study anthropology! Thank you for your efforts. Again, bringing light to banish the dark.
thanks - yes i’lo have it in the next few daya and post about in the “community” section so if you get notifications you’ll be notified. otherwise check back in a few days
hi - the bibliographies are linked in the notes under every video - for this one its: www.patreon.com/posts/60043152 but when it comes to the paintings, i don’t know what the hell happened - the articles weren’t in the bibliography (the woman with the zebra penis by power and watts, women in prehistoric cave art by power - links to both articles are in the bibliography) - i just added them now, but they don’t have the age of the paintings in them. in the video i said 250 000 years old and then when i was editing it, i “corrected” this to 70,000 years old and added a subtitled with that correction - but now reading the articles about the paintings i have no idea where i got either of those numbers from i just looked online to find the age of the paintings and i can’t find any scholarly source that gives them, but i do find several non-scholarly websites saying that the various paintings at that site are 3000 to 450 years old - which is completely unrelated to 250k or 70k … so i have no idea what the hell was in my head when I gave either of those numbers - like when I made the correction, i must have looked it up got that from somewhere?? Anyways, that’s embarassing - just corrected the transcript and bibliography to include this…
Nice! This helped me straighten out my thinking regarding the tension between determinism and activism. If you're a historical materialist of some kind, i.e., think that material conditions determine ideas and culture, then what's the point of thinking and activism? Aren't we fated (in the long run, for the most part) to have whatever social forms are adapted to present conditions? You suggest that actually present conditions are increasingly well-suited to egalitarian social forms. But that doesn't itself justify activism. We have to keep in mind something else you said: that hierarchy can - temporarily at least? - block transition to more adaptive social forms. And I suppose THIS is the primary role of thinking and activism: to speed up the transitions by exposing and stomping down on the claws of the old entrenched powers. Secondarily, it is to decide among the various adaptive social forms (since presumably there is not just one form a society can take in any given material circumstance). I guess there is ALSO a potential activism program of deliberately engineering material conditions in order to facilitate a transition to a new social form. For example, a Marxist accelerationist expediting industrialisation in order to strengthen the conditions for class consciousness etc.
i talk about this a little more in episode 8 and im going to go in more detail when i wrap up the book review after chapter 5, but i think there’s activism matters becuase in and of itself it can increase your bargaining power in most situations, and there’s usually some room for things to be better than they are, though material conditions will make the chances harder or easier to actually achieve your goals - but i think that in advanced industrial civilization, where were in many ways creating our own conditions, that there’s a lot of room for different kinds of systems, so activism can have a huge effect, just like lack of organization can. the reason you want to think a lot about material/practical conditions today is because if you do manage to take away power from the people who currently hold it, if you’re *not* thinking about material conditions, and incentives you’ll create a system that goes right back to hierarcy after some amount of time. You need to undertsand the dynamics of incentives to create something that will actually incentivize equality over the long term. “social democracy” (better termed welfare capitalism) for example was a set up for failure because it redistributed a significant amount of income, but it didn’t radically take away power away from the powerful, so overtime they had the means to amass more and more power over time.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 " You need to undertsand the dynamics of incentives [and material conditions] to create something that will actually incentivize equality over the long term. " Yes, that is the key point for transitioning society I think!!!! Which I might suggest is where all your work here on this channel boils down too... how does society incentivize equality over the long term (something that I think Graeber and Wengrow usefully explore somewhat in their analysis of past societies even if they do not provide adequate consideration of material conditions therein). I don't know how much you talk about money/currency in this channel, but that is something else I think Graeber tackles well in his Debt book. The fact that money(and debt) is a means of negotiating relationships between people is also key to examining how we disincentivize equality. Here, I think we can point an awful lot of fingers at money (and private ownership, or at least the virtually unlimited accumulation of private ownership that the money system enables), and all the social and material consequences of this accumulation..
They’re anthropologists, of course they don’t know how to “build the plane.” They’re just giving a history of flying without presenting a explicit blueprint. That should be a democratic conversation, deciding which direction we take flight, and I actually respect that these authors leave room for that. I get the impression you have not yet read Debt the First 5000 by Graeber, (correct me if I’m wrong) which fills in some of the gaps you mentioned. His argument is Debt exasperated the hierarchy that agriculture introduced, allowing for the distorted and exponential growth of kingdoms and later empires. Their argument is not that inequality was a “choice” at all, it’s a manufactured system that we complacently participate in (most of us). I agree, not making demands may not be the best strategy, but Graeber dedicated his life to the cause and Occupy woke millions from a slumber, including me, who witnessed it at the age of 12. In my own bias, I feel that more credit was due in this critique than was given, but I certainly do appreciate this video and the conversation it sets in motion. Would be interested to hear your thoughts on the concept of schismogenesis that these authors mention towards the end of the book. Solidarity, comrade!
but they do know how to build the plane - or they could have some solid ideas about it given all the literature they cover - it’s in there, they just refuse to see it! I think you’ll see more of what i mean when i cover chapters 4 and 5, but i talk about it a bit in subsequent episodes to this one - they deliberately leave out from all the sources they discuss all the information which explains how hierarchies form, how equality is maintained etc. i have read debt, but a long time ago (though recently re-read some parts for this series. it doesn’t offer anything useful in that regard from what i remember. i’ll talk more about schizmogenesis when i cover chapter 5 - i think its something, and has to do with competing groups maintaining distinction - like it makes sense for hassidic jews or amish people - but i dont think it at all explains what they describe in chapter 5 regarding the PNWC people. they’re giving it way more power than it has.
@@mcgoombs and btw to be clear, i don’t mean that graeber and wengrow on purpose don’t want people to understand how to build the plane or how hierarchy and equality work - it’s just that to explain that stuff you need to look at the role of incentives and material and practical conditions, and they purposefully ignore all of that stuff because they think that if you go down that road, you’re going to conclude that hierarchy or equality is pre-ordained by existing conditions and you can’t do anything about it. it’s their own preconceptions that tanks their efforts.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 oh I appreciate that clarification, that’s makes so much more sense. I completely agree with the sentiment. I see where the authors might be coming from with that in mind, if their intended audience is Americans that is, I’d assume they were disillusioned to the extent to which citizens of the imperial core are deeply propagandized already to draw those very conclusions. It’s also possible the incoherence comes from disagreements between the two authors. We’ll never know. I do agree with you that in the long run it will get us into trouble to not examine the complete picture no matter how uncomfortable it may be. It’s truly a shame we cannot hear how Graeber might have responded to your critique, RIP ❤️
the absence of the effects of rural pastoralists in discussion of the development of patriarchy is really glaring when in contrast with how it was discussed in Debt: the first 5000 years which gave a very strong narrative related to rural folk associating looser sexual standards in urban areas with the economic exploitation from cities on them.
honestly, that part of Debt was largely rubbish - they say that patriarchy came from the rejection of urban mores … again ignoring how and why pastoralism all on its own, absent civilization, incentivizes patriarchy (see episodes 7 and 7.1)
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 if I remember correctly the section I'm thinking of presupposed pastoralism as patriarchal without getting much into it and it was mostly an explination of why urban areas would adopt patriarchal structures but that's a charitable interpretation that I would have to actually re-read the book to substantiate I'm going through those episodes now btw, good stuff
@@unktheunk1428 i could be misremembering as well - there was just one particular passage that pissed me off that was a footnote saying that biblical patriarchy came from this rejection of cities. thanks!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I could see a defensible way of saying that, but I'm less inclined to now that I know that Graeber was in the "no demands" camp during occupy still very strange to ignore the influences of pastoralists in the development of patriarchy in a book that came out *after* there was already a fairly detailed narrative on that. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that Wengrow took an unfinished draft after Graeber died and Wengrow's influence made it worse. but that's probably not worth the effort to try to either substantiate or disprove.
@@unktheunk1428 in this book they’re doing everything they can to ignore material reasons for things and focus on choice so the pastoralism story doesn’t really fit into that - though graeber’s weird version from debt does i guess, i dunno!
I think one of us misunderstood this book. I think the target of this work is actually the popular public of authors that consume de Fukuyamas, the Pinkers and Hararis around and have no access to Academia papers and/or aren't particularly interested in those to build a common social narrative. Graeber/ Wengrow try to match that sort of popular narrative with an alternative one while trying deliberately to avoid the obvious pitfall which almost creams out of your analysis, which is the same as Rousseau inevitably fell in: "If equality is possible then it was only in 'simple' bands of hunter gatherers". I think the book is directly political the same the authors mentioned are in the sense of trying to validate the dominant narrative that has bled unto the public: That we are inherently evil and violent and thus require hierarchy to function. Graeber and Wengrow go through the same process (and one could call it dishonest, politically charged or convenient) in order to counteract that idea without falling into the Rousseau's apparent conclusion: That equality is lost to us due to our complex social and technological societies. I don't see this as quite a problem as you seem to perceive. I wasn't expecting a pure anthropological paper. I was expecting a popular take and critique on the dominant narrative of human nature and human social organization. I got that
that’s what they authors say they’re doing, but then they go into actual academic books and authors and papers and completely distort and mangle the contents of those books in order to pretend that humans weren’t egalitarians to begin with etc. and like i say in the video, graeber was doing this for his whole career.
Great video! Do you think the tendency to favor ideas of democratic organization “experimenting” with totalitarianism is a holdover from western-focused history, specifically the idea articulated in the academic work, The Dark Knight, that the last time Rome appointed an emperor “just for now,” the emperor refused to relinquish power? Did ancient peoples live long enough to see themselves become the villains, or at least could that be influencing the thinking of western academics, even good ones like these? Thank you for your videos!
thanks - i don’t think it’s so much a holdover from anything - i think each case is different (like which are you thinking about?) but in general, a shift towards dictatorship is more about the balance of powers in a society. in general, the wealthy have a vastly disproportionate influence over states in capitalist countries, and when it seems like that control might slip away via democratic means, then the people with power will subvert democracy to retain their power. if you’re thinking of people like Orban or Bolsonaro, Modi etc, I think that neoliberal decimation of society gives power hungry authoritarians leverage to get popular support to amass power by pretending that they’ll use it to solve the problems caused by neoliberal economics etc.
in a way it does resemble Caesar, who leverage the social chaos caused by the Optimates’ pillaging of society, in order to gain popular support for imposing dictatorship. And then Augustus did the same thing but more in service of the elite rather than the general population.
Great to see you upload again! Your point that G&W's criticism of 'equality' can fuel right-wing talking points is also my main concern. At the same time, we gotta acknowledge that rightists who do so are cherry-picking: As you cited yourself, the authors DO argue that "our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together" is "[t]he ultimate question of human history", so some of the actual disagreement seems to be about the semantics of "equality", rather than about concrete anthropological data. They also do acknowledge that hunter-gatherers like the Hadza are unambiguously egalitarian in every sense of the world - which solves the semantic question. When people try to instrumentalize G&W against egalitarianism, perhaps it's a good idea to mention that. I'd be looking forward to you further addressing their objection though: How does this fact really support our case for true equality being possible in societies with any material base other than immediate-return foraging? People HAVE told me (just my personal experience of course) that "sure, maybe communism works in small indigenous tribes, but surely not in any modern civilization". Judging from chapter three (I've only gotten around to read past chapter four myself), I believe you are largely correct about the authors' heavy voluntarism; however, given the objection mentioned above, I can understand why they think materialism leaves us hopeless for a truly egalitarian future. As much as they ascribe an unrealistic power to mere rituals of playing different social orders, maybe we do need something of that, if only to get all this capitalist realism out of our heads.
if you look at how they treat the hadza case, they accurately describe the egalitarianism of the hadza, but then they focus on how they make sure no one has too much wealth, and then say ‘that’s dumb and dreary, kandiaronk knew better, wealth inequality doesn’t have to equal power inequality’ and then toss it out the window as an example we can learn from. but if you actually read woodburn’s articles, he outlines the conditions inherent to immediate return foraging that make equality the best choice for them, and frankly the only real choice (he doesn’t put it that way). and he lists a bunch of factors that i’ll list when i do chapter 4. now graeber and wengrow should have jumped on that and then said “hmm how can we apply this knowledge and these factors to our own society” but they don’t, they just ignore that part of his work because they don’t want us to think about conditions - they just want us to think about choice, ergo robbing us of the knowledge we need to actually make our choices into reality…! this is why i hate this book so much, it’s all just empty calories. i’ll explain when i wrap up the book how i believe that the conditions that we live in today actually give us enormous room to replicate the relevant conditions of egalitarian foragers, without having to return to hunting and gathering. i think we live in one of those times when material reality is on our side, or that it can be, it has the potential to be - we have a lot more ability to change conditions than was possible in smaller scale societies with less insanely powerful tech and communications etc
My first reaction to hearing a talk by Graeber on UA-cam on this subject was precisely: "This guy is demolishing lies to children in order to look smart. There is nothing about his ideas which doesn't support the general thesis of egalitarian hunter-gatherers".
Around 31:00 "We should organize in ways that maximize equality and freedom" (paraphrased): This means we need a hierarchy (organize) so that we can reach the highest reachable level of equality and freedom? (it's an honest question). Thanks!
organization doesn’t need to be hierarchical - egalitarianism is a form of organization. but there are democratic and dominance hierarchies, and if you need a hierarchy for efficiency reasons, a democratic one where the members choose to have a hierarchy, choose all the terms of the hierarchy and can choose to dismantle it and remove the leader etc is way more egalitarian than a dominance hierarchy. the book confuses the two
Hi, this is interesting work! If I can bother you with a detail: at 7:35, where you say that the protestors occupied parks illegally, do you mean in the US or in general? I remember Graeber saying that the US 2nd amendment is supposed to protect the right to freedom of assembly and that it'd been essentially repealed in practice and also that the laws were changed after Occupy to make it so.
interesting - I don’t think that’s correct - from what I understand, in NYC, the Zuccotti park that the Occupy started in, is a privately owned park and the owner tolerated their presence, and therefore the city had no grounds to clear them out. Eventually the owner rescinded his acceptance of the protesters which allowed the authorities to come in. So it’s not a 2nd ammendment issue, because the private sphere is totally expempt from the constitution! But it also means that my comment was imprecise in terms of the NYC protest because it wasn’t technically illegal until the end, but I know that many of the other hundreds of occupations were illegal, in public parks etc.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 thank you. It makes sense to me that the protests on a private park were illegal without the owner's consent. It's the ones on public parks being considered illegal that confuses me, as a non American. I guess my question is what law makes those (the ones on public parks) illegal in the US because up until now I thought it was like in my own country, that's why that Graeber comment I mentioned made sense to me
@@maueflcoach1506 i think it depends on the country and city - so like in the US there’s freedom of protest and speech etc, but at the same time in most cities you can’t sleep in parks according to the law - so you could clear out a park based on people camping there. but you couldn’t clear it out just because people are protesting. so if the protesters would gather every day and go home every night then it might be legal etc.
After listening to the podcasts I really started to appreciate and desire more equality (not take hierarchy as the norm). However, as a computer scientist and also as a M.S. in software architecture and system theory, I have problems with the idea of removing hierarchy completed, in fact, with the real possibility of removing it entirely. You know, hierarchy is core in software development and it is what allows us to create more and more complex software (at the same time, it creates a sense of alienation of what is going on in the system as a whole). You mentioned the "riddle of history". I think hierarchy is a material condition, a natural force that bends society into hierarchical and it is actually simple to explined. in fact, you have already explained yourself. It is much easier to manager a collaborative effort wiith a hierarchical structure. In a (small) hierarchical society we have political power, which will allow some people to exploit this power into economical power, in which further increases the political power, which further increases the hierarchical structure and so on. You can't escape this reality... it is a wicked problem (I don't know if you know but google this term otherwise).
i think you missed something or else i mentioned it in a different episode than this one, but the issue isn’t just hierarchy, but *dominance* hierarchy. computer software doesn’t have dominance hierarchy, it just has hierarchy. the difference between dominance hierarchy and just hierarchy is coercion. it’s like the difference between SM vs sexual assault. a cooperative that elects managers has hierarchy but it’s not dominance hierarchy. see what i mean?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thanks, I did not missed that one. But I think it's easy to transit from a normal hierarchy to a dominance hierarchy as soon as the hierarchy becomes big and you start to lose contact with who commands what. Because of human nature, someone somewhere will exploit it and over time a normal hierarchy will transit into a dominance hierarchy. It's the same thing about politics. People just want to live, work, have fun. Most people are just "too busy" to check if politicians are not stealing anything. That was my point: you can't avoid hierarchy and due to life conditions, over time, hierarchy becomes dominance hierarchy.
@@BrunoGabrielAraujoLebtag i think there’s that tendency for sure, but if we’re aware of that we can take steps against it. to design the system to disincentivize that, and to force people who are “too busy” to be involved, or to make sure no one is too busy etc. Like in cooperatives in argentina they learned that everyone needs to take turns in administrative positions or else the administrators become a ruling elite etc.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I am just talking from an academic perspective. I am not against change. My point is that people treat social systems too lightly but it behaves like any other complex system. Complex system is an on-going research area in its infancy. Engineering of emergent behaviors is even more new. We don't have a good background on how to deal with this problem. The way communists try to "revolutionize the world" is way too dangerous (and I am talking only from a academic perspective). "Let's just tear this thing down and see what happens", this is just crazy... It's like geo-engineering... The majority of scientists are against large scale geo-engineering experiments because the consequences are too unpredictable and potentially catastrophic.
@@BrunoGabrielAraujoLebtag i agree that you need to know what you’re doing before you do it… and that you need to experiment with things, and that it’s not so simple. but these problems shouldn’t be an excuse for inaction either. the idea is to keep a focus on reducing dominance hierarchy insofar as practical and possible. if you’re aiming in that direction and thinking about the associated problems you’re improving things. we see what works with trial and error, from smaller scale enterprises and organizations to larger ones
Thanks a lot for your work, its a pleasure to get in touch with your channel. Im in the process of research for a theatre project right now and i have decided to engage with the topic of mutual aid. I started reading kropotkins book on mutual aid but after a while i thought that his views are maybe outdated for a current dispute. Since David Graeber wrote the introduction on the recent edition of the book i really wanted to understand his stance on this topic. Im especially interested to read more about Kondiaronk and so i bought the dawn of everything. Since i could not really understand the approach of the authors on equality, i researched and luckily found your channel. Right now im not sure where to continue tbh. I thought maybe you could suggest me some books or tell me what i should read next. You suggested some books in your last videos which i already ordered but it would be awesome to know which literature is more focused on the aspect of mutual aid (even though i know thats its interconnected to a lot of other themes). I would appreciate your help very much. Im looking forward to the next videos. Greetings from germany.
hi faraz - i don’t really have too much knowledge about works on mutual aid either in theory or practice besides kropotkin which like you pointed out is 100 years old or more. I guess look up mutual aid on libcom.org they must have a ton of stuff on there. I know there are a lot of small activist organizations everywhere that focus on mutual aid practices now - there most certainly must be some anarchists groups in germany and europe doing these things, but again, I just don’t know enough and haven’t kept up on it so i don’t know of particular ones etc
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I appreciate your quick response. I will try to continue searching for more material on libcom. But right now im really not sure if the topic even makes sense without the proper literature to work on. It seems like i put too much effort on the wrong topic. Maybe i should start working on egality, since i have so much good input right now. Keep on the good work!
Awesome! While I haven’t read Dawn of Everything- this has been illustrative - I’m quite surprised by the way Graeber denied egalitarian societies when, as you mentioned, is the root of his politics as an anarchist - there may of been an “insurrecto” tendency within Graeber’s mind until the end - don’t know
i think that when he was an undergrad student he probably had hippie professors talking about the egalitarian hunter gatherers in utopian dehumanizing ways and thus he had a prejudice against that literature and never engaged with it. and beyond that he had some bad insticts which are common because our society is such a mess when it comes to left political theory
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 yea that makes sense - I think overall his work was needed and generally and culturally a net positive, when you direct his work the way you have, it becomes clear that there were many missing (and just ignored) pieces to the story he was telling - the fact that he would dismiss egalitarian societies as a concrete example of a sort of 'anarchism in action' is really a bit mind blowing to me....Have you ever read anarchist Wayne Price's critique of Graeber's political vision ?
Oh yeah, at 38:00, I think the perspective that there's a category of "not doing agriculture" and "doing agriculture" is very problematic, right from the get go! And probably contributes to how we mis-understand this progression anyway, not just in human societies, but ecologically speaking more broadly. For example, I would argue that many animals do do agriculture (boundless examples), and I would characterize agriculture as simply an intensification of evolutionary interactions between one species (or group of species) and another (others). For example, take a simple case of grazing animals: Grasslands wouldn't exist except for grazers and browsers that "farm" them. Eating grass stimulates it's growth, because grass has evolved to thrive under these conditions, embedding a mutualism between consumer and producer. While crapping the partially broken down tissues is straight up what we call fertilizer. Human plant breeding and growing isn't different in this regard, and would have been taking place in all manner of forms before the actual process of gathering, storing and planting seeds took place on a larger scale. They are all basically co-evolved mutualisms between species, which tend to propogate through ecosystems as the species involved succeed and spread. Perhaps higher nitrogen concentration in soils enabled this wide-scale intensification of "agriculture" in the holocene as some suggest, but these evolutionary relationships have developed and existed in one form or other since the beginning of life on the planet, and more latterly in ways that we can better understand once plants and animals were on the scene. I would therefore argue that humans were "domesticating" and propogating species well before the holocene, whether through conscious manipulation of their environment and species, or just through the changes to the environment that they incidentally made via their land-use/behaviour. Like you could argue that we've domesticated just as many "weeds", as we have agricultural plants. The ones we choose to grow are food and are "agriculture", but all the plants that have evolved to fit into the niches created by specific forms of agricultre don't count, even though they have evolved through basically the same process of selection as our domesticated varieties, only natural processes were controlling the results, rather than us adding additional selective forces for traits that were useful to humans. As a counter point to the no-ag vs. ag framing of human social development, I would examine the development of agriculture in relation to hierarchy more along the lines of how much are natural processes fought against in producing food vs. producing food in ways that work with natural processes? In other words, how much energy and effort must be concentrated via hierarchial systems to combat natural processes (e.g., reliance on monocultures for mechanical or market efficiencies, reliance on artificial inputs of water, fertilizer, or pest control, reliance on plant varieties that don't breed true and must be hybridized every growth cycle, etc. etc), all of which tends to embed the hierarchies required to achieve these concentrations of time/energy/inputs. These are what give hierarchies leverage over the means of production. In contrast, food production systems and technologies that work with and utilize natural processes require far less effort to catalyze them, and therefore, are accessible to many more autonomous individuals and groups of individuals, and here hierarchies don't gain traction so easily, and can be more easily resisted to a large extent. It's not even that intensive agriculture and fighting-nature is more stable or efficient at producing more food, in fact I would say there's quite a bit of quantitative research nowadays demonstrating just the opposite. I think that many other socio-cultural processes get manipulated by hierarchies once they establish around food production, which then serve to embed hierarchial systems further into the social fabric and food system overall. In other words, it's not agriculture and intensification of food production which creates material conditions for hierarchy to establish, rather it is social-cultural processes that artifically create these material conditions (using agriculture) that propogate hierarchies. Agriculture is more like a tool used by hierarchy to support itself, rather than agriculture creating conditions which lead to the development of hierarchy... just thinking out loud at this point...
I agree that you can expand the definition of agriculture, but the grasslands isn’t a good example - I think you need there to be deliberate efforts to manipulate the environment. Otherwise literally everything becomes agriculture. The book Dark Emu argues that australian hunter gatherers actually turned all of of ausrtalia into a giant farm. I really haven’t thought much about the definition of agriculture so I can’t get into this too deeply just now. In any case the relationship between agriculture and hierarchy (or anything and hierarchy) is a lot simpler than what you’re talking about - dominance hierarchy happens when some people can control access to the resources that other people need to live and where there’s no easy way for people to go get other resources. The end! Agriculture in the conventional sense means dependence on plots of land that can be controlled and defended. But that on its own isn’t enough, you need for there to be no good alternatives to go off and get your own land somewhere else, or to go off and forage somewhere else etc. This is why it took a long time for hierarchy to pop up after agricultural settlements emerged, you needed for there to be enough population growth for surrounding areas to be cut off from people escaping domination attempts.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I get your point, and don't dispute that agriculture and pop density contributes to the development of hierarchies in the scenario you describe above (i.e. people must submit to hierarchy or die), but I would strongly argue that that the forms of agriculture and land tenure that lend themselves to serving the interests/enforcement of hierarchies, and which enable(require?) population densities to grow to levels of this magnitude are themselves the product of hierarchial development in society. i.e. It's not that everyone just sets about developing intensive agriclutural technologies to indefnitely improve production at larger efficiencies of scale (which almost without fail are only "efficient" over the short term and usually result in long term degradation and desertification), as well as subscribe to private ownership of land/resources. It's that people create technological advances in these directions to gain individual (or family or group, whatever) material advantages within a system of stratifying social hierarchies that are already present and developing. Similarly, what's the difference between your sceneario and a scenario where a relatively egalitarian hunter gatherer society has reached the max pop density that can be supported in the region by the animals and plants they are dependent on? Productivity of these lands are still enhanced by land-practices requiring labour (e.g. prescribed burning, animal husbandry, pruning/planting, etc), which edible/useful species evolve/adapt to just like "agriculture". These territories can still produce storable surpluses of meat and plants, and they can also still be defended against neighboring groups, and you still get warfare between groups over hunting territories (effectively reduces pop pressure), or you get agreements and protocols developed between groups and between individuals within groups, which artifically increase the social costs of resource use one way or another to effectively reduce population growth/pressure (lots of non-violent or ritualized violence mechanisms invented to accomplish this). In this scenario or the one you describe above, death is still the prime motivator to come up with a solution for population pressure. But this doesn't necessitate hierarchy to accomplish, even thought it could right? Like examples from Graeber-wengrow like those florida fisher-hunter-gatherers. And I'd argue that lots of Indigenous societies accomplished precisely these pop growth solutions with or without "agriclture" in the binary sense of this term and with or without dif. levels of hierarchies. My beef is that viewing agricultre as a binary just makes it easier for people to point their fingers at agriclture as a material cause of hierarchy and domination in human societies, when in fact the co-dependent evolutionary relationships that develop through agricultural practices occur all over the place along a spectrum of intensities whether it's "intentional" by a human being or not, or within a hierarchial context or not. Thus, my extended beef with this binary framing of agriculture, and my argument overall is that there are only particular kinds of agriculture and technology (and land tenure systems) that develop when hierarchies arise and take hold in societies (e.g. peoples who haven't learned from the school of hard knocks about problems with "too much hierarchy), and tthen its the social hierarchies and institutions themselves that shape food production (or other technologies) to be a means to further support the dominance hierarchy. Therefore, I think there's a strong argument for a multi-dimensional kind of thing going on in which hierarchies creep into and grow in societies that largely takes place in the realm of ideas/thought (e.g. spiritual beliefs, values, worldviews, customs/traditions, etc.), which get translated through to land-use, social behaviour, governance institutions, etc. Bottom-up material conditions influence this process and some material conditions are largely resistent to hierarchy formation while others encourage it, but mucho importantly , top-down social processes play a key role in how these material conditions develop in the first place. And there are tensions and trade-offs between these top-down vs. bottom up processes, which lead to the formation of social hiearchies or the lack thereof in any given time/place. I think also important: How outward is the view that people take in looking at themselves and the world? i.e. do natural processes and empirical observations of ecosystems/nature (largely composed of autonomous individuals and devoid of dominance hierarchy structures) ground the beliefs, worldviews, and values of a society, or is the cultural gaze directed inwards and focussed on the social-environments constructed therein?. In many cases, this inward focus creates the conditions that I think largely contribute to the formation and persistence of social hierarchies, and indeed hierarchy encourages this looking inwards rather than outwards for just these reasons (and we in western mainstream societies are absolute pros at this). Lastly, as a further example of hierarchy shaping technological advancement: I kind of consider the development of agriculture and land tenure in these forms you refer to is alot like how I understand solar power is being developed now In Canada (or at least on the prairies). It's not being rolled out so that each household is autonomously generating its own power and can buy/sell from the grid how it likes, or even use this power when the power grid goes down. Instead, panels are being put in and connected to the grid, and each household's power production is monitored by a company who tells the household how much they are producing, and a household's unused power is "sold" to the grid at a fixed rate, and unless you pay loads of extra money for the hardware, you still loose power when the grid goes down. In other words, people are not achieving a greater degree of energy autonomy and freedom from corporate (or crown) owned infrastructure; the technology is getting rolled so that people remain dependent on it, and the private companies that manage/monitor it. And this is happening not because that's how people want it, but it's how the existing dominance hierarchy wants it. I think its the same with certain forms of agricluture and land tenure systems arising within existing hierarchies.
I’ve looked for your name on your site but can’t find it. I love your line “you can’t understand politics without understanding anthropology”. I’d like to quote you.
hey! i’m not really so into plastering my name all over the place - you can just say “the host of the what is politics podcast” or something like that?
I'm having difficulty with the idea that a group operating democratically is anything but a dominance structure of the majority over the minority. But this is not my only difficulty. The weakness of an egalitarian society would seem to be its vulnerability to the conquest by a non egalitarian society, which seems to happen quite often. I think I'm still trying to find some stable structure that doesn't have to undergo civilization collapse on such a seemingly regular basis. Maybe the rises of civilizations are the exception? I've always lived in one, but there have been periods of less expansive ones. Hmmm. Still loving your work, by the way. Amazing work. I'm still hoping you find your way to making this into book form. I just don't trust the longevity of internet. It's too tied to all the infrastructure that is so fragile, if you think about it. Well, when I think about it. Trying not to take things for granted.
well egalitarian hunter gatherer societies have lasted for thousands and thousands of years - but i don’t know that the reason more recent attempts at egalitarian societies get crushed in wars has as much to do with their egalitarian nature vs just the fact that they’ve so far happened in small countries and have faced much stronger, larger enemies who had all sorts of advantages. and i don’t see how an egalitarian societies is domination of the minority by a majority - non-egalitarian societies are where some people can dominate others based on control over resources. Egalitarian societies just make sure no one can hoard resources that others depend on. Capitalism for example is based on having the state protecting and defending the private ownership of more wealth than anyone could protect and defend on their own. A book is something i might do later, but it would require me to stop doing videos for like 2 years, or else to be making enough money to stop working for the same amount of time.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Very valid points. And the inability of advanced civilizations to dominate some egalitarian societies is a fact. It still comes at a cost, and I guess I'm trying to figure out how to reduce or eliminate that cost. Perhaps that's not in the cards? Thanks for your response. I appreciate that there are priorities.
what comes at a cost egalitarianism? for sure there’s an efficiency cost and some coordination costs - in some contexts - but you have democratic hierarchies (vs dominance hierarchies) where you can have organizational efficiency without exploitation
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 am I misunderstanding hierarchy? I was thinking of it as structure. Not necessarily an expression of power. Can organization exist without the structure of hierarchy? Hmm. I may be confusing worbs. Does a project require a director? You've really got me doing a lot of thinking. This is a good thing.
@@RichardRoy2 i think i talk about it in one of these graeber episodes, but there’s dominance hierarchy, where the people at the top control the hierarchy for their benefit, and only concede to people at the bottom what they have to in order to maintain their advantages, and there’s a democratic hierarchy, where the purpose is to serve the interests of everyone in the hierarchy, and the people at the top are only there insofar as they serve the interests of the people at the bottom. i think one can easily slip in to the other if you’re not careful, but it’s quite different, think of a cooperative where the management is elected by the workers vs a company where owners hire and fire workers according to their own needs
I finished the book about a week ago. I think you are strawmanning really hard in various parts of this video. In fact, I think if you had Wengrow on your show he would agree with you on most of what you said. They do talk about material condition, but don't use it as a hard determiner of social-political organization. And yes, right wing assholes can use this book out of context for dumb takes, just as leftists can use the story of Kandiaronk as a great critique of the enlightenment itself. What I got from this book is that history is much more complex than we often want it to be. In terms of political mobilization, I think we desperately need this optimism right now (that things don't have to be the way they are forever). A focus solely on material conditions (and we should obviously focus partly on them), is a downward spiral towards doom. Almost all of us are exploited, a focus on our exploitation makes us depressed, so we give up on politics. Even the idea of choice is a breath of fresh air, that we CAN overcome the odds and save the world.
which parts do you think i’m strawmanning? like what am i saying, vs what they’re saying? I’m sure graeber (if he were alive) and wengrow would say ‘of course material reality matters’ but the whole book is specifically written in a way to make it seem like it doesn’t matter, while covering their asses so they can say ‘i never said material reality doesn’t matter!’ in chapter 5 they actually discuss material theories of social organization, but they make a total mess of it in ways that are very revealing, which i’ll discuss when i get there (i’m mostly only going to cover chapters 1-5 in my review). my intention is to highlight what they’re doing, and point to where it takes us, not to strawman the argument. I agree that hope is important, but I disagree that material focus leads us to doom - that’s what Graeber and Wengrow think which is why they’re making such a mess with all their arguments - I think there is actually a lot of hope *because* of material arguments. I’ll get into that in more detail when I finish chapters 1-5 and then present my own big narrative of human origins and descent into hierarchy at the end.
@@kerycktotebag8164 plus advanced industrial societies have the power to shape conditions in ways that were rarely possible before. also i think there’s always a *chance* to change things even in unfavourable conditions, just that the chances are much lower! Especially if you’re not conscious about what you’re working with (like the english peasants!)
@@janespright haha i love how marxists try to dismiss me for being too anarchist and anarchists for being too marxist… the split between marx and bakunin or leninists becoming the new exploiting elite in the USSR has nothing to do with how badly Graeber and Wengrow made a mess of this book. I’m sure I share all your criticisms of Marx’ followers. Even if you hate Marx, materialist analysis of social phenomen can be used by anyone from anarchists to capitalists to neocons who actually wants to understand how human beings work. You can read Carl Philip Salzman’s The Arab Israeli Conflict if you want to read a right winger using materialism to explain the arab israeli conflict and phenomena like tribalism and honour killings.
chomsky is always good! dawn of everything is a lot of fun to read, and will introduce you to a lot of new ideas, but it’s also full of crap and really bad scholarship (see episode 10.4) - it’s definitely worth reading IF you read/watch some critiques. My series is good for chapters 1-5 and i recommend Walter Scheidel’s critique for the rest of the book.
@@kengilliland727 scheidel isn’t a youtuber, his review is a scholarly journal article: www.academia.edu/69494234/Resetting_Historys_Dial_A_Critique_of_David_Graeber_and_David_Wengrow_The_Dawn_of_Everything_A_New_History_of_Humanity
@@abstractalien12345 they’re not, but they don’t have projectile weapons which is one of the main ways that it’s hypothesized that people we able to be egalitarian. the point was just to argue that humans probably started as immediate return foragers vs practicing food storage etc, though that could be incorrect
@WHATISPOLITICS69 wouldnt that point to the food production not being determinative, then? To be honest, I agree with a lot of your criticism of the book. I think Grabgrow would have been more persuasive if they argued against materialism being a SOLE determiner instead of rejecting it entirely. There is also a lot to be said of the fact that humans can consciousness change their material conditions, but they seem to want to chalk it all up to ideas. Only ideas or only material conditions both seem reductionist, in my opinion
@@abstractalien12345 it’s not just food production that’s determinitive, it’s the factors related to that type of food production which (combined with the existence of projectile weapons) that make hierarchy impossible long term and I agree, choice exist, limited by the constraints of material conditions - that’s how I think is the way to think of it
Wow, thank you! Can't wait for the next episode in this series, but will watch some of your other vids in the meantime (meager patreon support is on the way to you, would love to be able to pay your salary, but alas... capitalism has me by the balls and is happily watching me suffer:) What I love about you: your fierce, funny no bullshit points; your passion for this topic which also lights me up; your hutzpa to go toe to toe with 'giants' and beat them; your persistence in the face of challenging conditions; your research and thought work in this vital arena. Thank you for sharing yourself with us, despite the consequences. You rock! I would love to connect with you as I have also wadded into the shit of human social power, tho from a participatory/practical perspective. About 12 years ago I was excommunicated from my spiritual community of 18 years for asking a question of my teacher. Just a question, not an inflammatory one (IMHO) but nevertheless my head was put on a spike for all to see and shun. This along with other experiences and observations of humanity led me into a deep dive into the question of what is power and why humans unbelievably suck at sharing it even when our existence is doomed for our lack of capacity to do so effectively. Long story a bit shorter: under very difficult circumstances, I researched and published a body of work grounded in theory which translates into a praxis of healthy social power theoretically applicable in any group of humans who are trying to achieve something together with the hope that perhaps if we can increase the effectiveness of our mission-driven organizations, we might stand a chance as a species. Over the 10 years I've been teaching this work in organizations, I've seen groups committed to sharing power operate much more effectively, and I've seen the resistance that emerges when our addiction to power and control surfaces. The methodology was published as an MVP (minimum viable product) and is under constant research, review, and iteration. Might you be open to a conversation?
that’s super interesting - i don’t understand what a minimum viable product is though - is there something i can read on this? and sure send me an email, i give it at the end of each episode - there’s only so much correspondence I can do, my friends are always pissed at me for ignoring them, and i have like months old conversations to catch up on, but always curious about what everyone has to say and if you don’t have money don’t send me money! i don’t make a lot of money but i do earn a living! i do want money, but just from people who have enough to spare! and honestly, anyone can get on youtube and criticize big guys, i don’t think it’s super brave, and there aren’t any real consequences for me since I’m not in academia anymore!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 thanks so much for your prompt reply, will email with more details. thanks too for your solidarity around money, tho I meant to better convey my yearning to support your work, and others on the margins like you, and the frustration I feel at my limitations. I also appreciate your candor around your bravery, or lack thereof :) and amend my compliments to an aspiration to put my perspectives on humanity into the public sphere with equal aplomb.
I've thought before that you really need to study some sociology and psychology to understand humanity. Now I'm thinking that anthropology might be needed too.
What the late Graeber and Wengrow seem to set out in the book is the schizogenesis practice of people. In practice this is a seemingly effective way to see how cultures develop and see how the history of people is that we play/do/respond to how other groups treat each other over periods of time and geographies. This analysis that they present is not only a new way to see how humans interact with each other (bong rip) but a predictable account of what humans do in response to wherever they are, therefore we can apply it to the future which might be an invaluable human insight (tab taken). They did not make this clear enough in the introductory parts of the book however that is how they practice in showing how cultures develop in the rest of the book almost in every case when they are not pointing out cases that hierarchies did not develop. However you are completely justified in your critic. What people value is to help their survival. The core theme of the book really should be rephrased however the heart of the debate if they showed the sources of inequality is almost showing that our approach to what inequality is, which so often is with the materials of whatever humans say they are or necessary for survival (enter prevalent examples that you point out), so that there is inequality available to happen in the first place. What is introduced is a concept of playful experimentation of what we think values can be. Values placed in games, homage to the dead, kings with no power, and what other people find value in other things/concepts/religious doctrines. What we find value in is what is played around with. This can be exemplified with the material culture of whatever group we can find. The value that we place is something of a matter of choice, which in a time and place where we can seemingly can do anything that we socially organize to do is revolutionary given that whatever materials we need is something seemingly available (miliarial power or working towards the singularity)((drunken rage to fuck'em all or LSD trip to be all knowing god)). The premise of the book should only be around Schizogenesis in how humans interact with value not the origins of inequality, but when the value of things seems to be a choice given a surplus of any other resource which a human can value is what is being challenged. Value in things that do not matter to survival which also seemed to happen in these cities that seem to crop up. They are challenging the value we place in anything which is practiced in schizovalueorientationsis (muhaha). ((codename schizmogenesis).
haha schizovaluorientationsis… i think the schizmogenesis stuff in the book is interesting and i think it does apply sometimes, but like you said you can’t explain hierarchy at ALL by schizmogenesis. the example they gave about the yurok vs the pacifc northwest coast peoples was a really bad example as I’ll cover when i do chapter 5. why would the yurok base their entire culture on opposing the people to their north, even though they didn’t have all that much contact with them day to day, but all the PNWC people who would regularly fight and kill eachother and enslave eathother choose to adopt very similar cultures to eachother? and when you do have schizmogenesis, cultures usually are very conscious of it and talk about it a lot (think about USA vs USSR in cold war). this was not the case in the california vs PNWC people. you just had one legend… instead the materialist explanation that they authors want to reject gives us a very simple answer. in the north they all based their economy on salmon because they had no better alternatives even though it meant lots of war and raiding, and in the south, despite having a lot of salmon they based their economy on acorns because salmon means war and raiding, and they did have an alternative. and in the shatter zone in between is where you would have more of a range of options so you would expect a mix. and if you do believe the schizmogenesis explanation, it makes sense that there would be more material room for that in an area in between two ecological zones.
As this was intended to be the first of a three part series, it seems possible - perhaps likely - that the obvious gaps were intended to be approached in the following parts of the trilogy. Only Wengrow has the answer to that now…
i can’t blame them for gaps or oversimplifying of some mistakes - any grand book covering huge topics like this is bound to have a lot of these and require some correction (guns germs and steel for example). but there’s a level of making things up, insulting entire fields of study with fake accusations, and just really crazy nonsensical arguments that I don’t think a future volume would really compensate for!
In spite of his haircut and his red star trek jersey, his commentary was well worth the listen. This guy presents a very well reasoned critique of a book I was thinking to purchase which now I probably will.
Your confident and blunt delivery is really refreshing, as is your commitment to real emancipatory politics. Keep it up!
Yeah so I’m in the third chapter and after the first I was so confused by the thesis that I’ve mainly just been listening for the interesting anthropological anecdotes. Really love the fact that I recently found this channel and you also decided to focus on Graeber, whose work I’ve been increasingly interested in, and help me work through it all. The topic of political anthropology is relatively new to me and I find it so fascinating due to how much it breaks down ideological walls. Keep up the good work!
it’s definitely filled with amazing anthropological and historical anecdotes - but then it prevents us from learning anything from them! Hopefully I’m fixing that!
This series was recommended to me by a friend when we are talking about some of the disagreements we have with the theses presented in "The Dawn of Everything", and I am really surprised with the quality of your videos and with how well-researched and well-articulated they are. Definitely some of the best content I came across recently. Keep up the good work!
thank you!
this series is beyond excellent
this makes me want to study even more and really dig into the books i intend to read.
And beyond needed
I found you from a reddit thread about the origin of patriarchy. Really cool channel, you're very well spoken and clearly educated and highly knowledgeable. I know nothing about these topics but hopefully watching your videos will change that!
thanks!
This is amazing work. I appreciate this effort. It's like my school was run by "lizard" people.
your channel is by far one of my favorites EVER. your delivery and humor make it insanely easy and fun to digest an hour long video, i feel like i'm sitting at a friend's house just discussing stuff, very chill and approachable. leftist circles need more of this and less of that stuffy academic posturing that turns so many people away. when my material conditions improve a bit i would love to join your patreon, in the meantime i'm gonna spread your channel around as much as i can. keep fighting the good fight! 💪
hey thanks so much i love to hear that. honestly i’m pretty surprised people can manage to watch 1h10m of this, even though i do like it myself! no worries about money, take care of yourself and your friends/family first!
No work in the queues today, this channel will get me through the day.
Hard to describe how much I appreciate and esteem this channel. Thank you Daniel. What you’re doing is incredibly valuable and important.
I’m especially enjoying how you’re disentangling this book.
Great video.
I have really enjoyed listening to Graeber and Wengrow, so I was somewhat skeptical at the title of this video. But at the same time, I did feel some kind of contradiction in my mind about my own conclusions and/or ideas about human development throughout time. And the idea that people used to have flexibility in social roles sounds interesting, but I have to admit, I don't know what to do with that now that you mention it. I thought maybe I just needed to think about it more.
But I find your criticism very clear, concise, and convincing.
when i do chapter 4 ill explain how to apply the materialist stuff to actually building egalitarian institutions that do what you want them to do
Another great video! Plus I'm loving the new intro music!
Man, the thing you said about Occupy's epic failure being a causal factor in the decline of anarchism and re-emergence of tankies... that hurts, that really hurts. I hadn't thought of it before but it makes sense.
The fact that the material conditions that made political/economic hierarchy possible existed for a long time before this hierarchy actually emerged gives me hope for the future. Because as you said the conditions to eliminate that hierarchy have already emerged. Just like it was for our ancestors, it may also take us a long time for our social structure to catch up to the new material conditions, but it seems almost inevitable that it will eventually. Of course we will have to work hard to make it happen, but the table has tilted back in our favor.
"as we'll see in future
episodes we can't predict the future but
despite obvious reasons to be
pessimistic the material conditions of
the advanced industrialized world that
we live in today actually recreates a
lot of the same conditions that make
equality possible in immediate return
hunter-gatherer societies in all sorts
of interesting and key ways and when we
look at that we'll see that the
ingredients for a much more egalitarian
and libertarian world are all there"
Holy shit, I'm sooooo excited for this! Just when I thought this series couldn't get any better.
Btw, have you heard of the Open Source Ecology project? It has great potential for helping make material autonomy even more accessible. I think it could be an important supplement/support to revolutionary class struggle.
Sadly I'm becoming quite disillusioned with David Graeber. Not because he's wrong, that's forgivable, it's because this book seems so intentionally misleading and dishonest. It really upsets me. Not to mention the subtle way this book is undermining the very political goals he intended to support. Wtf, Graeber.
I can’t know for sure if occupy caused tankie resurgence, but I’ve definitely heard a few leninists cite occupy as a turning point away from anarchism for them if they’re older, or else as an example of why anarchism is pathetic etc if they’re young. Also I think for younger people there’s reading stalinist history without having any contact with anyone who lived through it.
I think the reason it took a long time for hierarchy to emerge after agriculture is more about it being easy to escape, and that the more populated the world got, it became easier and easier to enforce hierarchy and harder and harder to escape it - but for us and for the future, you have to keep in mind that the time frame in terms of a lag is extremely short - like the internet has only been around since like 1992 or whatever, algorithms, computational power - all very recent - if it takes another 50 or 100 or even 200 years that’s still pretty damned fast for a major change. likely it will take economic crises or environmental crises to get average people to be more receptive to new ideas, but it’s hard to imagine things going on as they are, the system as it is just eats itself over time, and now that it’s so globalized there is nowhere for it to go.
I have not heard of the Open Source Ecology Project i’ll look into it!
It’s really hard for me to assess Graeber at this point - like his writing is so exciting and imaginative and inspiring, but it’s so laden with bullshit and right wing crap. As I’m reading the book closely now, and remembering his other work I think he actually does not believe that a totally free and equal society is possible at all, and that such a thing is childish and not possible or desirable for humans.
About dishonesty - on one hand he says in the book that he acknowledges material world affects things like social structure, but says that he wants to focus on the agency and choice and freedom aspect more - so that seems like an excuse - but then he’s constantly shitting on theories and writers and then acting like their ideas make no sense, but then hiding the explanations they provide for their theories … plus we live in an era where everyone already thinks everything is a matter of choice and agency, and nobody has any clue about how material factors affect culture or social structure. We don’t need yet another book making us shortsighted and confused …
I basically think he was an ideologically incoherent mess .. a lot of the stuff people criticize anarchism for. And a lot of what seems like academic dishonestly is actually incredible laziness and sloppiness, which is standard in academia, it’s crazy.
It’s also extremely hard to write a huge book like that.
I’d be curious to see what his reactions would have been to the sorts of critiques I’m making in these videos, but that can’t happen. And I think the stuff i’m critiquing is mostly Graeber not so much Wengrow, except maybe the ice age stuff, so I don’t know that he would have much to say about it. I dunno.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I'll take your word for it regarding your assessment of Graeber. Still disappointing for him to be such a confused mess but better than him being outright manipulative and dishonest. I had evicted him from my heart but I guess now I can let him back in, even if I'm shaking my head.
Thank you for shedding light on complex political theories and their implications 🙌 🙌
I have one question...
What can individuals do to challenge oppressive hierarchies?
in general the key to that is join up into groups to leverage your bargaining power in various ways … you can’t really change anything at scale without being organized into a larger coalition
This book is now being released here in Brasil, and this weekend one of the country's two biggest newspapers published an interview with Wengrow about it. I've got almost zero reading on anthropology and had Graeber as an author whose work I would like to know better (even though all the no-demands debacle). I had never heard about this book and got really excited with the ideas discussed at the interview, about democratic practices popping up in originary communities on several continents and about the debate over how the colonizers contact with the ideas about democracy and freedom of the peoples they were trying to colonyze might have ignited the development of the narratives we still have in common sense (and above all, in right wing common sense) about pre-history and "human nature".
I've shared the interview with friends and some FB pages, but then a friend asked me if I was aware of some critics the book had received, and the first link he recommend me was this video. I started watching it planning to just skip over some bits to get a hold of the main ideas before watching the whole thing another night, but couldn't let go of it and had to watch it to the end. So, thank you, really, the content you're building here around this book is just great, it seems like an obligatory companion for reading it if someone wants to get a hold of how all these examples they bring can be organized in a whole body of knowledge.
I was thinking about your comment at the beggining about how Graeber and Wengrow's book try to fill an existing gap (even if they fail at it) of organizing lots of reference in a thread that can be followed by people interested on the subject (specially people like me, that didn't have a prior formal contact with anthropology and it's main theories) and I've found out I really couldn't remember any author or book being recommended to me as an introduction or general presentation of the field, with it's main frameworks, categories, debates, contemporary researches, etc, as I've seen about other fields. So, I wanted to know if you have any book or maybe even video series to recomend with that intent (even if it may be dated against more recent theories). As I'm reading István Mészáros's Marx's Theoy of Alienation right now, I was wondering if you're aware of all the "ontology" debate in Marx, Lukács and Mészáros work, and weather it is discussed (even if negatively) at left-wing anthropology circles.
Again, thank you for the great job you're doing and for all the references you're sharing with us, I will watch all the videos you've released.
OK, looking at your other videos titles, I think I'm gonna treat your channel as that introduction.
@@MrZevers yes, i was just going to write that unfortunately, there’s no really great introduction to these topics that I know of. i think it’s useful to read the book to get your mind going about the questions to think about, and to watch / listen to my stuff to clean up all the garbage and get re-oriented in the right direction. and while there isn’t one comprehensive introduction, check out the stuff that I put in the bibliograhies, lots of great mind blowing stuff to read.
and no i don’t know anything about the ontology debate, sounds a bit esoteric for me, but might be relevant, i really just don’t know anything about it
I don't agree that the message of the book is that humans choose their political arrangements and that materialist considerations are therefore irrelevant in explaining the development of particular social and political phenomena. The message that I took from the book was that certain political arrangements, once they arise, retard the otherwise natural development of the human ability to imagine alternative systems. The point is not that we are free to choose, the point is that we have the natural capacity to imagine, and that when that capacity gets blunted (through political systems in which we are excluded from the dialectics of group decisions) we are more likely to accept the political situation we are in as inevitable or natural.
but what you’re saying is perfectly compatible with what I said, and they in fact make both of those arguments.
they do specifically say in chapter 5 that they want to focus on conscious choice, and over and over they argue that this or that social arrangement was a conscious choice in defiance of any sense. and they never say that material conditions are irrelevant, but they do specifically argue against or insult or ignore every material explanation for all the phenomena they describe, and they even go so far as to making things up in order to drive that point (see my episode 10.4 or read walter scheidel’s critique of the Hiding in Plain Sight chapter for some surprising examples of this).
I don’t see how you can read this book and not get the message that social structures are a matter of choice.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 You do it by not starting with the assumption that the authors are trying to make that assertion. You have at least explained why you personally find it to be so challenging not to bring this assumption to the reading, but rest assured this is not an assumption that most readers will bring, and therefore they will not be limited to the interpretive options that are open to you, and therefore the text will not have the dialectical impact that you seem to fear it will have for the vast majority of people who read it.
Like I explained above, I read their first preview articles with an open mind, and came to my conclusions BY READING THE TEXT and because I KNOW THE SOURCE MATERIAL THAT THEY ARE MANGLING. My preconceived notions about the book come from READING THE PREVIEW CHAPTERS OF THE BOOK. These preview chapters say the exact same thing as the book.
I am trying to convey what the actual source material is to the audience so that you can see what I see. That you have completely missed all of this makes me guess that this episode is the only one you’ve seen.
I don’t know what a “dialectical impact” is but I do know from experience is that people in general have very little understanding of how material factors affect ideology and social structure and values, and that people already generally think that everything is a choice. I also know from experience that people also generally don’t think egalitarian human social organization is possible because they think it’s against human nature.
I also know from experience that before this stupid book came out and the stupid preview articles from the book, I used to be able to explain to people that human beings are capable of egalitarianism and I used to point to how most human beings were probably living in egalitarian societies until deep into the holocene era, and now after the book came out half the time people tell me (totally incorrectly) that Graeber and Wengrow have debunked that idea or that (totally incorrectly) Graeber and Wengrow have shown that the latest scholarship has debunked that idea.
So on the one hand I see Graeber and Wengrow reinforcing everyone’s bad ideas about agency and materialism that they get from media and the education system, and then I see that they’ve injected total bullshit into their heads that makes people think humans have always had inequality.
I see that the book gives people hope that we can change our social system, but I also see that it prevents readers from having the tools to actually do anything to make that happen. It’s just feel good pablum.
If it does any good it’s because it’s asked the right questions and pointed people in the direction of anthropology, and then maybe people will stumble on all the literature on immediate return societies, and it also give me the opportunity to tie up a lot of loose ends in anthropology and present a very coherent materialist framework for understanding social structure and hierarchy and equality which at this point is scattered around hundreds of academic articles.
Dude! This is exactly the kind of video I'm looking for! I too am trying to look for the origins of inequality in anthropology! 😅
check episodes 6 and 7 as well! i get into it there
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 yep! Just watched those! Thanks! I'm basically doing the equivalent of going back to school for this! 😅
I love this video, and your channel. One thing that makes me hesitant to share it at times is the bad-faith ridiculing (complete with insulting imagery) of the ideas/points you are criticizing. (one example being the big bird/dora the explorer/etc analogy). Your arguments are strong enough that they won't lose their potency even if you present the opposing side in a fair or positive light. Thinking along the lines of the Srsly Wrong style. (just my two cents!)
hi - i appreciate the criticism - i go back and forth on whether it’s constructive or not to be mocking in that way, but ultimately I keep coming back to how very insulting and upsetting the book is to me, because of how badly it distorts what fellow left wing anthropologists think and say, and how dishonest that is. I feel like they’re just taking advantage of their readers’ ignorance in order to pump them full of what they think is a hopeful positive message. so i feel like it’s fair game to use humour to point those things out…
but maybe you’re right, and I’m sure it does turn some people off. though I would say that I am presenting their arguments in a fair light, in that I’m not misrepresenting them, even if I am mocking them. no?
Oh wow, and I just saw that you subscribed to the patreon despite your criticism! I really appreciate that! I haven’t actually heard Srsly Wrong yet, I guess I should ASAP!
I agree with the response. His ridiculing humor appeals to me, but I dont think it was bad faith. He wasnt misrepresenting their ideas at all. And as far as ridicule goes, it was pretty tame, imo. It was used to express his feelings about the book in a way most people will understand. Plus, imo, it makes the whole thing less dry and more relatable. He speaks to his audience frankly and hes open about how he feels without being pc for the sake of being pc.
I get what you are saying, but this is a myth that people on the left love to cling to. For some reason they think that you will score some points for civility, *when civility has mostly been used as a weapon and a limiting condition by those who have the luxury of being civil all the time* (which is much easier to do when one is in power). The definitions of civility are also established by these same people in power, who will move the goalpost on ‘what is civil?’ whenever it suits them.
You really uploaded a new video. Wow!!! Thank you so much...
I am a big fan of David Graeber's writings and I am happy that you are building in the same direction. I work in a lower-class environment (but publicly employed) where there are a lot of far-right and racist leanings, and people are confused about roles and places in the power hierarchy.
i find a lot of people have some racist or right wing ideas, but they’re basically on the left, though they’re attracted to the messaging of the right and then end up voting for things they don’t want all the time. that’s why i started this series, but i ended up presenting in a way that connects iwth a more educated audience. in the future i’m going to be doing stuff to try to connect with a more apolitical audience and less university crowd.
btw what’s an example of that from your experience? of confusion etc
These are great critiques so far. I'm telling myself that your are helping me concretely many of the things that are irking me as I read this book, but honestly I might just be the kind of person that believes the last thing I hear. Either way good arguments!
haha, apparently that’s how trump chose pence as VP - kushner knew that he agrees w the last person he speaks to so he made sure he met him at the right time and he switched from christie to pence
Let's goooooo my boy is back! I been waiting for this, I ain't even start this shit but I know it's bout to be 🔥🔥🔥
I don’t understand nearly enough about politics but I do understand what it means to wear that uniform. Be safe, my friend!
starfleet keep us all safe!
Thanks so much for this. I think for laymen out there, they tend to think of scholars as "the truth" and so it's useful to see they are as subject to errors or muddled thinking as anyone. Keep up these great videos!
this is a long comment, sorry!
i read the essay about the demands controversy you cited, and interpreted it quite differently. the 90% rule was adopted within days of the initial occupation; it wasn't done to counter the demands wg. one of the main organizers of the Demands Working Group straight up says they assembled a coalition to show up and overwhelm the GA when they couldn't reach the supermajority.
elsewhere, interviewing some of the antidemands faction, it comes up that the demands wg didn't participate in the GA, and only showed up to try to get their demands foisted on the movement. they went on to speak to journalists as representatives for the movement, they complained that some influential radicals in the Facilitating Working Group would not go forward on an initiative unless there was consensus as a bad thing.
i also don't understand why the criticism of the 1381 peasant revolt was that they made demands, then lost everything, followed by a criticism of occupy, which refused to make demands, but restarted the NA socialist movement. the argument at the time, reflected in the essay, was that a movement that makes demands ceases to be revolutionary. where occupy went wrong was its inability to defend itself, and its endless catering to liberals and moderates (who did not defend them when the police presence became unrelenting). occupy oakland is usually pointed to as the most effective occupation, and they broke a lot of the rules committed to in zuccotti, and i believe its most lasting impact has been the relative embrace of combative direct action in the social movements since.
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i will have to rewatch the entire video, but im several chapters in and i don't follow the materialist argument you're making. they give examples of seasonal societies that adopt hierarchy in one part of the year, and others that do the opposite in the same part of the year, others that have the same structure thru the whole year, all in varying material conditions that show that there isn't a hard rule of social structure relating to relative scarcity. some societies adopted hierarchy during the wet season while others did just the opposite.
describing some societies as generally free outside of religious rituals seems generally dishonest to me though. it seems a lot like saying that i'm free whenever i'm not in court. the existence of the state contextualizes literally everything, so i disagree with them and with bob black (in Wild Justice) who believes that everything that isn't resolved by a police officer is technically anarchist. hegemony shapes everything, and i just don't believe it can be coherently argued that a society is totally uninfluenced by periodic displays or executions of overwhelming force. the role of religion as the second most common precursor for politogenesis (behind patriarchy, a precondition for all known stateless societies that became states) as summarized by gelderloos in Worshiping Power seems relevant.
i havent gotten to their explanation of gendered domination yet (though im aware of Graeber's argument in Debt about the origin of patriarchy), and im curious of how it may square with camilla power's review from a few years ago. you mention that they ignore 200K years of egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, but it seems like the sampling they have could be extrapolated back forever. some societies were egalitarian, some werent, and some were in between. to me it strengthens the argument that there isn't a default state of egalitarianism that is no longer attainable now that we live in societies with complicated technology, regular surpluses, and simplex (or totally anonymous) interdependent relationships. it echoes gelderloos' argument that anti-authoritarian societies were the ones that made a conscious choice to be so, rather than an inevitable structure arising from material conditions.
finally, the snark was a little over the top here. you're making important arguments, but i feel you are unfairly misrepresenting them, which can make it seem like you arent acting in good faith.
About the occupy article - are you getting that from your own experiences or something? The article I cited doesn’t say any of what you’re saying, and it’s a harsh critique of the anti-demands organizers, exactly as I presented it. Maybe your narrative is correct but that’s not at all how Kang describes it. And didn’t Occupy Oakland actually make demands?
The criticism of 1381 wasn’t at all that they made demands - where did you get that?? The criticism of the 1381 peasants is that they didn’t understand how their political system worked such that they stupidly believed the King when he told them that he was going to meet all their demands, whereas they should have just deposed him and taken over the country.
The parallel to Occupy is the stupid confused ideas about how politics works, not the existence demands or no demands.
About societies that change structure seasonally - it’s not about a hard rule relating to more or less scarcity = more or less hierarchy, or about winter = hierarchy or summer = equality or vice versa - that’s not how materialism works when it comes to dominance hierarchy. It’s about the conditions particular to each society that give some people advantages that they could use to dominate others at some parts of the year, but not at other parts. In some societies that would be in winter, and other societies that would be in summer. You’ll see when I cover that part of chapter 3 what I mean specifically for those societies, but I explain it in a more general fashion in the video i’ll be releasing next week.
Dominance hierarchy is not a “choice” it’s something that’s imposed by some people on other people against their wishes. If people are choosing it, then it’s a democratic hierarchy which is an entirely different beast, and the authors confuse the two, which is one reason why the book is a big stupid mess of nonsense.
I don’t understand this sentence that you wrote: “describing some societies as generally free outside of religious rituals seems generally dishonest to me though.” I don’t know what you’re referring to, and I don’t remember saying that, so I can’t respond. Please rephrase and specify.
About their explanation of gendered domination in Debt and in Dawn of Everything - it’s total nonsense! They’re babbling on about sumerian temples, which is ludicrous, because you had gendered domination in australia 4000 miles away from any urban centre. Gender domination starts with patrilocal residence, which is a formation that favours defence, but that puts women at a severe bargaining power disadvantage. It exists in various hunter gatherer bands and probably existed on and off in the palaeolithic in places where there was a lot of competition. The relationship between male dominance and patrilocal residence is well known and it’s shocking that the authors are pretending that male domination is some kind of mystery. The reason they do that is because the whole book is predicated on the nonsensical idea that social structure (including dominance hierarchy) is a choice rather than a power struggle where conditions often determine the winners and losers. Patrilocal residence is the result of conditions (frequent conflict) so they can’t go there and they can’t argue against it, since it’s so obviously correct, ergo they need to pretend that it’s some kind of mystery or that it’s sumerian temples. Graeber makes the same stupid argument in Debt.
I don’t remember what Camilla Power said specifically that you’re referring to, but I know that she understands very well that patrilocal residence causes male domination, and I generally agree with her on most things.
As for Graeber and Wengrow’s rejection of egalitarian origins - if you read chapter 3 carefully (i’m just finishing my edit of the review of the part dealing with this) you’ll notice that they actually don’t present any evidence at all against egalitarian origins! Zero! Nothing at all!
Their one single argument against egalitarian origins is that since people came in different shapes and sizes and lived in different environments, then we have to assume that they had a wide diversity of social arrangements in terms of the existence or absence of dominance hierarchy! That’s literally their only argument!
And if you understand how dominance hierarchy works (which I wouldn’t expect you or most people to!), you would understand that is a completely idiotic assumption.
Everything else they say in that section is just smoke and mirrors designed to make you think that they’re presenting contrary evidence to egalitarian origins, but they just aren’t. They’re just citing a bunch of irrelevant facts and presenting them as if they somehow contradict egalitarian origins.
They pretend that anthropologists believe that all humans were the exact same kind of immediate return small bands egalitarian hunter gatherers for 250,000 years, which no one believes anymore - and then they’re talking about upper palaeolithic societies that were organized a little differently but that were also probably egalitarian as well, which even they admit by the end of the chapter.
They criticize Christopher Boehm for believing in egalitarian origins, but they conveniently leave out the part of his book where he explains his reasoning, and then they pretend to be all confused about why he believes what he believes. I cover this in the episode I’m releasing next week.
And all the stuff they say about monumental architecture is abject nonsense - gobleki tepe was built in the holocene era, after the end of the palaeolithic. It has nothing to do with the palaeolithic or human origins. it was built in conditions that didn’t exist and that were not possible in the palaeolitic.
and mammoth houses are not monumental architecture by any stretch of the imagination - most of them are small igloo sized tents, and the biggest ones are 30ft by 30ft, and they’re very similar in size to structures that the relatively egalitarian arctic inuit built in recent times.
And even the authors say by the end of the chapter that all the rich burials are likely also from egalitarian societies. I actually don’t believe that - but either way, upper palaeolithic europe is completely different from the conditions that humans originated in. So if their was some hierarchy in upper palaeolithic, so what? I would expect there to be some hierarchy in those conditions. It’s simply not relevant to our origins.
Read Boehm and Sarah Hrdy and you’ll get a better idea of why people believe in egalitarian origins, and you’ll also see how deceptive or at least sloppy and incoherent Dawn of Everything is.
What’s dishonest is not my well deserved snarkiness, it’s this fucking piece of shit of a book!
Everything in this book is predicated on the audience not knowing anything about the subjects being discussed. If you do know the literature you see immediately what complete garbage it is - so much so that most of it isn’t even wrong, it’s just nonsense.
I can’t explain to you how awful this book is without going over every paragraph with a fine toothed comb and teaching you the ABCs of human origins and anthropology - which is what I’m ending up doing unfortunately… I’ve done 4 episodes on this stupid book, and I’m only half way through chapter 3.
At least that’s true for chapters 1, 3, 4 and 5. The rest of the book I don’t have enough knowledge to have a strong opinion on besides parts here and there. There are some parts I really like, but given how badly they mangle the parts I do know about, I just can’t trust the rest.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 my opinion/experience is only a couple sentences starting with "where occupy went wrong". everything preceding it is described in the essay you cited. the author is obviously partial to the demands faction, tho i felt they did a good job of attempting impartiality. not familiar with what happened in sacramento, i fully expect that each occupation had it's own culture (one of the colorado occupations nominating a dog as the leader comes to mind).
even in the reply just now, you refer to the demands they made on the king instead of just actually putting their society into place that they wanted. that's what occupy tried to do, generally speaking.
the comment on the religious stuff was me agreeing with something you said in the video about GW's several mentions of temporary hierarchy during religious ceremonies.
i'm not sure that GW are advocating an idealism; i dont see the book as a refutation of a dialectical materialism. many/most people do consider that society has developed in stages relative to scarcity though, who is the audience they are writing to, and that seems like a positive contribution to me. these guys are teachers that have a pretty good idea on common myths from engaging with thousands of students over the years, and it matches my personal observations as well. looking forward to what you have to say about materialism in the video.
i didn't catch a refutation of egalitarian origins either. the way i read it (especially the early parts of the book where they lay out the project) was that they are saying it doesn't really matter; that there aren't material circumstances which doom a society to hierarchy and states, since we observe hierarchical and non-hierarchical societies in every kind of material conditions.
they make a note about the mammoth houses, anticipating the criticism. their argument is that their monumentality is relative. i guess you disagree.
im only familiar with Mothers and Others, and have gotten an understanding of boehm second hand. sounds like i will need to pick up a book though.
must say that it's exciting to be collectively digesting a book. never in my life have so many people been reading and discussing the same book at the same time.
Ooops - i means occupy oakland made demands, i don’t know why i brain farted sacramento. Colorado leader seems like a questionable move, but very entertaining!
The difference between 1381 and Occupy in terms of transforming society vs making demands is that the 1381 revolutionaries were actually in a position to transform their society. Occupiers were not. Occupy was however in a great position to put pressure on the government, but they neglected to do so for reason that in my opinion were very misguided and foolish. I don’t see how Occupiers expected to transform society by doing nothing… The point of my critique is that in both cases the 1381er and Occupiers did wasted the leverage they had, though the amount of leverage was very different.
I think Graeber and Wengrow very much are arguing an anti-materialist position when it comes to dominance hierarchy. The point of the book is that we can choose our own social structures and we’re not bound by material conditions. That’s the opposite of how we need to look at things if we want to change our society. Dominance hierarchy is caused by conditions which give some people advantages over others. If you want to eliminate a dominance hierarchy you need to identify those conditions and fight to change those conditions. If you try to change society without changing those conditions, even if you succeed at first they changed will be reversed due to the conditions that generated the hierarchy in the first place. Graeber and Wengrow’s approach confuses dominance and democratic hierarchy and doesn’t help us understand how hierarchy works or what to do about it. That’s why I’m wasting so much time on the book!
I agree with you that the authors argue that you have hierarchy and equality in all sorts of different conditions, but in Chapter 3 they very explicitly argue against egalitarian origins and insist multiple times that inequality has no origins.
You should definitely read Boehm, it’s very easy to read, and whether you end up agreeing with it or not, you can see that Graeber and Wengrow did not give his thesis a fair treatment.
The thing with the mammoth houses besides is that they’re literally just tents similar to what relatively egalitarian inuit built recently. They take a few hours to make. The biggest ones are 30ft by 30ft, also similar to assembly houses inuit built. They’re cool, but the authors present them as if they somehow disprove egalitarian origins, which doesn’t even make any sense. Basically they put forth a false premise that anthropologists all think every human was a 100% egalitarian immediate return hunter gathether society with no agency or variation, and then they talk about mammoth houses as if this proves that wrong. It’s smoke and mirrors.
The book is an amazing read, and very fun and exciting, and I don’t fault you or anyone else for loving it - if I’d read this 20 years ago it would have been my favourite book ever! But it’s very half baked and the worst parts are predicated on readers not knowing the subject matter, and it hampers our ability to actually reverse dominance hierarchy.
And yes, it’s very cool to have these interactions!
Awesome work man! Thank you
Thank you so much for making this. I have wanted to give many of these same explanations to people but couldn't with even a fraction of the thoroughness and eloquence you have.
thank you, i really appreciate that! i think a lot of people who have an anthropology background are pretty pissed off about this book
You’re amazing! Thank you for this gift which I will share and support
Tell me more about your Anarcho-Bertism, is there a mailing list?
good idea, i need to make one….
Absolutely fantastic!! I've been writing a giant newsletter article on the source of much of humanity's problems and how we can begin to build a better world, and these videos play a large part in inspiring and educating that process! Super excited to see your next videos. Hopefully can support you more materially in the near future as well.
I’m doing that too. Please let me know when yours is completed. These videos are very helpful indeed.
@@barnabyflynn965 Oh awesome! Mines is out! Check out my substack called 'The Journal of TechnoWizardry'.
Please let me know when yours is out too. :D
So if IR hunter gatherers had more or at least the same leisure time, this refutes the idea that leisure time was responsible for abstract thinking (science, philosophy, math, religion..etc). But then what was the cause for that? Was it specialization and division of labor? more complex relations to the environment ? elaborate social relations?
The other question I have is was this in one way or another inevitable? in the sense that with enough time, things were going to change to more abstractions and complex relations?
Also is it true that IR HG societies were less violent on avg? after one controls for things like modern medicine. And is it true that they were happier? what are the rates of depression , suicide and mental illness like on those societies?
Why do you think IR foragers don’t have abstract thinking! They certainly do have philosophy and religion, and everyone has some version of science and math.
the cause of highly developped math and science is the need for highly developed math and science, plus of course the time to develop it.
they are less violent in terms of war with other societies which is almost nil, though this has a lot to do with the state stamping down on wars. But they all have a strong anti aggression ethic, and they don’t have the problem of feuding that so many horticultural and pastoralist societies have.
compared to western countries though, they do have a significant amount of murders, because literally everyone has deadly weapons so when a serious fight breaks out it can be deadly.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 thanks for the answers. What I mean is in the relative sense, they have much much less of it.
I am not sure if abstract thinking developed simply because there was a need for it. Some did but all of it? What was the need for Greek science and philosophy? What did Copernicus , Newton and Galileo gain by developing laws of motion of the planets? The use came hundreds of years later. The Islamic science of the middle ages was driven mostly by patronage, so was much of renaissance science.
I wonder if you can do a vid on the religion and type of math IR HG societies have. Thanks alot, jus subbed.
Thank you for making and distributing this quality content. Knew Manvir back in grad school. Glad to know he's working on such foundational stuff.
cool - i think i disagree with him on this particular issue, but he does cool stuff - often posts very interesting articles and things on twitter
Ok settling into this and just wanted to say I love your shirt!
haha thanks - old navy with a patch i sewed on
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 by the way, this is a tour de force - my favourite one of your videos so far. Practically a summarization of my anthropology and geology degrees. Great work!
Love your work man - I am posting it far and wide.
Can you link me to the article you mentioned which challenges the book's theory about 'egalitarian cities'?
I find this claim highly dubious.
i don’t know enough to evaluate - from what i do know i think it is possible, but that the scope of the egalitarianism would be much less than like a gender equal immediate return hunter gatherer band, and that the cities were probably smaller than they make them out to be. I can imagine like a haudenosaunee type society becoming wealthy and sedentary by becoming specialized in trade in some broad economy for other civilizations and managing to maintain relative equality in the process. Anyhow, i’ll post a bibliography in the next week or two, but here’s the article i was referring to: www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thanks mate!
While I was reading that book I realized that while I enjoyed many of the stories and anthropological discoveries they talk about I just couldn't really follow their overarching narrative. There are no catchy theses that just make immediate sense (say what you will about Diamond/Fukuyama/Harari but they do have those).
So it all left me kinda confused in the end, if someone would have asked me what it was all about I would have really struggled to come up with a good answer.
Your videos really helped me to de-pudding my brain.
Would love to hear your thoughts on some of the other explain-it-all books (e.g Origins of political order / The WEIRDest People in the World)
thanks! it’s interesting how people get different impressions about what the message of the book is. i’ve noticed a few people saying the same thing as you, that it has no thesis, and others saying it’s about how we have the power to shape our social structure and other people saying some weird stuff that clearly isn’t in there at all! i thnk you’ll like the next episodes where i go through the details of chapters 3-5 and give the answers that they omitted.
Thank you so much for this! Best response I’ve found to their book, and I couldn’t agree more
Thank you a lot for these videos, they've taught a lot to me
I am halfway through the book and it seems that their thesis is that we passed in and out of different forms of social organization. That there was much more fluidity and experimentation. The question I think they are raising and hopefully they will answer by the end is how did we get stuck? I look forward to more of your videos on the topic. I don’t think they discard a material analysis. They have a material analysis of why slavery existed in the Northwest coast and how those in California that found slavery and the hierarchy of those to their North avoided the same modes of production. Am I mistaken?
hi! I do think you’re incorrect there - I don’t have detailed notes for chapter 5 yet (about the california vs pacific northwest coast cultures) as I’m working on the critique for chapter 3 right now, but from what i remember and looking at it quickly again, the whole point of that chapter is to argue against the behavioural ecology (i.e. materialist) explanations for why those cultures are different, and replace is with the idea of “schizmogenesis” - meaning that the cultures in the sound purposefully made their societies differerent to the cultures in the north not because of economic reasons but because they just didn’t like the ways of the people in the north. The authors even imply that these societies could have been farmers at the beginning of the chapter, insinuating that even hunting and gathering was just a random preference and not related to environmental conditions and considerations.
all of this is a terrible explanation for the differences in the two culture zone, and the materialist ones really explain it all quite nicely in my opinion (and the opinion of just about anyone with any expertise in this) and I’ll explain why i say that when I cover chapter 5.
and you’ll see when they finish the book, that they don’t answer their question of how we got stuck at all! they can’t possibly answer it because 1. they don’t understand how dominance hierarchy works - they think it’s an experiment or a choice rather than something that some people impose on others. 2. they refuse to look at materialist explanations for how we got stuck. for example their whole theory about how about fluidity and experimentation implies that people were just experimenting randomly and not as an adaptation to circumstances, which they expressly try to downplay.
the whole point of the book is to make it look like social structure is something we can just choose a new social structure if we want to. i agree that it’s possible to change our social structure, but not because social structure is a random choice we can make, but because the material conditions we live in today make it possible to do that.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I agree they lean into the "schizmogenesis" hypothesis a lot, but as part of that analysis of living in opposition was also a re-ordering of their material lives. One example given was the avoiding of fishing as a primary source of food even though it would have more of a caloric reward for the effort to put it. Which to me points to they were aware that how they shaped their material relations would prevent falling into a hierarchical/slave society like that of the North. I didn't read that as just a choice to live differently but a much deeper awareness that their material relations shaped their cultural lives.
I am just a normie when it comes to material analysis so I could be very off in what I am seeing in the book. But I am seeing material analysis weaved throughout the book. Sometimes as an explanation of how things came about and sometimes societies not being essentially victims of the material conditions but reshaping them to rework their social lives. I think the book could have used a lot more structure and could have been much more explicit in their material analysis, I also really like your Ernie analogy. In a world without intellectual property law I could imagine that this book could be rewritten into a much more cohesive narrative.
so it’s basically impossible to completely escape materialist analysis, and graeber and wengrow even admit that material conditions limit our choices, but basically the point of the book is to de-emphasize the role of material/circumstancial influences and highlight agency and choice.
so for example, from memory (so i might be getting some details wrong) with the california example you’re talking about - the consensus explanation for the differences in their economies is that in the south, either there’s not enough salmon to base an economy on, or else if you do create a salmon based economy you will be subject to raiding and attacks from other people who will try to steal your stored salmon. therefore people choose acorns even though acorns are way more work and less nutritious etc.
meanwhile in the north, they don’t have acorns or any good alternatives to salmon, so they have a salmon economy which ends up leading to their hierarchical social structure because it means that some people can monopolize the best territories (and they end up being the chiefly or noble classes) while others end up with less productive territories (and they end up as commoners) while the chiefs go raid for slaves to do the most boring labour for them to keep them in power.
graeber and wengrow are arguing something completely different - they’re saying more or less what you said, that people in the sounds didn’t like hierarchy and they didn’t like the people to the north so they chose to focus on acorns. the authors are making it more about aesthetic and moral preference and trying to negate the practical argument: acorns may suck, but they suck less than getting constantly raided.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I will have to re-read it then. Because what I took away from it was your first points. That they chose not to fish not because of aesthetics but because of the potential consequences of having a fishing based economy, ie...increased violence and hierarchy. They bring up that increased violence and susceptibility to raiding in the North was because fish are processed and then stored vs acorns that are stored unprocessed and are instead processed upon use. So the already processed food would be much more enticing for raiders since all the hard work was already done.
They also bring up that the North didn't have the option of acorns. And they did have a whole theory of how slavery and hierarchy developed in the North due to the large processing demands of the salmon runs, I don't remember all the details though.
However I agree that it gets lumped in and overshadowed a bit by the "schismogenesis" which it would be easy to take away as just being cultural/aesthetic changes. So I think the material arguments are there, but I like you would love to see them explored much more.
@@MarvinRoman i could be wrong, but the way i remember it, they brought up all those arguments that you (and I) listed in order to refute them! and i remember them making some weird argument about how the need for slaves wasn’t about material wealth it was about something else like glory or something, i forget. I’ll look at it properly when i review the chapter
Was wondering when this would drop. So excited!
These videos are brilliant! Well done and thankyou!
thank you!
I'm promoting the hell out of this muppet show. Fun, accessible and straightforward. Thankyou!
definitely should have called this the muppet show!
How is David Graeber not considered an outright reactionary? It sure does sound that way to me. It seems like the main purpose of this book was almost purely reactionary. I almost went to Occupy in my late teens but never actually did because it never quite made sense to me and now I know exactly why. Either David Graeber was a conservative or the world's most incompetent revolutionary.
if you read the book, Graeber and Wengrow’s goal is to convince us that social structure is a choice, so why don’t we choose something less oppressive. definitely not a reactionary goal by any means.
he’s written a lot of great stuff, and some dumb stuff. this is one of the dumb ones, because the premise is foolish.
i think that when he was a student he was exposed to some hippie teachers who romanticized egalitarian foragers into a caricature, and that gave him a prejudice to think that all the literature on them isn’t accurate.
and as a result, he came up with a lot of stupid shit…
Thank you for debunking and lighting this book. I read it 2 months ago and I still can't precipitate its essence. I can't figure out what the message of it is. It does not say anything about what we can do everyday. This is a ode to freedom, autogestion and diversity in social structures. This is still narrow minded. There is a ton of bibliography but i don't feel that this is "thruth". But the book is ultra solid, so much little details, they debunked so much.. my prof is saying that everything is a qjestion of social status and in one little line, they destroy it and say "children have play enough".
It was hard to read through, especially about Indus and Chinese civilisations.. go so lost. And in south america too.. so much material. This is monumental.
i don’t know enough about the indus valley or other ancient civilizations to have an opinion on those sections, but the stuff in the first five chapters is a lot of b.s.! they pretend to debunk stuff that no one believes anymore since 50 years ago and often 100+ years ago. everything is definitely not a question of social status either though!
I kept waiting in vain for an explanation of the red Star Trek shirt, and then I started wondering if the dude would get killed off by a super computer or tortured by the Romulan Tal Shiar. In all seriousness, though, this was a thoughtful and humorous exploration of the material. Cheers.
red shirts need to form a union and overthrow the class hierarchy whereby we do all of the dangerous work!
Finished 10.1 today and what a pleasant surprise that 10.2 came out also today 😀
i wish i could crank out one right after putting out the other one like that too!
I really appreciate what you’re doing with this channel, and enjoyed this video. However, as a review of the Dawn of Everything, it’s a hatchet job and a caricature, based on the false premise that the ‘thesis’ of DOE is that all humans everywhere at all times have a ‘choice’ in what political and economic forms their societies take and that material conditions have no bearing on anything. If I missed where they stated this absurdity as the book’s ‘thesis’, as you’ve repeated numerous times, please clarify where it is they say that. Yes they talk about ‘experimentation’, ‘play’, ‘theatre’ etc but they at least respect their readers intelligence enough to assume that they won’t make the cartoonish logical leaps you’re promoting here, basically putting inane ideas like ‘women got to choose patriarchy’ or ‘slaves got to choose slavery’ into G&W’s mouths (and using the cherry-picking of right wing opportunists as if they actually represented the authors intentions).
It’s a shame you took such an antagonistic approach to the book and it’s authors because otherwise you may have been able to have a dialogue with Wengrow that might have actually been illuminating.
Ironically, the real ‘thesis’ of DOE was that we need to re-open the book on human origins and begin conversations (like this one!) about how we can use the discoveries of the last 50 years of anthropological and archaeological research, including immediate return foragers but also bringing in evidence for early egalitarian cities, evidence for early political revolutions, an indigenous critique of European values etc etc Many times in interviews Graeber and Wengrow both said this was book was intended as a first foray into this re-evaluation of the origins of human society and in no way intended as the final word on the subject - they wanted to open the conversation, (and not just in specialist circles) so that we could broaden our political imaginations.
It’s funny because that’s also how I understand Occupy’s legacy. Opening the book on what a reconstituted 21st century Left might look like and allowing space for open questions. Turns out that, in the years since Occupy, hyper-capitalism and the climate crisis has led a lot of young people to the conclusion that Marxist-Leninism offers a swifter and more decisive strategy for dealing with these existential issues than Graeber’s more open-ended brand of anarchism. I think occupy opened space in the global political imagination in a pretty unique way, and perhaps the young tankies rehabilitating Stalin owe as much to occupy as does the Bernie campaign and BLM, not so much because of its failure to make demands of the state, but because of the questions it raised and the energies it unleashed. (It is a fun little trick to blame the rise of Marxist-Leninism at the expense of anarchism as a Left tendency on the failure of anarchists to act more like Marxist-Leninists)
Hi - a few people have said similar things in terms of me presenting a cartoon version or disingenuous version of their thesis - but I really think this is what they’re saying. Of course they’re not explicitly saying “women choose patriarchy” because that would be idiotic idiotic, but they basically say that when they go off about people “consciously experimenting” and choosing etc and then as an example they talk about how inuit had patriarchy in the winter but not in summer…
And they’re not saying the material world has no influence on social structure or on anything, because again, they know that’s ridiculous, but then every part of the book is designed to focus only on agency and to ignore material influences. They consciously excised every part of the sources that they cite which offer material explanations for the phenomena they describe, and which would answer their thesis questions which they themselves fail to answer!
The only big exception is in chapter 5 when the whole point of the chapter is to argue against material explanations for social structure.
This stuff happens way too much for it to be by accident.
So what I’m doing is just taking their approach to it’s logical conclusion, which is a way of making fun of it, which is why i’m presenting their thesis in such a cartoonish way.
I think this will be more clear once I do chapter 3, 4 and 5 where i’ll get into the sources they cite and show what they’re leaving out, and you can see for yourself what they’re doing.
I think they did such a good job writing it and making it seem so exciting and interesting, that it’s easy to miss how crazy it actually is. Every time I read the book I think “wow this is so exciting and fun” and then the more time that passes and the more time i have to think the more angry i get at what a mess they’ve made, and how they’re making it harder for me to teach people how social structure actually works…
Before the published the book I was going to write Graeber an email like “wtf are you guys doing with these articles? Don’t you know that A B C? You should really consider this stuff” and I just started it and then he died like a week later.
I had figured their book would be better than the crazy “how to change the course of human history” crap they put out, and that they wouldn’t literally be saying people choose their social structure - kind of like Bullshit Jobs book was way better than the stupid article graeber wrote which literally said that business owners make people work long hours on purpose to prevent a revolution… but the book is just as weak on that point.
It’s clear that the book isn’t meant to be the final word, but the whole thing is a giant attack on materialism. Like I would have been annoyed if they had done a good job arguing against egalitarian origins, but they just did a hack job.
And I do love a lot of the egalitarian cities stuff and the Kandiaronk chapter (which I gave a good review of execpt the conclusion) and the Tlaxcala chapter - but I don’t have a ton of experise in any of that stuff, so I’m suspicious of it given how they’ve hacked up the stuff I do know about.
Again, maybe this will make more sense once I get into the details of it.
If you don’t already listen to it check out the Fight Like an Animal podcast Ethnogesis pt 4 episode - the host loves Graeber, loved How to Change the Course of Human History, but then reads DoE and comes to the same conclusions as me more or less (but isn’t as snarky about it).
And for occupy - I guess you can argue that the socialist resurgence sparked by occupy spilled over into leninism and stalinism, but when i hear those people speak, they often cite occupy as a reason why they think anarchism is foolish etc. And I don’t think it’s marxist leninist to make demands of the state! People make demands of their enemies all the time. Ignoring your enemies and letting them kill you is not anarchist practice, it’s upper middle class college kid overeducated pretzel brain.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I’m just saying that the choice, for better or worse, not to make demands of a state they considered illegitimate, was consistent with anarchist theory. The demand to ‘get money out of politics’ does to some extent legitimate an electoralism that is perhaps irredeemable. Here is Malatesta on the subject: “We must do what we can to prevent the fallacy from taking root that a good parliament might be possible, which would be just as harmful as the theory that there might be such a thing as a good king.” (xxi)
“Electionists…compare what is done in the electoral struggle with what would happen if nothing were done; while instead they should compare the results obtained when other methods are followed and with what might be achieved if all effort used to send representatives to power…were employed in the fight to directly achieve what is desired.”
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 idk if I agree it’s an attack on materialism. I think it’s more an attack on a kind of determinism prevalent on both right and left when materialism is the ONLY lens through which these question can be viewed. And on common narratives of ‘progress’ or ‘fall’ that are also prevalent on right and left. Have you read Graeber’s article on modes of production? Anyway, I look forward to your future episodes. Try to get Wengrow on for an interview.
@@devonchurch3187 i guess, but there’s good and bad anarchist theory! also, i still see pressuring the government as being compatible with those quotes - forcing the government into doing something good doesn’t make the government good, you can do that to the worst king for example. and the second quote - well we have the results today of this! occupy was not strong enough to directly achieve what was desired, so it didn’t predictable accomplish anything directly besides raise awareness temporarily, and much more would have been achieved by pressuring government. and putting pressure on government isn’t “electoral struggle” like running for candidates, promoting them etc. it’s saying “do this or else…” you can do that to hitler.
is that the one about how in malaysia stories were determing power classes instead of material conditions? i very much think he came to the wrong conclusion from his experience there - i don’t remember the details of that but there were clear material/practical conditions that allowed that to happen. he was just so set on debunking materialism. i think bullshit jobs book had an element of that, even though it’s a great book overall. he misses out how those little wastefull fiefdoms in the corporate world actually reinforce power, even if they cost profit.
wengrow we be a great inteview, but i think one big negative or my harsh approach to the book is he’ll probably be really pissed if he sees this stuff… he’s mostly been ignoring materialist critics, saying he won’t fall into the “trap” of arguing with them. the only time i saw him engage in any debate with with the NYRB reviewer Appiah about archaeological detals. im pretty sure most of the stuff i’m critiquing was graeber’s work - wengrow isn’t a big anthro or history expert, he’s an ancient egypt expert. he wrote the tlaxcalan stuff which i think is really cool, and stuff about palaeolithic societies being huge in scope, which i agree with, and lots of stuff that i have no knowledge of to praise or critique either way.
the only thing that i think he wrote that i strongly disagree with is qualifying “mammoth huts” as “monumental architecture”! google mammoth hut, they’re like little tents for like 4 people max. they look cool, but i wouldnt even qualify them as architecture, much less monumental!
I have a question. Maybe you can clarify. At the section titled "why social structures change or remain the same" you give an explanation for why some pastoral groups were/are male dominated. It makes sense to me, if the men of the group band together for defense it makes sense why the sisters of those men or the women more generally would be the ones to leave, and why it would be women from the outside coming into the group. Seems straightforward, if you have a bag of red and blue balls and you remove all the red you'd only be left with blue balls in the bag. But what I don't understand is why is it the MEN are the ones that band together for defense? Why not the women? I can imagine a society where the women are the ones doing the defending and the men have to be the ones that go to other groups. What was/is it about the men of the group that lead those groups of people to structure their society like that? What's the material reason for "choosing" that? (I put choosing in quotes just because I wasn't sure what sounded better, if you prefer to replace it with the word becoming, be my guest) if as you say all pastoral societies mare male dominated, then there must be something that is shared in common with all those different groups that lead them to that social structure. Specifically that the MEN stay while the women go. What exactly is it? I saw from an earlier comment of yours that you have a masters in anthropology, im not trying to argue or get into a name calling match here, I genuinely just want some sort of explanation to my question. Thanks.
The reason that all pastoralist societies are patrilocal and male dominated is because it’s easy and beneficial to steal herd animals - so in order to protect your wealth and fight off raiders, it’s better to have your bands organized according to related men.
Why men instead of women? Because men are generally significantly stronger and aren’t spending long periods nurising or preganant etc, even though women can be effective warriors too.
Male dominance isn’t a choice that women make, but patrilocal organization probably is a choice that they will agree to because women and men alike understand that patrilocal organization is the best way of insuring the defense of the group.
You can see this happen in real time when societies who don’t organize this way adopt cattle - within a generation or two they switch to patrilocal residence.
Similarly, in societies where men go off to long distance hunting or raiding for long periods in the year, those societies end up organizing according to related women - matrilocal residence - because the women are the ones who need to take care of local politics and property. It makes more sense that related women will get along better and be better to manage politics together, and also women have the bargaining power advantage to make that choice, even if men don’t like it because they’re the ones at the home village.
make sense? i don’t sense any name calling, it’s legit questions!
Hi 'What is Politics' (Don't know what to call you. Do you have a web handle of some kind?) I'd be really interested to see the article you mentioned that challenged G&W's presentation of the case for egalitarian cities. I've seen this argued both ways for Mohenjo Daro and some of the cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation and have been unable to draw any definite conclusions. I'm not a specialist or even an academic, but it is a debate I'm very interested in. If the article is not available online (I'm guessing it isn't) I have access to an academic library and may be able to get it anyway.
As always, thanks for all the work you put into this. It's by far the most useful, detailed, series on these topics online. 'Beyond excellent' as the Analogist says below.
hi, thanks! yes, it’s here: www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/ and there’s a response from Wengrow and then a counter-repsonse from the author Appiah. I don’t know enough to really have a firm opinion, though based on what Graeber and Wengrow did with the chapters that I am knowledgable about, i’m super skeptical of the other stuff.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Brilliant! Much appreciated. Thank you. You clearly have a well organised filing system. Me: not so much.
Yes, I've read accusations of poor scholarship from several experts in fields that the Davids touch on. That has left me very sceptical of everything they write. Not a bad thing perhaps.
It's only an impression, and I wouldn't make any claims for it, but as I read The Dawn of Everything, I was repeatedly struck by the idea that G&W had grown so in love with being counter cultural and the desire to be original that their imaginations had begun to run away with them. They were certainly enjoying themselves. Maybe we need people like that. It's a shame though that this book has the potential to do so much damage.
Thanks again.
@@richardfield6801 i think it’s a combination of the fact that the book isn’t really scholarship or to be super accurate, it’s just meant to pump people up and make us feel like we can choose a different social structure - and also i think a lot of people who write big borad books like this are often just super lazy, and they have a theory or an idea that’s cool that they’re excited about and then they just try to find sources to cram into their theory without really taking the time to really understand the sources or to deal with what happens when things don’t actually fit in with their theory.
So much of what you stated about the book's contents is reductive in the extreme, or outright misreadings, it feels to me that rather than making a critique of the book you are lampooning a white anglo liberal read of it (in the best of cases), or flat out failing at literacy. DoE is a pretty extensive recount of stuff that some of us who've been reading anthropology from the last few decades under a particular perspective (Sahlins, Clastres, Scott, etc.) would be familiar, condensed in one book. Also, knowing Graeber's other work one would think you'd know the dude never intended to give a direct answer to questions but to start conversations around certain things (which arguably has been a success on a lot of his previous work). Folk reading theory aren't meant to always at all times be spoonfed future projections on what to do and shit, lest you do some dumb utopianism. It ain't my favourite book of them, and I think it can be really messy in organisation at times, but this review to me clearly has some weird bone to pick.
since you’re not giving any specific examples of anything that you disagree with in my presentation, i can’t really respond to anything. I don’t know what an ‘anglo liberal read’ is supposed to mean. I’m pointing out that their arguments are not coherent, and reducing them to their absurd conclusions in order to do that.
the one thing i can respond to is you say ‘ the dude never intended to give a direct answer to questions but to start conversations around certain things’ but what I’m trying to point out (and will be going in detail in the next few episodes) is that there are actual well known answers to the questions that Graeber and Wengrow ask - but they usually just ignore them and pretend they don’t exist, even when they cite authors who have presented answers! And they will present caricature versions of arguments that they want to contradict, but they don’t actually present any of the logic behind those arguments.
all of this paints a really misleading picture to readers, my focus is in what’s in chapters 1-5 because that’s where I have enough knowledge to know how misleading and crazy their presentation is. the rest of the book, might be brilliant, I don’t know enough to judge (aside from a few idiotic assertions, like their absolutely stupid explanation for male dominance!)
@@Graeberwave says the guy who has no idea what he’s talking about and needs a diaper change
and by the way, i have a master’s degree in anthropology you stupid jackass.
federico clearly has no idea what he’s talking about, and seems to have learned all his anthropology from this stupid book - and you clearly know even less than he does but you’re 5x as arrogant about it.
and if anyone doesn’t know their Marxist anthropology (aside from you who doesn’t even know what Marxist anthropology even is) it’s Graeber and Wengrow, as evidenced by this really stupid book.
@@Graeberwave is your mom going to let you do that? you’re going to have a hard time doing that in your dirty poopie diaper
Excellent analysis and communication of your analysis - thank you! I dig Graeber but I was keen to hear a critique - this was high quality, your critique was rigorous and robust, balanced and good-spirited. I was disappointed to see Graeber and Wengrow cite Jared Diamond, whose work seems rather questionable.
they were criticizing diamond if i remember - but in general i think his work is better than theirs in dawn of everything! diamond is naive and credulous when it comes to idiotic concepts like “good corporate citizenship” but his work is generally sound. guns, germs and steel is excellent, and most of the critiques of it that i read back in the day were just tantrums for jealous babies as far as i could see. he messed up a couple of details which is normal for a books of that scope (like for dawn of everything) but his general thesis is solid (whereas graeber and wengrow mess up a lot of things in ways that aren’t very excusible and their main thesis is deficient).
I'm back, watching the video for the second time and realizing I never gave it a thumbs up. I have rectified this issue.
Thanks so much for all of your videos/podcasts so far! I've seen almost all of them and I've been sharing them around. If you don't mind, I had some questions:
1. Is Cultural Materialism what you're presenting in this series?
2. What counts as 'material conditions'? Is it the social culture of farming/hunter-gathering, or the physical stuff like the farms or hunting grounds?
For example is it the fact that the Himba practice Immediate Return, despite knowing about other modes of production? Or is it the physical existence of maize and wheat in the Himba's environment which pressures them to become agriculturists? (Similar to that quote "We didn't domesticate grains, the grains domesticated us").
I ask because that determines how hard it is to change society, according to the theory. Is it enough to change our culture of production e.g. by making everything a cooperative? Or do we need to invent technology that's conducive to Immediate Return-like behavior? E.g. a 3-D printer for medicine so we're not dependent on Insulin corporations.
Hi thanks! It’s more or less cultural materialism but they tend to call it “behavioural ecology” these days because some cultural materialist stuff from the 70s-90s got a bad name for being overdeterministic and cartoonish. And my focus isn’t exactly the same as most behavioural ecologists, i’m focusing on social structure here, and they tend to be more focused on what people eat or do for a living, and they aren’t as focused on how conditions establish differential bargaining power as I am.
So material conditions is a bad term because it makes people think of the environment - but it’s more than the environment, it’s any practical thing around you that limits or influences your choices. So would include both the things you mentioned, environment and mode of production. It also includes things like population density, whether you’re getting attacked or not by other people, and genetic predispositions (like people prefer freedom to being dominated, people prefer easier work to harder work).
The Himba are agro-pastoalists not hunter gatherers, but for example the Mbuti and Lese both technically live in the same rainforest, but the Mbuti live in the actual rainforest by foraging and the Lese live by cutting down the rainforest to plant gardens. The things they do for a living results in completely different social structure, and world view of each culture. And you can explain what each culture chooses to do for a living, in part by history (the lese farmers came from outside and don’t know how to forage) but also from “material” factors like Lese population density is too high to survive by foraging in that environment.
Yes it does imply that it’s hard to change social structure, but it means that you want to change the conditions that generate certain things, which is one thing humans are capable of (in the right conditions). So the Lese are very male dominated because patrilocal residence puts women at a strong bargaining power disadvantage. Patrilocal residence is an adaptation to frequent attacks which is no longer the case among the Lese, so if you wanted women to have more rights, the ultimate goal would be to get rid of patrilocal residence. If that’s not possible you’d work on getting the isolated women to form coalitions and get to know eachother more. It’s not always simple.
In our society I think all the tech and productive capacity is such that we can definitely change our social structure. But we’d first need to rip power away from the powerful and then establish institutions that generate conditions that incentivize equality and don’t leave room for some people to amass more and more power over time.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thank you so much! This is a really in-depth and detailed reply. You've given me a lot to think about.
Looking forward to the next episodes!
What the book appeared to say to me was that people "go along" with certain social structures ("choice") because they don't recognize the problems at first OR because, like they clearly state in the book, the use of violence to maintain inequalities - their key principle of domination. I think the idea isn't that humans "choose" their social arrangements so much as attempt to use their capacity to imagine new ones, hence they mention the essential freedom of movement as a key to reinventing societies and discuss how the limitation of that freedom could have led to hierarchical social arrangements. Or they don't consider all the possibilities so their construction of societies is prone to hierarchical "infiltration" through mechanisms they hadn't forseen. So obviously people at some stage "go along" with the social order, including as you mention, women in highly patriarchal societies, or the peasants who didn't overthrow the king, because they aren't fully aware of their potential or their oppression. I'm not trying to critique your position btw, just thinking through things out loud. I've only just finished reading the book and haven't had too much time to think about it I'd love to hear your response. Anyway, thank you for a thought provoking video and for making liberatory (and entertaining) content!
thanks - sure violence is used to control people. but why are some elites able to control people by violence, but in other societies, people can’t do that, even though they want to? why do people in some societies just “go along” with oppressive structures, but in others they don’t?
there are explanations for this, but the book doesn’t even ask those questions.
and if you look at further episodes like the one about the inuit women, you’ll see that the authors do think people “choose” their social structure consciously. it’s just not a very coherent idea.
Thank you for expanding on the theoretical and empirical basis for the "egalitarian origin," and having now learned about it, The Dawn of Everything does feel incomplete for failing to address the potential association between immediate-return foraging and egalitarianism, even if they would have ultimately sought to disregard the theory. However, as someone without any training in the field, a couple of issues with the theory immediately came to mind.
1) Survivorship Bias. This idea is somewhat implied in your "arguments against" section, but to stating it explicitly, the risk of survivorship bias would seem to be a fundamental stumbling block in any attempt to draw conclusions about prehistoric hunter-gathers from contemporary examples. Granting the assumption that most human cultures of the paleolithic were of the immediate-return foraging variety, then the societies which remain have gone through a rigorous selection process, and are rather unique in their ability to have persisted in this form. As a result, one can not in principle determine whether any particular cultural feature observed across modern immediate-return foragers is generalizable to all immediate-return foragers or is a feature which is heavily correlated with the propensity of such a culture to survival and resist change (making it over represented in the contemporary sample).
Of course this doesn't disprove the theory that immediate-return foraging incentivizes the formation of egalitarian social structures, but suggests that it is also important to consider the possibility that egalitarianism is one of the features which uniquely allowed these particular immediate-return foraging cultures to persist. I find it interesting that many of these groups seem to be stridently egalitarian, that is they have practices whose specific purpose appears to be the preemption of hierarchy formation, which to me would suggest (perhaps naively) that their lifestyle is not inherently resistant to developing a hierarchy. Why have cultural practices opposing hierarchy if it isn't a risk?
2) I question the assumption that the majority of early human hunter-gathers were immediate-return foragers. It is my recollection that there is evidence of Homo erectus cooking nearly 1 million years ago, and it is logical that cooking would inevitably lead to smoking, and hence a means of meat preservation. The contention that archaic humans cooked for hundreds of thousands of years without discovering smoking seems improbable, so they had the technology. Couple this with the fact that many early human groups appeared to be large game hunters who quarry included proboscideans (mammoths, mastodons), which would have almost certainly provided more meat than could have been consumed immediately, and my naïve assumption would be that many (if not most) groups would have some forms of delayed-return. They presumably had the preservation technology and the transitory food surplus, and the energy expenditure and risk involved with downing massive megafauna seems difficult to justify if the vast vast majority of the resultant food was not being utilized.
This is doubly true in temperate climates, where not only is there a second low effort/technology preservation method available in the form of freezing, but the cyclical nature of the climate creates huge seasonal disparities in available resources. Plant abundance severely diminished in a temperate winter, and the energy expenditure required for hunting increases dramatically as one must content with the cold and snow. I have a hard time believing that the majority of human group living at higher latitudes weren't storing food for the winter. On this point, you mention the Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi) who apparently lived in what is now Quebec and Labrador as an example of an egalitarian group. I don't know anything about them (beyond what I saw on Wikipedia), but I would be surprised if they were strictly immediate-return foragers given the environment and climate of the region.
My assumption would be that immediate-return foraging would be mostly limited to sub-tropical regions with abnormally high year-round abundance of utilizable resources. It might be notable that our closest living ancestor, other great apes, who do not practice delayed-return foraging have a geographic distribution which is limited to just such areas, in contrast to the widespread range of our ancestors.
I imagine these are objections which have been thoroughly debated amongst anthropologists, and I'd be curious to see how they are addressed if you have any good resources.
1. The survivorship bias argument doesn’t make sense to me. The argument isn’t that people who practice immediate return nomadic foraging today have done so continually since the dawn of humanity. People adopt immediate return strategies because they make sense in certain conditions. where those conditions were met in the palaeolithic we’d expect to see that form of organization, and where they aren’t we’d expect to see other kinds. People would move back and forth two and from immediate return foraging as conditions changed.
in terms of why they have consciously egalitarian practices - people have a propensity to want to dominate eachother and take advantage of eachother. where it’s not possible for that to succeed in a stable fashion due to conditions, attempts to do so would cause a lot of chaos and discord. so practices emerge to stabilize an egalitarian order (versus having a chaotic egalitarian order - condition favouring equality ultimately of one sort or another).
2. just because something is possible doesn’t make it useful or a good idea. Modern nomadic foragers usually know some farming and other storage techniques but don’t use them because they aren’t practical. why smoke and carry around all this heavy crap with you around all year, when you can just go hunt and get food when you need it? smoking and storing food is for people who are semi sedentary and who can’t easily access food all year.
it could be that people moved back and forth from immediate to delayed return systems at different times. delayed return systems usually imply harsher conditions or more scarcity or competition. this is one of the reasons why it seems more likely that immediate return was probably more common before the world was full.
in upper palaeolithic europe i imagine that people smoked mammoth and stored it - arcaeology shows that many upper palaoelithic cultures were semi sedentary like recent inuit, and they lived in extremely harsh conditions.
there’s not much reason to think things were similar in africa when we were emerging as a species.
i don’t agree about tropical environments etc. recent foragers live in some of the most difficult environments on earth (they are able to continue to forage because other people don’t want their land - that’s a form of survivorship bias, but it’s toward harsher environments than would have been common in the past). yes you need food to be available continuously for immediate return but you’d be surprised by the environemnts that this is possible in - the kalahari desert seems like an inhospitable wasteland, but it’s been home to immediate return foragers for thousands of years. you just have to know where to find the food and how to get it.
I’m don’t remember the details of what montagnais naskapi ate and the jesuits but i don’t remember anything about food storage, and they generally seem like they were immediate return foragers for various reasons, nomadic hunting, gender egalitarianism etc. they might have been highly egalitarian delayed return foragers which also existed.
their immediate return organization may have been possible due to trade with other non forager cultures so that they didn’t need food storage.
fully nomadic immediate return central african foraging for example is likely only possible because they have trade relationships with farmers, otherwise they would lack carbohydrates.
fully nomadic immediate return big game hunting is thought to be (via quantitative studies) as the most calorie efficient form of economy so anthropologists assume that people will choose that if it’s possible.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Wow, thank you for the rapid and detailed response. Feel free to just cite some references instead if that would be easier. Now on to my challenges (maybe confusions).
1. I guess this is an empirical question, but isn't it thought that most modern hunter-gather groups have lead a similar lifestyle for quite a long time? It was my understanding that they tend to be quite genetically and linguistically distinct from their pastoral/agrarian/industrial neighbors, suggesting at the very least that they have not recently fractured from a non-hunter-gather group (though it is possible that they change their strategies over time). Regardless, there need not be cultural continuity to the paleolithic in order for survivorship bias to still warrant consideration, so long as cultures in question are old enough that they came under sufficient selection pressure (from threat of change, assimilation, or antihalation). How young is the youngest known immediate-return hunter gather group, and is this shorter than the average survival time of a newly contacted hunter gather group?
2. I would have to imagine that the efficiency of immediate-return hunting is a function of ecology, climate, seasonality, and geography, such that even in areas were it is possible it would not always be most efficient (I would be interested to see a reference to the quantitative work if you have it handy). To think of just a simple example, edible nuts are extremely easy to collect and store (though sometimes costly to process), but generally are highly seasonal. I would therefore expect an ecosystem in which they occur in abundance to skew towards delayed-return foraging, at least with regards to this particular resource.
With this in mind I did a quick search for articles on the subject and found "Modeling Modes of Hunter-Gatherer Food Storage" (Morgan, 2012) which discusses potential nut storage techniques of the Mono people in California. I found the opening line of the introduction to be pertinent to our present discussion "Despite over three decades of modern thinking about the economics of hunter-gatherer food storage, this critical component of many foraging economies and important factor in the evolution of complex social systems remains poorly understood, leading Kuijt (2009:641) to recently lament that “archaeologists have yet to develop a detailed understanding of the scale of economic contributions of food storage in preagriculturalist communities.”" This suggests that the field lacks a consensus theory on the utility and role of food storage in hunter-gather societies, reinforcing my skepticism in the assumption that early human societies were predominantly immediate-return hunter-gathers
@@recurrenTopology i don’t have references to throw at you, it’s time consuming enough just to answer off the top of my head! look at the bibliographies in my episodes. you can find good bibliographies to start off with jerome lewis’ egalitarian social organization among hunter gatherers, and kelly’s the foraging spectrum
1. yes most are thought to have existed for a long time, particularly the hadza and kalahari people, but others like the central african forager groups (mbuti, bendjele etc) are thought to have only been there for a few thousand years. the might have been doing immediate return foraging before but we don’t know (or i don’t know), they might have been doing delayed return foraging or even non foraging - there are several known historical examples of people switching to hunting and gathering form pastoralism or agriculture.
i don’t know the ages, but again the survivorship bias is about being in the sorts of territories that other people don’t want or can’t survive in. there’s nothing to indicate that it’s the most resilient or whatever, we have all sorts of kinds of hunting and gathering, the assumption is that they are all adaptations to various conditions and we’d see them wherever similar conditions exist for long enough.
2. you need to read ethnographies - almost all environments are seasonal and all nomadic people have seasonal differences in social organization (like more concentrated in cooler season and more dispersed in hotter season) and that doesn’t incentivize delayed return - when the season for nuts is over you have other resources in season.
when you go far back in time, you have a world empty of humans so you likely have the choice of the best environments until the world starts to get close to carrying capacity for immediate return foraging, and then you’d expect to see more delayed return strategies.
you also have frequent climate fluctuations in the palaeolithic which would have increased and decreased carrying capacity every couple of generations or so, so that’s another factor.
from the quote you gave of the the article you cited, that doesn’t suggest to me that people lack understanding of utility of food storage, but rather that they don’t have the tools to measure how much food storage was being doing prehistorically.
most likely the original humans were immediate return foragers because we started out in a favourable environment (like bonobos vs chimps) and then as we expanded out we’d remain mostly immediate return, but then whith climate changes you’d find pockets of delayed return as people get stuck in an unfavourable environment for a period of time until favourable conditions return, and then eventually as the world starts to fill up and people get pushed into worse environments (like europe) then you’d see more delayed return systems, which is what you do see in the upper palaeolithic.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Only brought up references in case that was easier. If we were discussing something in my field it'd probably be easier for me to just provide references as opposed to summarizing ideas, so I figured I'd extend the option. Also, please feel free to ignore me or reply at your leisure, I completely understand if you have other things you'd rather do with your time.
I've paged through a few of the references in the bibliography, so hopefully that will increase the level of our discourse.
1. Survivorship bias is a general concept from experimental design and data analysis. A canonical example is Wald's analysis of bomber survival in WW2, in which he studied the distribution of damage to planes returning from bombing runs. Failing for the survivorship bias, one might be tempted to consider that distribution as representative of the areas of the plane most likely to get hit, and reinforce the plane accordingly. This would be a mistake, however, because it was precisely damage to areas areas of the plane not seen in the return sample which caused the missing planes to crash.
I think you would agree that the world has become increasing inhospitable to hunter-gathers with the rise of pastoral and agricultural societies, so this implies a selection process. It is a fundamental experimental/statistical truism that data from a subset of examples which have passed through a selection process is potentially non-representative on account of survivorship bias. While environmental availability is certainly one potential source of survivorship bias (and is in fact used by Singh as an argument against extrapolating from modern examples), I see no grounds for considering it the only feature that could be subject to bias.
Briefly searching through the anthropological literature I am very surprised to have not the issue discussed in these terms, as I think it would be a natural criticism levied by anyone coming to the problem with a mathematical or statistical background. Honestly, the more I read the more I'm left with the impression that this is a serious unresolved issue in the field.
2. Why is an environment suitable for immediate-return foraging necessarily more favorable than one suitable for delayed-return strategies? To use an example from another field, the North Atlantic is tremendously productive, however its abundance of forage fish (whale food) is highly seasonal (rich in summer, sparse in winter). To take advantage of this productivity, baleen whales have evolved to ability to store large amounts of energy as blubber and live off these reserves while nearly fasting for half the year. This does not make the North Atlantic an undesirable habitat, in fact higher latitude areas with seasonal abundance are the only marine habitats that support large baleen whales (there did used to be tropical baleen whales, but they went extinct following decreases to the productivity of equatorial regions after the formation of the Panama isthmus).
Similarly, I imagine there are many environments that would be ill suited for immediate-return economies, but that are exceptional for delayed-return strategies. Why think archaic or early modern humans would avoid such environments if they possessed the technologies to thrive in them? Our LCA with chimps and bonobos likely lacked the ability for alternative foraging economies, as they do, but I don't see why one should confidently assume such strategies didn't develop long before the Holocene. It seems entirely plausible to me that homo Erectus in Europe learned to survive winter by living off a frozen elephant, or stored seasonal fish abundance by smoking it. Their migration out of Africa suggests they were able to adapt to a variety of ecosystems (in a way chimps and bonobos can not), so why should we assume that food storage wasn't one such adaptation?
1. i hear what you’re saying about survivorship bias, but again I don’t think that it’s a fruitful way of looking at it. i think it makes sense to ask if a world full of only foragers would have very different dynamics for hunter gatherers than our current world, and if the foragers we see in recent times are not representative of ancient foragers because the conditions they live in are just too different - but i don’t see the idea of “we only see the types of societies that survived the changes in the world” because it assumes those societies are all static and either survive or get wiped out rather than adapting to conditions.
i suspect that this is why you don’t see any discussions of this idea - behavioural ecology which is a quantitative approach to anthropology is math and data oriented, so it’s not like people are avoiding math questions.
2. apparently, according to behavioural ecologists, nomadic immediate return foraging with big game hunting is the most efficient system in terms of calories and nutrients expended vs gained. If this is correct, then you will assume that people will choose this kind of foraging whenever possible, and that other systems are a compromise of some sort.
as far as i know there is zero evidence of homo erectus or anyone smoking anything until more recent times, though there is some evidence of vegetable processing in the middle palaeolithic which might suggest delayed return system (though not necessarily). you do have more convincing evidence of delayed return in upper palaeolithic europe and in some other pockets around the world at the same time.
hunting a mammoth and sitting around for half the year eating it sounds good superficially, but then you’re narrowing your diet to an extreme, as you’d be consuming all the vegetable foods in that area after a few weeks and have nothing but meat for months. if you have the choice, you’d probably just let the rest of the mammoth rot and move on to a differnt camp with more fruits and berries and vegetables around. maybe you can smoke it and transport it, but transporting takes a lot of effort, and you’d only do that if that’s easier than hunting again in a new place.
again, immediate return nomadism is supposedly the most efficient system.
another example is pacific northwest coast societies who fishd half the year in one place, and smoked and stored the fish and stayed in sedentary villages, and went out hunting for a couple of months in the off season to compliment their diets.
storing all of that fish makes you a target for raiding and war and requires all of this military preparation and defensible storage facilities etc.
the war and storage and defense is so onerous that further south in california where acorns were available as food, the foragers there oriented their entire economies around extremely annoying to process laborious acorns, despite the fact that they had the choice of basing it on fish.
i’m sure people were doing delayed return strategies at various times and places, but only when immediate return wasn’t viable.
Hi I just came to say this is crack. Love when I can feel the ridges of my brain deepening. It’s addicting content.
glad you’re enjoying it so much! hope it’s less damaging and more constructive than actual crack rocks!
I came in ready to be annoyed, but then I was amused. After that, I was recruited. ;) 👍
welcome!
LOVE the shirt xoxo
Great to see a new video from you! I love your insight, thanks for your work👍 I love "believing nonsense that isn't true is not liberating" ""The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." Spock
nice spock reference! vulcan socialism is weird but real
You said that pre-Holocene humans couldnt have developed sustainable agriculture because of low nitrogen levels in the soil. Can I have a link on that ? Ive never heard of that explanation before.
here: www.researchgate.net/publication/200033448_Was_Agriculture_Impossible_during_the_Pleistocene_but_Mandatory_during_the_Holocene_A_Climate_Change_Hypothesis
and it was C02 and not nitrogen, i made a mistake speaking from memory - and the harsh and quick temperature fluctuations are also cited as a main reason why agriculture wasn’t viable until the holocene.
for some reason this article never got a lot of mainstream coverage but i see it cited in journals more frequently
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 thank you
@@notanothermichael4676 you’re welcome - ill be putting up a bibliography for this episode, i just didn’t have time cause i had to rush to get it out before xmas holidays kills viewership
Reasonable and well organized analysis. I'm impressed! You have my attention.
A lot of questions came to my mind when I was watching this video. I feel a little disheartened by the fact that I can't even trust an anarchist anthropologist like Graeber to give an accurate picture of the state of the knowledge. I'm convinced anthropology is crucial for political theory, but I find myself stumbling around the field not knowing which sources to trust. Do you have plans to make a video with reading suggestions referencing leftist anthropologist who haven't given up on materialism? is there hope that you might one day review Gottner-Abendroth's work on Matriarchal societies? Or give an overview of the debate around female cosmetic coalition theory?
that’s exactly right - people afraid of materialism because they think that if hierarchy or equality can be explained by material factors then there’s nothing we can do about them, which ignores that humans, especially in advanced industrial civilizations have enormous powers to change material circumstances.
i haven’t yet read her book on matriarchal societies yet but i have it - i don’t think i’ll be doing more super in depth reviews like this, but I will read it and might discuss it if it’s interesting. I might get into female cosmetic coalition stuff but need to re-read the stuff on it because my knowledge isn’t in depth enough to say anything. I will have Camilla Power on very soon so I’m sure she’ll have something to say about that!
for reading suggestions, each episode has a bibliography - i don’t feel like there’s any great book (that i know of) that really presents an explicit materialist theoretical outlook the way I’d want to, and not in a political way. A lot of stuff is a mishmash of materialist and idealist outlooks without a lot of coherences.
There are a ton of loose ends and ideas floating around that need someone to tie them all together like I’m trying to do here. Marvin Harris was doing that sort of thing in the 70s and 80s and his stuff is worth looking at, but i’m not satisfied with it, and feel like some of it is outdated and that he he had lots of ideas but not all of it was verified or correct. à I feel like you just have to read a bunch of stuff and just think for yourself.
Maybe i’ll put out an ABC theory book based on this video show at some point.
To me all that stuff about materialism being colonialist etc, is more right wing shit disguising itself as left wing stuff, designed to make us powerless to use anthropology to actually do anything useful in the world. It’s a reaction to actual radical scholars in the 60s and 70s that actually wanted to make the world a better place. There was a useful critique in there because materialism as an inherently practical outlook can be used to bad purposes, and if it’s not sophisticated ignores individual agency and historical particularities, but as always with elite academia any good idea very quickly because a bunch of crap that serves power and defangs anything radical.
That stuff is such sanctimonious hypocritical bullshit, and is ironically very racist in its own way. the same person who will have a completely materialist understanding of western people (politicians for example) will never attribute the same human motives to someone from a different society, as if people from other cultures are extra terrerstrials…
Many people in indigenous societies have materialist understandings of things on top of their specific religious or comological cultural explanations for things - every human has materialist explanations for things - and you saw that in that insurrectionaist book you talked about! it’s impossible not to have materialist views of things, even a 4 year old does, people are just invested in being blind to it in certain areas because it’s a threat to power or ego or both.
Damnit… and just like that I’m a fan of the channel! Good job UA-cam recommending smaller creators! More of this please!
Around 41:00 it would be interesting to compare chimpanzees to bonobos since the first are more hierarchical and violent while the latter are more much less violent (can't tell about their hierarchy). The interesting thing is that there are more body differences between males and females in chimpanzees (males are much larger and stronger) than among bonobos (males and females are almost the same size). One of the differences between both groups' environments is the availability of food: while the chimps leave in a seasonally variable resources environment, the bonobos live in an constantly more or less resource abundant environment. Chimpanzees, it seems, can't practice immediate return hunting and gathering - at least not as much as bonobos do. AFAIK, Bonobos were identified in 1974.
sure i’ll probably do that when i do an episode about animal politics - and yes in bonobos their more egalitarian structure is associate with more resource availability, and chimps get more patriarchal and more hierarchical the scarcer resources are. but chimpanzees and bonobos both practice immediate return foraging. immediate return foraging is when you eat what you collect without extensive processing. most mammals are immediate return foragers
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Just a nit-pick, but I would guess quite a large fraction (though likely not a majority) of mammals actually are not immediate return foragers. Two of the largest mammal groups, rodents and shrews, commonly stash a considerable proportion of their collected food. It could also be argued that mammals whose phenology involves periods of substantial fat accumulation followed by extended fasting, as seen in bears and whales for example, are functionally not immediate return foragers.
@@recurrenTopology oops that’s actually a very good point!
I like the fact that somebody did this.
Because I've been wanting criticism of their work.
This makes me like their work more. Because your critique doesn't destroy their work.
The part that I dislike is that big bird has a narrative that is widely accepted in Conservative cycles- not Anthropologie circles.
haha, i don’t understand what you’re saying about big bird
@@WHATISPOLITICS69
The Big Bird narrative of the progression of history that is widely accepted by most people in the US.
That 1970s ideology of early peoples life was short and brutal is still a difficult narrative to overcome.
@@zachhodgson4113 i never heard that called “big bird” before!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69
I was quoting the video.
That particular part of it
This is terrific. What a wonderful breakdown of the failures of occupy
Thanks again for taking the time to do this. For sure you're performing a valuable public service. Maybe Wengrow will watch your videos and in a few years come out with a more scholarly sequel or updated version that takes out all the offending parts and replaces them with something more acceptable along the lines of what you've been suggesting. Lord knows the speed of technological change in the field is breathtaking and he may have to. Some of these changes you probably know more about than I do. For example, Lidar and related technologies, in conjunction with “big data” and related analytical tools, bioarcheology, osteoarcheology, drone technology, including underwater drone technology, and of course artificial intelligence are going to change everything in the field. The sorts of cherry picking they resort to throughout the book just won’t be tenable anymore. People with access to the data, which is going to be practically everybody who wants it, will be able to come up with a complete set of relevant data. One of my favorite new sets of tools are devices that will sift through whatever you call the unprocessed archaeological excavation material, sort it, (obviously humans will still have to do a lot of this), tag it so the provenance will be maintained, AND pick out the poop for special processing. The special processing can tell all sorts of things including how old the poop is, what species it was from, the age, sex, etc. They can even tell a lot about the social structure if the site was occupied by a group, and they have other corroborating data.
P.S. Once Covid dies down If you live in a number of places in the U.S.(NYS for sure) and probably elsewhere you are probably going to find your skill set in high demand, although I’m not sure what the pay scale is. Media, legal, anthropological/archaeological, and administrative/organizational skills aren’t a combination of skills you find in too many people.
interesting, i’m not an archaeologist so i don’t know much about these new technologies you’re talking about. i wonder if it will totally change the picture we have of prehistory, or just give us new details. i really doubt wengrow would change the book or add to it in the way i’d want, i think the whole point of the book was to emphasize the idea that “we can choose our social structure” and so they purposefully left out all the things i want to focus on. i don’t think it was accidental or neglect etc. im not sure my specific skill set will be useful outside of youtube and tenant law! we’ll see…
@Paul Gauthier that’s why i don’t monetize my youtube channel! or work for landlords!
I didn't even know about the "not making demands" thing. This almost sounds like a parody of anarchism...
every political movement today is kind of like a parody of itself…
Another quick question! I’m really interested in early experimentation with things that are commonly presented as having started at a later date. I was listening to an interview with Rebecca Wragg Sykes who wrote the book “Kindred” about Neanderthals recently, and she talked about a specific Neanderthal culture - just one, and isolated too I think - who started experimenting with long flint blades similar to the ones that Homo Sapiens made, in a way that no other Neanderthals have yet appeared to do. Then they just stopped showing up in the archeological record.
Are there any good resources you’d recommend on very early attempts at subsistence farming that didn’t stick around? That sounded really intriguing.
yes, it’s super interesting! it shows that people had subsistence stress always but didn’t have the option of sustainable agriculture until after the holocene
i know of two articles: www.persee.fr/doc/paleo_0153-9345_2013_num_39_2_5519
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422
the first one talks about 35 000 years ago - i was going to cite that instead of 23 000 years ago, but then i couldn’t find the article until after i recorded it… same thing with the 250 000 years vs 70 000 years at fulton’s cave. i know i read 250 somewhere but can’t find it…
Amazing! Thank you so much - I’m making a huge timeline as an art project and I’m definitely gonna include these.
I would say that they made the blades due to home sapiens interaction and were subsequently assimilated, based solely on your comment. I'm probably wrong, knowing nothing more of the context. Just comment happy atm
Please, bibliography needed! Can't afford to go back to school to study anthropology! Thank you for your efforts. Again, bringing light to banish the dark.
thanks - yes i’lo have it in the next few daya and post about in the “community” section so if you get notifications you’ll be notified. otherwise check back in a few days
When you say "I'll link to an article on that" where do we find the links? I'm particularly interested in the article on the old imagery in Africa.
hi - the bibliographies are linked in the notes under every video - for this one its: www.patreon.com/posts/60043152 but when it comes to the paintings, i don’t know what the hell happened - the articles weren’t in the bibliography (the woman with the zebra penis by power and watts, women in prehistoric cave art by power - links to both articles are in the bibliography) - i just added them now, but they don’t have the age of the paintings in them.
in the video i said 250 000 years old and then when i was editing it, i “corrected” this to 70,000 years old and added a subtitled with that correction - but now reading the articles about the paintings i have no idea where i got either of those numbers from
i just looked online to find the age of the paintings and i can’t find any scholarly source that gives them, but i do find several non-scholarly websites saying that the various paintings at that site are 3000 to 450 years old - which is completely unrelated to 250k or 70k …
so i have no idea what the hell was in my head when I gave either of those numbers - like when I made the correction, i must have looked it up got that from somewhere??
Anyways, that’s embarassing - just corrected the transcript and bibliography to include this…
Nice! This helped me straighten out my thinking regarding the tension between determinism and activism. If you're a historical materialist of some kind, i.e., think that material conditions determine ideas and culture, then what's the point of thinking and activism? Aren't we fated (in the long run, for the most part) to have whatever social forms are adapted to present conditions?
You suggest that actually present conditions are increasingly well-suited to egalitarian social forms.
But that doesn't itself justify activism. We have to keep in mind something else you said: that hierarchy can - temporarily at least? - block transition to more adaptive social forms. And I suppose THIS is the primary role of thinking and activism: to speed up the transitions by exposing and stomping down on the claws of the old entrenched powers. Secondarily, it is to decide among the various adaptive social forms (since presumably there is not just one form a society can take in any given material circumstance). I guess there is ALSO a potential activism program of deliberately engineering material conditions in order to facilitate a transition to a new social form. For example, a Marxist accelerationist expediting industrialisation in order to strengthen the conditions for class consciousness etc.
i talk about this a little more in episode 8 and im going to go in more detail when i wrap up the book review after chapter 5, but i think there’s activism matters becuase in and of itself it can increase your bargaining power in most situations, and there’s usually some room for things to be better than they are, though material conditions will make the chances harder or easier to actually achieve your goals - but i think that in advanced industrial civilization, where were in many ways creating our own conditions, that there’s a lot of room for different kinds of systems, so activism can have a huge effect, just like lack of organization can. the reason you want to think a lot about material/practical conditions today is because if you do manage to take away power from the people who currently hold it, if you’re *not* thinking about material conditions, and incentives you’ll create a system that goes right back to hierarcy after some amount of time. You need to undertsand the dynamics of incentives to create something that will actually incentivize equality over the long term.
“social democracy” (better termed welfare capitalism) for example was a set up for failure because it redistributed a significant amount of income, but it didn’t radically take away power away from the powerful, so overtime they had the means to amass more and more power over time.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 " You need to undertsand the dynamics of incentives [and material conditions] to create something that will actually incentivize equality over the long term. " Yes, that is the key point for transitioning society I think!!!! Which I might suggest is where all your work here on this channel boils down too... how does society incentivize equality over the long term (something that I think Graeber and Wengrow usefully explore somewhat in their analysis of past societies even if they do not provide adequate consideration of material conditions therein).
I don't know how much you talk about money/currency in this channel, but that is something else I think Graeber tackles well in his Debt book. The fact that money(and debt) is a means of negotiating relationships between people is also key to examining how we disincentivize equality. Here, I think we can point an awful lot of fingers at money (and private ownership, or at least the virtually unlimited accumulation of private ownership that the money system enables), and all the social and material consequences of this accumulation..
They’re anthropologists, of course they don’t know how to “build the plane.” They’re just giving a history of flying without presenting a explicit blueprint. That should be a democratic conversation, deciding which direction we take flight, and I actually respect that these authors leave room for that. I get the impression you have not yet read Debt the First 5000 by Graeber, (correct me if I’m wrong) which fills in some of the gaps you mentioned. His argument is Debt exasperated the hierarchy that agriculture introduced, allowing for the distorted and exponential growth of kingdoms and later empires. Their argument is not that inequality was a “choice” at all, it’s a manufactured system that we complacently participate in (most of us). I agree, not making demands may not be the best strategy, but Graeber dedicated his life to the cause and Occupy woke millions from a slumber, including me, who witnessed it at the age of 12. In my own bias, I feel that more credit was due in this critique than was given, but I certainly do appreciate this video and the conversation it sets in motion. Would be interested to hear your thoughts on the concept of schismogenesis that these authors mention towards the end of the book. Solidarity, comrade!
but they do know how to build the plane - or they could have some solid ideas about it given all the literature they cover - it’s in there, they just refuse to see it!
I think you’ll see more of what i mean when i cover chapters 4 and 5, but i talk about it a bit in subsequent episodes to this one - they deliberately leave out from all the sources they discuss all the information which explains how hierarchies form, how equality is maintained etc.
i have read debt, but a long time ago (though recently re-read some parts for this series. it doesn’t offer anything useful in that regard from what i remember.
i’ll talk more about schizmogenesis when i cover chapter 5 - i think its something, and has to do with competing groups maintaining distinction - like it makes sense for hassidic jews or amish people - but i dont think it at all explains what they describe in chapter 5 regarding the PNWC people. they’re giving it way more power than it has.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 interesting take, I’ll be looking forward to future episodes. Thanks for your response
@@mcgoombs and btw to be clear, i don’t mean that graeber and wengrow on purpose don’t want people to understand how to build the plane or how hierarchy and equality work - it’s just that to explain that stuff you need to look at the role of incentives and material and practical conditions, and they purposefully ignore all of that stuff because they think that if you go down that road, you’re going to conclude that hierarchy or equality is pre-ordained by existing conditions and you can’t do anything about it. it’s their own preconceptions that tanks their efforts.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 oh I appreciate that clarification, that’s makes so much more sense. I completely agree with the sentiment. I see where the authors might be coming from with that in mind, if their intended audience is Americans that is, I’d assume they were disillusioned to the extent to which citizens of the imperial core are deeply propagandized already to draw those very conclusions. It’s also possible the incoherence comes from disagreements between the two authors. We’ll never know. I do agree with you that in the long run it will get us into trouble to not examine the complete picture no matter how uncomfortable it may be. It’s truly a shame we cannot hear how Graeber might have responded to your critique, RIP ❤️
the absence of the effects of rural pastoralists in discussion of the development of patriarchy is really glaring when in contrast with how it was discussed in Debt: the first 5000 years which gave a very strong narrative related to rural folk associating looser sexual standards in urban areas with the economic exploitation from cities on them.
honestly, that part of Debt was largely rubbish - they say that patriarchy came from the rejection of urban mores … again ignoring how and why pastoralism all on its own, absent civilization, incentivizes patriarchy (see episodes 7 and 7.1)
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 if I remember correctly the section I'm thinking of presupposed pastoralism as patriarchal without getting much into it and it was mostly an explination of why urban areas would adopt patriarchal structures
but that's a charitable interpretation that I would have to actually re-read the book to substantiate
I'm going through those episodes now btw, good stuff
@@unktheunk1428 i could be misremembering as well - there was just one particular passage that pissed me off that was a footnote saying that biblical patriarchy came from this rejection of cities. thanks!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I could see a defensible way of saying that, but I'm less inclined to now that I know that Graeber was in the "no demands" camp during occupy
still very strange to ignore the influences of pastoralists in the development of patriarchy in a book that came out *after* there was already a fairly detailed narrative on that. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that Wengrow took an unfinished draft after Graeber died and Wengrow's influence made it worse. but that's probably not worth the effort to try to either substantiate or disprove.
@@unktheunk1428 in this book they’re doing everything they can to ignore material reasons for things and focus on choice so the pastoralism story doesn’t really fit into that - though graeber’s weird version from debt does i guess, i dunno!
I think one of us misunderstood this book. I think the target of this work is actually the popular public of authors that consume de Fukuyamas, the Pinkers and Hararis around and have no access to Academia papers and/or aren't particularly interested in those to build a common social narrative. Graeber/ Wengrow try to match that sort of popular narrative with an alternative one while trying deliberately to avoid the obvious pitfall which almost creams out of your analysis, which is the same as Rousseau inevitably fell in: "If equality is possible then it was only in 'simple' bands of hunter gatherers". I think the book is directly political the same the authors mentioned are in the sense of trying to validate the dominant narrative that has bled unto the public: That we are inherently evil and violent and thus require hierarchy to function. Graeber and Wengrow go through the same process (and one could call it dishonest, politically charged or convenient) in order to counteract that idea without falling into the Rousseau's apparent conclusion: That equality is lost to us due to our complex social and technological societies. I don't see this as quite a problem as you seem to perceive. I wasn't expecting a pure anthropological paper. I was expecting a popular take and critique on the dominant narrative of human nature and human social organization. I got that
that’s what they authors say they’re doing, but then they go into actual academic books and authors and papers and completely distort and mangle the contents of those books in order to pretend that humans weren’t egalitarians to begin with etc. and like i say in the video, graeber was doing this for his whole career.
This is awesome!! Thank you so much for this.
Great video!
Do you think the tendency to favor ideas of democratic organization “experimenting” with totalitarianism is a holdover from western-focused history, specifically the idea articulated in the academic work, The Dark Knight, that the last time Rome appointed an emperor “just for now,” the emperor refused to relinquish power? Did ancient peoples live long enough to see themselves become the villains, or at least could that be influencing the thinking of western academics, even good ones like these?
Thank you for your videos!
thanks - i don’t think it’s so much a holdover from anything - i think each case is different (like which are you thinking about?) but in general, a shift towards dictatorship is more about the balance of powers in a society. in general, the wealthy have a vastly disproportionate influence over states in capitalist countries, and when it seems like that control might slip away via democratic means, then the people with power will subvert democracy to retain their power. if you’re thinking of people like Orban or Bolsonaro, Modi etc, I think that neoliberal decimation of society gives power hungry authoritarians leverage to get popular support to amass power by pretending that they’ll use it to solve the problems caused by neoliberal economics etc.
in a way it does resemble Caesar, who leverage the social chaos caused by the Optimates’ pillaging of society, in order to gain popular support for imposing dictatorship. And then Augustus did the same thing but more in service of the elite rather than the general population.
Great to see you upload again!
Your point that G&W's criticism of 'equality' can fuel right-wing talking points is also my main concern. At the same time, we gotta acknowledge that rightists who do so are cherry-picking:
As you cited yourself, the authors DO argue that "our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together" is "[t]he ultimate question of human history", so some of the actual disagreement seems to be about the semantics of "equality", rather than about concrete anthropological data.
They also do acknowledge that hunter-gatherers like the Hadza are unambiguously egalitarian in every sense of the world - which solves the semantic question. When people try to instrumentalize G&W against egalitarianism, perhaps it's a good idea to mention that.
I'd be looking forward to you further addressing their objection though: How does this fact really support our case for true equality being possible in societies with any material base other than immediate-return foraging? People HAVE told me (just my personal experience of course) that "sure, maybe communism works in small indigenous tribes, but surely not in any modern civilization".
Judging from chapter three (I've only gotten around to read past chapter four myself), I believe you are largely correct about the authors' heavy voluntarism; however, given the objection mentioned above, I can understand why they think materialism leaves us hopeless for a truly egalitarian future. As much as they ascribe an unrealistic power to mere rituals of playing different social orders, maybe we do need something of that, if only to get all this capitalist realism out of our heads.
if you look at how they treat the hadza case, they accurately describe the egalitarianism of the hadza, but then they focus on how they make sure no one has too much wealth, and then say ‘that’s dumb and dreary, kandiaronk knew better, wealth inequality doesn’t have to equal power inequality’ and then toss it out the window as an example we can learn from.
but if you actually read woodburn’s articles, he outlines the conditions inherent to immediate return foraging that make equality the best choice for them, and frankly the only real choice (he doesn’t put it that way). and he lists a bunch of factors that i’ll list when i do chapter 4.
now graeber and wengrow should have jumped on that and then said “hmm how can we apply this knowledge and these factors to our own society” but they don’t, they just ignore that part of his work because they don’t want us to think about conditions - they just want us to think about choice, ergo robbing us of the knowledge we need to actually make our choices into reality…! this is why i hate this book so much, it’s all just empty calories.
i’ll explain when i wrap up the book how i believe that the conditions that we live in today actually give us enormous room to replicate the relevant conditions of egalitarian foragers, without having to return to hunting and gathering.
i think we live in one of those times when material reality is on our side, or that it can be, it has the potential to be - we have a lot more ability to change conditions than was possible in smaller scale societies with less insanely powerful tech and communications etc
My first reaction to hearing a talk by Graeber on UA-cam on this subject was precisely: "This guy is demolishing lies to children in order to look smart. There is nothing about his ideas which doesn't support the general thesis of egalitarian hunter-gatherers".
I also appreciate how non-jargony your content is. Holy shit reading blathering academic writing makes me insane.
thanks, yes - hard to read and for no reason! often it just masks that the writer doesn’t have fully formed ideas
Around 31:00 "We should organize in ways that maximize equality and freedom" (paraphrased): This means we need a hierarchy (organize) so that we can reach the highest reachable level of equality and freedom? (it's an honest question). Thanks!
organization doesn’t need to be hierarchical - egalitarianism is a form of organization. but there are democratic and dominance hierarchies, and if you need a hierarchy for efficiency reasons, a democratic one where the members choose to have a hierarchy, choose all the terms of the hierarchy and can choose to dismantle it and remove the leader etc is way more egalitarian than a dominance hierarchy. the book confuses the two
Steven Pinker's work you're mentioning here has always made me throw up in my mouth.
Amazing video as always!
Hi, this is interesting work! If I can bother you with a detail: at 7:35, where you say that the protestors occupied parks illegally, do you mean in the US or in general? I remember Graeber saying that the US 2nd amendment is supposed to protect the right to freedom of assembly and that it'd been essentially repealed in practice and also that the laws were changed after Occupy to make it so.
interesting - I don’t think that’s correct - from what I understand, in NYC, the Zuccotti park that the Occupy started in, is a privately owned park and the owner tolerated their presence, and therefore the city had no grounds to clear them out. Eventually the owner rescinded his acceptance of the protesters which allowed the authorities to come in.
So it’s not a 2nd ammendment issue, because the private sphere is totally expempt from the constitution!
But it also means that my comment was imprecise in terms of the NYC protest because it wasn’t technically illegal until the end, but I know that many of the other hundreds of occupations were illegal, in public parks etc.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 thank you. It makes sense to me that the protests on a private park were illegal without the owner's consent. It's the ones on public parks being considered illegal that confuses me, as a non American. I guess my question is what law makes those (the ones on public parks) illegal in the US because up until now I thought it was like in my own country, that's why that Graeber comment I mentioned made sense to me
@@maueflcoach1506 i think it depends on the country and city - so like in the US there’s freedom of protest and speech etc, but at the same time in most cities you can’t sleep in parks according to the law - so you could clear out a park based on people camping there. but you couldn’t clear it out just because people are protesting. so if the protesters would gather every day and go home every night then it might be legal etc.
Reminds me of the review by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale in the Ecologist.
yes, we have many of the same critiques / observations
After listening to the podcasts I really started to appreciate and desire more equality (not take hierarchy as the norm). However, as a computer scientist and also as a M.S. in software architecture and system theory, I have problems with the idea of removing hierarchy completed, in fact, with the real possibility of removing it entirely. You know, hierarchy is core in software development and it is what allows us to create more and more complex software (at the same time, it creates a sense of alienation of what is going on in the system as a whole). You mentioned the "riddle of history". I think hierarchy is a material condition, a natural force that bends society into hierarchical and it is actually simple to explined. in fact, you have already explained yourself. It is much easier to manager a collaborative effort wiith a hierarchical structure. In a (small) hierarchical society we have political power, which will allow some people to exploit this power into economical power, in which further increases the political power, which further increases the hierarchical structure and so on. You can't escape this reality... it is a wicked problem (I don't know if you know but google this term otherwise).
i think you missed something or else i mentioned it in a different episode than this one, but the issue isn’t just hierarchy, but *dominance* hierarchy. computer software doesn’t have dominance hierarchy, it just has hierarchy. the difference between dominance hierarchy and just hierarchy is coercion. it’s like the difference between SM vs sexual assault. a cooperative that elects managers has hierarchy but it’s not dominance hierarchy. see what i mean?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thanks, I did not missed that one. But I think it's easy to transit from a normal hierarchy to a dominance hierarchy as soon as the hierarchy becomes big and you start to lose contact with who commands what. Because of human nature, someone somewhere will exploit it and over time a normal hierarchy will transit into a dominance hierarchy. It's the same thing about politics. People just want to live, work, have fun. Most people are just "too busy" to check if politicians are not stealing anything. That was my point: you can't avoid hierarchy and due to life conditions, over time, hierarchy becomes dominance hierarchy.
@@BrunoGabrielAraujoLebtag i think there’s that tendency for sure, but if we’re aware of that we can take steps against it. to design the system to disincentivize that, and to force people who are “too busy” to be involved, or to make sure no one is too busy etc. Like in cooperatives in argentina they learned that everyone needs to take turns in administrative positions or else the administrators become a ruling elite etc.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I am just talking from an academic perspective. I am not against change. My point is that people treat social systems too lightly but it behaves like any other complex system. Complex system is an on-going research area in its infancy. Engineering of emergent behaviors is even more new. We don't have a good background on how to deal with this problem. The way communists try to "revolutionize the world" is way too dangerous (and I am talking only from a academic perspective). "Let's just tear this thing down and see what happens", this is just crazy... It's like geo-engineering... The majority of scientists are against large scale geo-engineering experiments because the consequences are too unpredictable and potentially catastrophic.
@@BrunoGabrielAraujoLebtag i agree that you need to know what you’re doing before you do it… and that you need to experiment with things, and that it’s not so simple. but these problems shouldn’t be an excuse for inaction either. the idea is to keep a focus on reducing dominance hierarchy insofar as practical and possible. if you’re aiming in that direction and thinking about the associated problems you’re improving things. we see what works with trial and error, from smaller scale enterprises and organizations to larger ones
Thanks a lot for your work, its a pleasure to get in touch with your channel. Im in the process of research for a theatre project right now and i have decided to engage with the topic of mutual aid. I started reading kropotkins book on mutual aid but after a while i thought that his views are maybe outdated for a current dispute. Since David Graeber wrote the introduction on the recent edition of the book i really wanted to understand his stance on this topic. Im especially interested to read more about Kondiaronk and so i bought the dawn of everything. Since i could not really understand the approach of the authors on equality, i researched and luckily found your channel. Right now im not sure where to continue tbh. I thought maybe you could suggest me some books or tell me what i should read next. You suggested some books in your last videos which i already ordered but it would be awesome to know which literature is more focused on the aspect of mutual aid (even though i know thats its interconnected to a lot of other themes).
I would appreciate your help very much. Im looking forward to the next videos.
Greetings from germany.
hi faraz - i don’t really have too much knowledge about works on mutual aid either in theory or practice besides kropotkin which like you pointed out is 100 years old or more. I guess look up mutual aid on libcom.org they must have a ton of stuff on there. I know there are a lot of small activist organizations everywhere that focus on mutual aid practices now - there most certainly must be some anarchists groups in germany and europe doing these things, but again, I just don’t know enough and haven’t kept up on it so i don’t know of particular ones etc
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I appreciate your quick response. I will try to continue searching for more material on libcom. But right now im really not sure if the topic even makes sense without the proper literature to work on. It seems like i put too much effort on the wrong topic. Maybe i should start working on egality, since i have so much good input right now. Keep on the good work!
Awesome! While I haven’t read Dawn of Everything- this has been illustrative - I’m quite surprised by the way Graeber denied egalitarian societies when, as you mentioned, is the root of his politics as an anarchist - there may of been an “insurrecto” tendency within Graeber’s mind until the end - don’t know
i think that when he was an undergrad student he probably had hippie professors talking about the egalitarian hunter gatherers in utopian dehumanizing ways and thus he had a prejudice against that literature and never engaged with it. and beyond that he had some bad insticts which are common because our society is such a mess when it comes to left political theory
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 yea that makes sense - I think overall his work was needed and generally and culturally a net positive, when you direct his work the way you have, it becomes clear that there were many missing (and just ignored) pieces to the story he was telling - the fact that he would dismiss egalitarian societies as a concrete example of a sort of 'anarchism in action' is really a bit mind blowing to me....Have you ever read anarchist Wayne Price's critique of Graeber's political vision ?
@@luciennoxisou9502 no i haven’t - can you give me a short couple sentence summary?
Oh yeah, at 38:00, I think the perspective that there's a category of "not doing agriculture" and "doing agriculture" is very problematic, right from the get go! And probably contributes to how we mis-understand this progression anyway, not just in human societies, but ecologically speaking more broadly. For example, I would argue that many animals do do agriculture (boundless examples), and I would characterize agriculture as simply an intensification of evolutionary interactions between one species (or group of species) and another (others). For example, take a simple case of grazing animals: Grasslands wouldn't exist except for grazers and browsers that "farm" them. Eating grass stimulates it's growth, because grass has evolved to thrive under these conditions, embedding a mutualism between consumer and producer. While crapping the partially broken down tissues is straight up what we call fertilizer. Human plant breeding and growing isn't different in this regard, and would have been taking place in all manner of forms before the actual process of gathering, storing and planting seeds took place on a larger scale. They are all basically co-evolved mutualisms between species, which tend to propogate through ecosystems as the species involved succeed and spread.
Perhaps higher nitrogen concentration in soils enabled this wide-scale intensification of "agriculture" in the holocene as some suggest, but these evolutionary relationships have developed and existed in one form or other since the beginning of life on the planet, and more latterly in ways that we can better understand once plants and animals were on the scene. I would therefore argue that humans were "domesticating" and propogating species well before the holocene, whether through conscious manipulation of their environment and species, or just through the changes to the environment that they incidentally made via their land-use/behaviour. Like you could argue that we've domesticated just as many "weeds", as we have agricultural plants. The ones we choose to grow are food and are "agriculture", but all the plants that have evolved to fit into the niches created by specific forms of agricultre don't count, even though they have evolved through basically the same process of selection as our domesticated varieties, only natural processes were controlling the results, rather than us adding additional selective forces for traits that were useful to humans.
As a counter point to the no-ag vs. ag framing of human social development, I would examine the development of agriculture in relation to hierarchy more along the lines of how much are natural processes fought against in producing food vs. producing food in ways that work with natural processes? In other words, how much energy and effort must be concentrated via hierarchial systems to combat natural processes (e.g., reliance on monocultures for mechanical or market efficiencies, reliance on artificial inputs of water, fertilizer, or pest control, reliance on plant varieties that don't breed true and must be hybridized every growth cycle, etc. etc), all of which tends to embed the hierarchies required to achieve these concentrations of time/energy/inputs. These are what give hierarchies leverage over the means of production. In contrast, food production systems and technologies that work with and utilize natural processes require far less effort to catalyze them, and therefore, are accessible to many more autonomous individuals and groups of individuals, and here hierarchies don't gain traction so easily, and can be more easily resisted to a large extent.
It's not even that intensive agriculture and fighting-nature is more stable or efficient at producing more food, in fact I would say there's quite a bit of quantitative research nowadays demonstrating just the opposite. I think that many other socio-cultural processes get manipulated by hierarchies once they establish around food production, which then serve to embed hierarchial systems further into the social fabric and food system overall. In other words, it's not agriculture and intensification of food production which creates material conditions for hierarchy to establish, rather it is social-cultural processes that artifically create these material conditions (using agriculture) that propogate hierarchies. Agriculture is more like a tool used by hierarchy to support itself, rather than agriculture creating conditions which lead to the development of hierarchy... just thinking out loud at this point...
I agree that you can expand the definition of agriculture, but the grasslands isn’t a good example - I think you need there to be deliberate efforts to manipulate the environment. Otherwise literally everything becomes agriculture. The book Dark Emu argues that australian hunter gatherers actually turned all of of ausrtalia into a giant farm. I really haven’t thought much about the definition of agriculture so I can’t get into this too deeply just now.
In any case the relationship between agriculture and hierarchy (or anything and hierarchy) is a lot simpler than what you’re talking about - dominance hierarchy happens when some people can control access to the resources that other people need to live and where there’s no easy way for people to go get other resources. The end!
Agriculture in the conventional sense means dependence on plots of land that can be controlled and defended. But that on its own isn’t enough, you need for there to be no good alternatives to go off and get your own land somewhere else, or to go off and forage somewhere else etc.
This is why it took a long time for hierarchy to pop up after agricultural settlements emerged, you needed for there to be enough population growth for surrounding areas to be cut off from people escaping domination attempts.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I get your point, and don't dispute that agriculture and pop density contributes to the development of hierarchies in the scenario you describe above (i.e. people must submit to hierarchy or die), but I would strongly argue that that the forms of agriculture and land tenure that lend themselves to serving the interests/enforcement of hierarchies, and which enable(require?) population densities to grow to levels of this magnitude are themselves the product of hierarchial development in society. i.e. It's not that everyone just sets about developing intensive agriclutural technologies to indefnitely improve production at larger efficiencies of scale (which almost without fail are only "efficient" over the short term and usually result in long term degradation and desertification), as well as subscribe to private ownership of land/resources. It's that people create technological advances in these directions to gain individual (or family or group, whatever) material advantages within a system of stratifying social hierarchies that are already present and developing.
Similarly, what's the difference between your sceneario and a scenario where a relatively egalitarian hunter gatherer society has reached the max pop density that can be supported in the region by the animals and plants they are dependent on? Productivity of these lands are still enhanced by land-practices requiring labour (e.g. prescribed burning, animal husbandry, pruning/planting, etc), which edible/useful species evolve/adapt to just like "agriculture". These territories can still produce storable surpluses of meat and plants, and they can also still be defended against neighboring groups, and you still get warfare between groups over hunting territories (effectively reduces pop pressure), or you get agreements and protocols developed between groups and between individuals within groups, which artifically increase the social costs of resource use one way or another to effectively reduce population growth/pressure (lots of non-violent or ritualized violence mechanisms invented to accomplish this). In this scenario or the one you describe above, death is still the prime motivator to come up with a solution for population pressure. But this doesn't necessitate hierarchy to accomplish, even thought it could right? Like examples from Graeber-wengrow like those florida fisher-hunter-gatherers. And I'd argue that lots of Indigenous societies accomplished precisely these pop growth solutions with or without "agriclture" in the binary sense of this term and with or without dif. levels of hierarchies.
My beef is that viewing agricultre as a binary just makes it easier for people to point their fingers at agriclture as a material cause of hierarchy and domination in human societies, when in fact the co-dependent evolutionary relationships that develop through agricultural practices occur all over the place along a spectrum of intensities whether it's "intentional" by a human being or not, or within a hierarchial context or not. Thus, my extended beef with this binary framing of agriculture, and my argument overall is that there are only particular kinds of agriculture and technology (and land tenure systems) that develop when hierarchies arise and take hold in societies (e.g. peoples who haven't learned from the school of hard knocks about problems with "too much hierarchy), and tthen its the social hierarchies and institutions themselves that shape food production (or other technologies) to be a means to further support the dominance hierarchy.
Therefore, I think there's a strong argument for a multi-dimensional kind of thing going on in which hierarchies creep into and grow in societies that largely takes place in the realm of ideas/thought (e.g. spiritual beliefs, values, worldviews, customs/traditions, etc.), which get translated through to land-use, social behaviour, governance institutions, etc. Bottom-up material conditions influence this process and some material conditions are largely resistent to hierarchy formation while others encourage it, but mucho importantly , top-down social processes play a key role in how these material conditions develop in the first place. And there are tensions and trade-offs between these top-down vs. bottom up processes, which lead to the formation of social hiearchies or the lack thereof in any given time/place.
I think also important: How outward is the view that people take in looking at themselves and the world? i.e. do natural processes and empirical observations of ecosystems/nature (largely composed of autonomous individuals and devoid of dominance hierarchy structures) ground the beliefs, worldviews, and values of a society, or is the cultural gaze directed inwards and focussed on the social-environments constructed therein?. In many cases, this inward focus creates the conditions that I think largely contribute to the formation and persistence of social hierarchies, and indeed hierarchy encourages this looking inwards rather than outwards for just these reasons (and we in western mainstream societies are absolute pros at this).
Lastly, as a further example of hierarchy shaping technological advancement: I kind of consider the development of agriculture and land tenure in these forms you refer to is alot like how I understand solar power is being developed now In Canada (or at least on the prairies). It's not being rolled out so that each household is autonomously generating its own power and can buy/sell from the grid how it likes, or even use this power when the power grid goes down. Instead, panels are being put in and connected to the grid, and each household's power production is monitored by a company who tells the household how much they are producing, and a household's unused power is "sold" to the grid at a fixed rate, and unless you pay loads of extra money for the hardware, you still loose power when the grid goes down. In other words, people are not achieving a greater degree of energy autonomy and freedom from corporate (or crown) owned infrastructure; the technology is getting rolled so that people remain dependent on it, and the private companies that manage/monitor it. And this is happening not because that's how people want it, but it's how the existing dominance hierarchy wants it. I think its the same with certain forms of agricluture and land tenure systems arising within existing hierarchies.
I’ve looked for your name on your site but can’t find it. I love your line “you can’t understand politics without understanding anthropology”. I’d like to quote you.
hey! i’m not really so into plastering my name all over the place - you can just say “the host of the what is politics podcast” or something like that?
I'm having difficulty with the idea that a group operating democratically is anything but a dominance structure of the majority over the minority. But this is not my only difficulty. The weakness of an egalitarian society would seem to be its vulnerability to the conquest by a non egalitarian society, which seems to happen quite often. I think I'm still trying to find some stable structure that doesn't have to undergo civilization collapse on such a seemingly regular basis. Maybe the rises of civilizations are the exception? I've always lived in one, but there have been periods of less expansive ones. Hmmm. Still loving your work, by the way. Amazing work. I'm still hoping you find your way to making this into book form. I just don't trust the longevity of internet. It's too tied to all the infrastructure that is so fragile, if you think about it. Well, when I think about it. Trying not to take things for granted.
well egalitarian hunter gatherer societies have lasted for thousands and thousands of years - but i don’t know that the reason more recent attempts at egalitarian societies get crushed in wars has as much to do with their egalitarian nature vs just the fact that they’ve so far happened in small countries and have faced much stronger, larger enemies who had all sorts of advantages.
and i don’t see how an egalitarian societies is domination of the minority by a majority - non-egalitarian societies are where some people can dominate others based on control over resources. Egalitarian societies just make sure no one can hoard resources that others depend on. Capitalism for example is based on having the state protecting and defending the private ownership of more wealth than anyone could protect and defend on their own.
A book is something i might do later, but it would require me to stop doing videos for like 2 years, or else to be making enough money to stop working for the same amount of time.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Very valid points. And the inability of advanced civilizations to dominate some egalitarian societies is a fact. It still comes at a cost, and I guess I'm trying to figure out how to reduce or eliminate that cost. Perhaps that's not in the cards? Thanks for your response. I appreciate that there are priorities.
what comes at a cost egalitarianism? for sure there’s an efficiency cost and some coordination costs - in some contexts - but you have democratic hierarchies (vs dominance hierarchies) where you can have organizational efficiency without exploitation
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 am I misunderstanding hierarchy? I was thinking of it as structure. Not necessarily an expression of power. Can organization exist without the structure of hierarchy? Hmm. I may be confusing worbs. Does a project require a director? You've really got me doing a lot of thinking. This is a good thing.
@@RichardRoy2 i think i talk about it in one of these graeber episodes, but there’s dominance hierarchy, where the people at the top control the hierarchy for their benefit, and only concede to people at the bottom what they have to in order to maintain their advantages, and there’s a democratic hierarchy, where the purpose is to serve the interests of everyone in the hierarchy, and the people at the top are only there insofar as they serve the interests of the people at the bottom. i think one can easily slip in to the other if you’re not careful, but it’s quite different, think of a cooperative where the management is elected by the workers vs a company where owners hire and fire workers according to their own needs
I finished the book about a week ago. I think you are strawmanning really hard in various parts of this video. In fact, I think if you had Wengrow on your show he would agree with you on most of what you said. They do talk about material condition, but don't use it as a hard determiner of social-political organization. And yes, right wing assholes can use this book out of context for dumb takes, just as leftists can use the story of Kandiaronk as a great critique of the enlightenment itself. What I got from this book is that history is much more complex than we often want it to be. In terms of political mobilization, I think we desperately need this optimism right now (that things don't have to be the way they are forever). A focus solely on material conditions (and we should obviously focus partly on them), is a downward spiral towards doom. Almost all of us are exploited, a focus on our exploitation makes us depressed, so we give up on politics. Even the idea of choice is a breath of fresh air, that we CAN overcome the odds and save the world.
which parts do you think i’m strawmanning? like what am i saying, vs what they’re saying?
I’m sure graeber (if he were alive) and wengrow would say ‘of course material reality matters’ but the whole book is specifically written in a way to make it seem like it doesn’t matter, while covering their asses so they can say ‘i never said material reality doesn’t matter!’
in chapter 5 they actually discuss material theories of social organization, but they make a total mess of it in ways that are very revealing, which i’ll discuss when i get there (i’m mostly only going to cover chapters 1-5 in my review).
my intention is to highlight what they’re doing, and point to where it takes us, not to strawman the argument.
I agree that hope is important, but I disagree that material focus leads us to doom - that’s what Graeber and Wengrow think which is why they’re making such a mess with all their arguments - I think there is actually a lot of hope *because* of material arguments. I’ll get into that in more detail when I finish chapters 1-5 and then present my own big narrative of human origins and descent into hierarchy at the end.
emancipation & change are rooted in material conditions, too. that's not depressing
@@kerycktotebag8164 plus advanced industrial societies have the power to shape conditions in ways that were rarely possible before. also i think there’s always a *chance* to change things even in unfavourable conditions, just that the chances are much lower! Especially if you’re not conscious about what you’re working with (like the english peasants!)
Hope without a clear understanding of the material conditions of society is a good way for rebellious peasants to get killed by the king.
@@janespright haha i love how marxists try to dismiss me for being too anarchist and anarchists for being too marxist… the split between marx and bakunin or leninists becoming the new exploiting elite in the USSR has nothing to do with how badly Graeber and Wengrow made a mess of this book. I’m sure I share all your criticisms of Marx’ followers. Even if you hate Marx, materialist analysis of social phenomen can be used by anyone from anarchists to capitalists to neocons who actually wants to understand how human beings work. You can read Carl Philip Salzman’s The Arab Israeli Conflict if you want to read a right winger using materialism to explain the arab israeli conflict and phenomena like tribalism and honour killings.
thanks for these! commenting for the algo
Wow, I just ordered that book, but now I'm wondering if I should've ordered a different book, like " The Precipice " by Noam Chomsky.
chomsky is always good! dawn of everything is a lot of fun to read, and will introduce you to a lot of new ideas, but it’s also full of crap and really bad scholarship (see episode 10.4) - it’s definitely worth reading IF you read/watch some critiques. My series is good for chapters 1-5 and i recommend Walter Scheidel’s critique for the rest of the book.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 ~ Thanks for the info, I'll have to check out Walter's channel.
@@kengilliland727 scheidel isn’t a youtuber, his review is a scholarly journal article: www.academia.edu/69494234/Resetting_Historys_Dial_A_Critique_of_David_Graeber_and_David_Wengrow_The_Dawn_of_Everything_A_New_History_of_Humanity
"All animals practice immediate consumption” What about ants, bees, or squirrels?
true good point. i guess i should have pointed to our ape relatives
@WHATISPOLITICS69 true, though many of them are no egalitarians.
@@abstractalien12345 they’re not, but they don’t have projectile weapons which is one of the main ways that it’s hypothesized that people we able to be egalitarian. the point was just to argue that humans probably started as immediate return foragers vs practicing food storage etc, though that could be incorrect
@WHATISPOLITICS69 wouldnt that point to the food production not being determinative, then? To be honest, I agree with a lot of your criticism of the book. I think Grabgrow would have been more persuasive if they argued against materialism being a SOLE determiner instead of rejecting it entirely. There is also a lot to be said of the fact that humans can consciousness change their material conditions, but they seem to want to chalk it all up to ideas. Only ideas or only material conditions both seem reductionist, in my opinion
@@abstractalien12345 it’s not just food production that’s determinitive, it’s the factors related to that type of food production which (combined with the existence of projectile weapons) that make hierarchy impossible long term
and I agree, choice exist, limited by the constraints of material conditions - that’s how I think is the way to think of it
Wow, thank you! Can't wait for the next episode in this series, but will watch some of your other vids in the meantime (meager patreon support is on the way to you, would love to be able to pay your salary, but alas... capitalism has me by the balls and is happily watching me suffer:)
What I love about you: your fierce, funny no bullshit points; your passion for this topic which also lights me up; your hutzpa to go toe to toe with 'giants' and beat them; your persistence in the face of challenging conditions; your research and thought work in this vital arena. Thank you for sharing yourself with us, despite the consequences. You rock!
I would love to connect with you as I have also wadded into the shit of human social power, tho from a participatory/practical perspective. About 12 years ago I was excommunicated from my spiritual community of 18 years for asking a question of my teacher. Just a question, not an inflammatory one (IMHO) but nevertheless my head was put on a spike for all to see and shun. This along with other experiences and observations of humanity led me into a deep dive into the question of what is power and why humans unbelievably suck at sharing it even when our existence is doomed for our lack of capacity to do so effectively. Long story a bit shorter: under very difficult circumstances, I researched and published a body of work grounded in theory which translates into a praxis of healthy social power theoretically applicable in any group of humans who are trying to achieve something together with the hope that perhaps if we can increase the effectiveness of our mission-driven organizations, we might stand a chance as a species. Over the 10 years I've been teaching this work in organizations, I've seen groups committed to sharing power operate much more effectively, and I've seen the resistance that emerges when our addiction to power and control surfaces. The methodology was published as an MVP (minimum viable product) and is under constant research, review, and iteration. Might you be open to a conversation?
that’s super interesting - i don’t understand what a minimum viable product is though - is there something i can read on this? and sure send me an email, i give it at the end of each episode - there’s only so much correspondence I can do, my friends are always pissed at me for ignoring them, and i have like months old conversations to catch up on, but always curious about what everyone has to say
and if you don’t have money don’t send me money! i don’t make a lot of money but i do earn a living! i do want money, but just from people who have enough to spare!
and honestly, anyone can get on youtube and criticize big guys, i don’t think it’s super brave, and there aren’t any real consequences for me since I’m not in academia anymore!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 thanks so much for your prompt reply, will email with more details. thanks too for your solidarity around money, tho I meant to better convey my yearning to support your work, and others on the margins like you, and the frustration I feel at my limitations. I also appreciate your candor around your bravery, or lack thereof :) and amend my compliments to an aspiration to put my perspectives on humanity into the public sphere with equal aplomb.
This critique of Graeber & Wengrow book is suburb, and it is actually also good basic marxism, especially at 33.30. Thank you!
suburb?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I ment; superb, excuse my bad english.
@@Debord1 haha i see, makes more sense! thank you!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thanks for your channel, very good pedagogic and mostly political correct.
Thank you for the work done on this. Very good critical analysis.
thanks!
I've thought before that you really need to study some sociology and psychology to understand humanity. Now I'm thinking that anthropology might be needed too.
i’d say so! if you want a good show that talks about all those subjects, check out Fight Like an Animal Podcast, can’t recommed it enough
What the late Graeber and Wengrow seem to set out in the book is the schizogenesis practice of people. In practice this is a seemingly effective way to see how cultures develop and see how the history of people is that we play/do/respond to how other groups treat each other over periods of time and geographies. This analysis that they present is not only a new way to see how humans interact with each other (bong rip) but a predictable account of what humans do in response to wherever they are, therefore we can apply it to the future which might be an invaluable human insight (tab taken). They did not make this clear enough in the introductory parts of the book however that is how they practice in showing how cultures develop in the rest of the book almost in every case when they are not pointing out cases that hierarchies did not develop. However you are completely justified in your critic. What people value is to help their survival. The core theme of the book really should be rephrased however the heart of the debate if they showed the sources of inequality is almost showing that our approach to what inequality is, which so often is with the materials of whatever humans say they are or necessary for survival (enter prevalent examples that you point out), so that there is inequality available to happen in the first place. What is introduced is a concept of playful experimentation of what we think values can be. Values placed in games, homage to the dead, kings with no power, and what other people find value in other things/concepts/religious doctrines. What we find value in is what is played around with. This can be exemplified with the material culture of whatever group we can find. The value that we place is something of a matter of choice, which in a time and place where we can seemingly can do anything that we socially organize to do is revolutionary given that whatever materials we need is something seemingly available (miliarial power or working towards the singularity)((drunken rage to fuck'em all or LSD trip to be all knowing god)). The premise of the book should only be around Schizogenesis in how humans interact with value not the origins of inequality, but when the value of things seems to be a choice given a surplus of any other resource which a human can value is what is being challenged. Value in things that do not matter to survival which also seemed to happen in these cities that seem to crop up. They are challenging the value we place in anything which is practiced in schizovalueorientationsis (muhaha). ((codename schizmogenesis).
haha schizovaluorientationsis… i think the schizmogenesis stuff in the book is interesting and i think it does apply sometimes, but like you said you can’t explain hierarchy at ALL by schizmogenesis. the example they gave about the yurok vs the pacifc northwest coast peoples was a really bad example as I’ll cover when i do chapter 5. why would the yurok base their entire culture on opposing the people to their north, even though they didn’t have all that much contact with them day to day, but all the PNWC people who would regularly fight and kill eachother and enslave eathother choose to adopt very similar cultures to eachother? and when you do have schizmogenesis, cultures usually are very conscious of it and talk about it a lot (think about USA vs USSR in cold war). this was not the case in the california vs PNWC people. you just had one legend… instead the materialist explanation that they authors want to reject gives us a very simple answer. in the north they all based their economy on salmon because they had no better alternatives even though it meant lots of war and raiding, and in the south, despite having a lot of salmon they based their economy on acorns because salmon means war and raiding, and they did have an alternative. and in the shatter zone in between is where you would have more of a range of options so you would expect a mix. and if you do believe the schizmogenesis explanation, it makes sense that there would be more material room for that in an area in between two ecological zones.
As this was intended to be the first of a three part series, it seems possible - perhaps likely - that the obvious gaps were intended to be approached in the following parts of the trilogy. Only Wengrow has the answer to that now…
i can’t blame them for gaps or oversimplifying of some mistakes - any grand book covering huge topics like this is bound to have a lot of these and require some correction (guns germs and steel for example). but there’s a level of making things up, insulting entire fields of study with fake accusations, and just really crazy nonsensical arguments that I don’t think a future volume would really compensate for!
In spite of his haircut and his red star trek jersey, his commentary was well worth the listen. This guy presents a very well reasoned critique of a book I was thinking to purchase which now I probably will.
you clearly mean *because* of my haircut and jersey
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Well that's what you get when you fall asleep in the barber's chair but very good job in your explication and critique.
Interesting and clear.