Some histories reside in people, in bodies and landscapes. When Natalie Diaz speaks of water, I often feel like she is speaking of time.
She writes, 1
I carry a river. It is who I am: ‘Aha Makav. This is not a metaphor.
A few stanzas later, she translates:
… ’Aha Makav means the river runs through
the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the middle of
our land.
This is a poor translation, like all translations.
As waters in which the past is always flowing, histories are elemental, untethered and resistant to imperial time—a mean mechanical clock time that would transform peasants into workers, distant lands into European colonies, and modern life into obsessively measured units of progress and productivity. The European plunder of overseas lands not only forcibly removed and killed millions of enslaved African and Indigenous peoples, brutalized landscapes and fractured more-than-human relations and ecologies, it also colonized time. If colonial regimes did not always or absolutely deny the humanity of those they sought to dominate and displace, they invariably did deny their presence in modern time and space. A fiendish kind of ignorance enabled such erasure, since what colonizers mistook for absence, were in fact meaningful and deeply enmeshed relations of co-inhabitance—histories that their ‘enlightened reason’ could not or would not grasp. Colonialism directly nourished what Reinhard Koselleck identified as one of the conceptual achievements of Enlightenment philosophy: a new concept of history that superseded a plurality of histories with a collective singular “history in general.” This idea, from its outset synonymous with the concept of world history, introduced a new “condition of possible experience and possible expectation.” History like the clock, no longer bound to God or nature, was instead made by men: as Schelling would declare by 1798, “man has history not because he participates in it, but because he produces it.” 2 As the imperial time of history systematically erases, literally and semantically, multitudes of histories in order to make itself, it is no wonder Dionne Brand declares, “I do not believe in time. I do believe in water.”
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, is a hefty testament to their belief in imperial time. Even as they introduce into popular discourse an important critique of corrosive ideas of social evolution and developmental history, there is no question that they remain loyal, even obsessive, enthusiasts of “history in general.” This seven hundred page tome presents their ambitious effort at (re)making history, offering a “new history of humankind,” “a new science of history,” “a new world history.” Toward this end they rally a wide selection of ethnographic and archaeological examples to demonstrate how humans have always experimented with and chosen a variety of social arrangements, generally keeping in check the irreversible and permanent accumulation and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few, until now. Concerned with the current state of human affairs in which something “has gone terribly wrong,” the authors argue that the most illuminating inquiry into the political conditions of our time should not focus on the origins of inequality; rather it should ask why and how we have become stuck: “why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo Sapiens—supposedly the wisest of apes—allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root?” Their answer, in part, is a failure of imagination: we humans (apparently every single one of us) have lost the ability to imagine otherwise, to imagine any kind of present or future society free from the state, free from governance rooted in an ancient idea of patriarchy that has hoodwinked us into accepting its violence as a form of care. We are stuck because our sense of history, hitched to the swindle of human progress, has radically impoverished our understanding of freedom. If our received historical narrative has foreclosed on the possibility to imagine a more liberated, cooperative, (state-less) future, then the answer for Graeber and Wengrow is to rewrite history from ‘facts,’ namely archaeological and anthropological evidence.
Their answer, in part, is a failure of imagination: we humans (apparently every single one of us) have lost the ability to imagine otherwise, to imagine any kind of present or future society free from the state, free from governance rooted in an ancient idea of patriarchy that has hoodwinked us into accepting its violence as a form of care.
This approach reveals a keen awareness (and redirection rather than rejection) of the ways in which states construct political time, the normative time of global modern life. States have always invested heavily in narratives of their own inevitability. The stakes are existential, as people must believe in and accept state power in order for it to survive. We are stuck because states use all means available to ensure that citizens internalize a narrative of benevolent and/or inevitable state power, and perhaps most critically the idea that human societies simply cannot do without it. And so we accept violence as a form of care. An essential tool of the state project is the construction of memory, which embroiders critical fictions (such as stadial theory) into understandings of the past in order to establish the state as a historical inevitability. As Meryam-Bahia Irafoui explains,
By defining modernity and the meaning of progress, the State also defines the meaning of ‘history.’ It imposes systematic ruptures upon histories (of countries, peoples, humans, etc.). Through creating permanent ruptures it fabricates a standardized structural continuity in their place…
Given that such history-making seeks to permanently negate all pre-existing or competing histories (concepts of time no less than space), I wonder: can any new—or even “radical”—history of humankind ever be liberating? I have only doubts.
Despite their critiques of Enlightenment thought—certain ideals and its mythical version of history—Graeber and Wengrow cannot quite resist amplifying and redirecting certain ‘facts’ towards a new grand narrative: a story that in the past humans were more free (not necessarily more equal), and a concerted return to pursuing principles of individual freedom (not equality) offers the best way out of our collective oppression. However appealing (or not) such a narrative might be, it seems more critical—even more liberating and hopeful—in this political present to instead recall that histories are not always or only made or fixed in ‘the past’; they also exist as ongoing relations not entirely graspable by language or rational thought—something akin to rivers and oceans, climate and weather, even coal or soil that are shot through with time and yet un-enclosable by categories of past, present and future. There can be no singular collective history that isn’t also a cleansing fiction. To make history, as Michel de Certeau observed, is to transform nature into culture. It is a particular idea that becomes thinkable only when humans see themselves as separate from—and also apart and above—the rest of the world. Human-centered history reckoned by imperial time marks a threshold between being in and out of animal life, and perhaps this is the rotten core of the matter: the conceit that humans, their doings and imaginings, can ever really be separated from nature, from the world, from each other.
*
What is nature if not that existential condition and configuration of life that insists that we all—human and otherwise—are bound irrevocably to each other? In a face-to-face encounter with the 35,000 year old Chauvet Cave paintings, John Berger wondered how the nomadic makers of this remarkable art might have answered the “first and perennial human question of: Where are we?” 3 Imagining a world in which they were but one small part of a vast community of animals, he concluded: humans had not been born onto a planet, but into animal life. They were not animal keepers: animals were the keepers of the world and of the universe around them which never stopped. Cro-Magnon humans were one species amongst other animals, and yet they were also different. They adorned themselves, used fire to make heat and light, built, spoke and counted, carried water, and tended to their dead; they also observed and contemplated their place in the world. Seeking out the sheltered secrecy of caves, they left traces of such acts—what we now call art.
Visiting the Chauvet Cave thousands of years later, Berger imagines a “perfect balance between danger and survival, fear and a sense of protection.” His singular perceptive abilities immediately grasps the dark anatomy of the cave, how its inborn secrecy and otherworldly atmosphere gives way to an expanded sense of the present in which place becomes thick with what has come before and the horizon of what is to come. A temporal anti-vertigo of sorts. What Berger’s evocative account makes clear is that this was not only a space of protection, but also a space of profound intimacy. In recreating the charcoal figures with his own hand on paper (he was also a painter), he imagines “dancing” with the ancient artist’s hand, and how in the dark it detected in certain bulges and fissures of rock the presence of animals that could be summoned by human touch:
The artist knew these animals absolutely and intimately; his hands could visualise them in the dark. What the rock told him was that the animals – like everything else which existed – were inside the rock, and that he, with his red pigment on his finger, could persuade them to come to the rock’s surface, to its membrane surface, to brush against it and stain it with their smells.
Rock became lion. Surfaces, lines and handprints indicated points of communion rather than separation. Cro-Magnon art did not respect borders. And then there is the striking way in which fierce animals like bears, rhinos, lions, and aurochs were depicted: they bore no trace of ferocity. Instead their images, animated by firelight, expressed grace, community, liveliness, mutual recognition, and pleasure—what Berger saw as “human presence in every animal figure.” I would even say that pleasure with recognition suggests something more like collusion, as in the original Latin sense of ‘playing together’ (col- + ludere), a secret agreement or cooperation. Perhaps these images conveyed not so much a reprieve from the dangers of everyday life, but a transcendent intimacy of being in animal life.
Berger’s evocation is a kind of communion itself. He does not instrumentalize the past for some present or future purpose. He does not use metaphor. Instead he immerses himself in a kind of pre-verbal connection between embodied and imaginative life, between time, space and experience. He understands that history is not always a structure of control that births meaning from so many corralled, mis-sighted pasts; most of the time it flickers or flares from within or between. He encounters a different sense of time: For nomads the notion of past and future is subservient to the experience of elsewhere. Something that has gone, or is awaited, is hidden elsewhere in another place. Time here is not linear and sequential, but extensive and discontinuous, even a bit wobbly. Elsewhere is a place, but also a body, a breeze, a rock, a sound, a horizon, and more. Such time-being is not something lost and gone with our pre-sapien ancestors. It is ever-present in human experience, even if it is not recognized as such.
*
A dear friend asked me as the only ‘radical archaeologist’ she knows (if by ‘radical’ she means ‘former’) to write a review of this book. As one amongst hundreds of researchers whose work is cited in Dawn (disclosure: I was part of the Çatalhöyük Research Project for fifteen field seasons), I might be expected to focus on their precise use or interpretation of archaeological and anthropological research. Graeber and Wengrow certainly take some liberties, but they are unquestionably qualified to wade through and interpret such research. And they cover a staggering expanse of time and space. Given this gaping outlook, they do trim or omit many analyses and discussions that might snag or muddle their mission to demote the ideal of egalitarianism (past, present and future), wrest freedom from its Roman perversion, and reclaim the collective power of political choice and imagination. Some omissions are more egregious than others, but even small ones reveal something other than fact-based history propelling this project. For instance, Graeber and Wengrow revive Maria Gimbutas’ much-debated and largely refuted (at least within archaeological circles) idea of a prehistoric mother goddess cult idea for Çatalhöyük. Focusing on three striking figurines categorized as female (although two might be debatable), they conclude that in the absence of any male parallels such figurines might indeed be “matriarchs” after all, or at least expressions of female status or “ritual priority.” This interpretation, at least in its more tempered version, appears to draw from our interpretation of these figures as likely female, and expressive of a certain status related to the accumulation of age, experience, and success. However, it conveniently ignores the majority of our research on the bulk of Çatalhöyük figurines that are tiny clay animals and horns, as well as our qualifying (and frequently repeated) remark that we should not assume that Neolithic human figurines obeyed a rigid female/male binary, or that sex-based categories held the same meanings or importance as they do in many contemporary cultures. Moreover, although researchers and enthusiasts alike tend to associate an excessive accumulation of flesh on certain areas of the body (namely, the chest/breasts, stomach and buttocks) with the female form, virtually none of the most of the recently excavated human figurines at Çatalhöyük display explicit sex traits or gendered decoration; in other words, the sex and gender of these bodies may not have been the point.
virtually none of the most of the recently excavated human figurines at Çatalhöyük display explicit sex traits or gendered decoration; in other words, the sex and gender of these bodies may not have been the point.
Given the catastrophic historical success of patriarchy across human societies, it is not hard to understand why a compelling narrative of prehistoric, egalitarian (however “mythical” according to Graeber and Wengrow) female power offers more to present and future imaginative possibilities than one that takes into account the scrappy accumulation and various strands of ambiguous and incomplete archaeological data. But arguing from absence is a form of conjuring. In their ranging survey of the human past, Graeber and Wengrow do more than read and examine ‘the evidence’ in order to correct the missteps of a dominant narrative; they curate episodes to lead readers to specific ideas about human nature and future possibilities orbiting around a particular project of freedom. Just as ‘The Ethicist’ from the New York Times has questioned whether the varied possibilities of human history they adeptly navigate and present actually line up into the probabilities they conclude, we should also question why they employ this particular methodology of future-imagining—using the past as a metaphor for the future—and what it might reveal about their political blindspots and allegiances, if not exactly their intentions.
we should also question why they employ this particular methodology of future-imagining—using the past as a metaphor for the future—and what it might reveal about their political blindspots and allegiances, if not exactly their intentions.
Graeber and Wengrow seem to embrace the ever-urgent task of writing what Michel Foucault called a ‘history of the present’—a history that critically interrogates given knowledge, exposes the constructedness of the past, and refuses the limitations and dictates of that former construction. 4 They employ a method that, on its surface, resembles Lisa Lowe’s unparalleled work that both critically reveals and undermines how (Western liberal) history and historical knowledge often fix and determine the relationship of the past to the present, and how the structure and meaning it gives to the past also determines what is imagined as possible in the present and the future. However, if Dawn aims to expose and tear down far-reaching fallacies of Western thought—specifically its ideological moorings of liberal freedom and equality—it lacks Lowe’s (via Walter Benjamin) critical, emancipatory gesture of refusal. Rather than mourning and attending to what remains of history’s subjugated “unknowns” and “nonhumans” and writing towards their humanity and liberation, the authors instead retreat to the past as a source of possible redemption.
Redemption for colonialists is best apparently when delivered by an Indigenous person, and they enlist the rhetorically skilled Wendat statesman Kandiaronk (c. 1649-1701), who likely traveled to France, and through opinions recounted in dialogues written by French aristocrat known as Lahontan, possibly introduced the concept of individual freedom and reasoned debate to European intellectual discourse. While the idea that European Enlightenment thinkers were influenced by Native cultures, concepts and people (as well as those from Asia, Africa, and so on) is already well-established, if not broadly known or acknowledged, Dawn’s treatment of this episode is nauseatingly, even violently, reductive and instrumentalizing. First, the move to single out Kandiaronk seems to rehearse a tedious Western need to articulate significant historical developments in terms of the exceptional achievements of certain ‘great’ and often charismatic individuals. While the authors draw substantially from Barbara Alice Mann’s work and acknowledge that many of the critiques of Christianity and European customs and society attributed to Kandiaronk (or Adario as Lahontan called him) correspond almost exactly to criticisms by other speakers of Iroquoian languages around the same time, they fail to (a) mention her potentially relevant reminder that Kandiaronk’s official position for most of his political life was that of speaker (not ‘Chief’ as French confusion would have it), whose particular skill and official duty were to relay precisely the content of others’ words, or (b) consult or address the oral tradition that maintains a “strong memory of Kandiaronk.” Even more troubling is the way in which they distill Wendat and Iroquoian attitudes and practices into a notion of individual freedom that they understand as being premised on a certain level of “baseline communism.”
The entire book orbits around an idea of political will anchored to this notion: as both precursor and foil to the liberal European concept of individual freedom, freedom rooted in communism (now an Iroquoian notion), not private property (a European one) is a political human instinct to be reclaimed and nurtured for the imagining of a more liberated future. Never mind that this particular project of liberation is incommensurable with decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty. Never mind that their analysis reduces and repurposes Indigenous concepts and practices, from Wendat or Iroquoian notions of ‘individual’ and ‘freedom,’ to the ‘baseline communism’ they use as a stand in for social and spiritual practices that defy singular, discrete Western ideas of self, soul, and individual responsibility. What does freedom mean if ‘moral persons’ with certain rights and responsibilities are lineage groups rather than individuals; when persons are also their relations—permeable, partible and contingent; when bodies are both one and many? What does freedom mean within a Wyandot or Senecan or Algonquin or Mojave worldview? Would or should those who could answer these questions even tell? Dawn might provide a convincing reason not to, since even two respected scholars have managed to unwittingly attribute to Native people the inspiration for that cunning tool of Western liberalism that justified the colonization, dispossession and dehumanization of their very own people, along with millions of others. Although it seems certain that European thinking was challenged and inspired by what Graeber and Wengrow call the “Indigenous critique,” what do we make of their facile connection between the freedoms conceptualized and practiced by Wendat peoples and the concept of ‘individual freedom’ as articulated by Western liberalism? As the authors’ admit, the latter effectively shackled freedom to other concepts that were incommensurable with Wendat values and practices: namely, private property and the absolute power of the male household head as established in ancient Rome. This difference is not, as they say, a matter of “losing” the baseline communism of Wendat ideas and practices of freedom; it is willful or opportunistic misunderstanding in service to imperial desire. As Lisa Lowe has so emphatically detailed, liberal freedom is a ruse, a wily cover-up for ongoing unfreedoms organized and rendered by the enmeshed practices and effects of (settler) colonialism, chattel slavery, racial capitalism and empire. Do the authors imagine inclusion in this sordid history of liberal freedom as some kind of honor or recognition? This and the above concerns seem to matter little to Graeber and Wengrow, but such lack of care reveals a particular orientation pulsing through the narrative of their history.
What does freedom mean within a Wyandot or Senecan or Algonquin or Mojave worldview? Would or should those who could answer these questions even tell?
Dawn effectively traps Kanadironk (along with other histories and cultures) within their history—history that is totalizing, imperial and colonial, and composed from shined up and lined up facts, if not exactly fiction. It is a story primarily concerned with cultivating what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call a critical consciousness of liberation to replace and stand in for the more uncomfortable tasks of relinquishing certain powers, privileges and entitlements necessary for the actual liberation of others. Such critical consciousness does not address the ongoing unfreedoms created by colonization or chattel slavery, those violent conditions of liberal freedom; rather it encloses or completes such histories by asserting a present where oppression is experienced by all (or at least 99%) in order to imagine a possible future as rupture. It then makes sense that Graeber and Wengrow place significantly more emphasis on the mental rather than material dimensions of imagination and choice, revealing that they are devoted heirs and stewards of a long-standing European intellectual tradition who are not proposing anything so radical or rebellious after all. Tuck and Yang (via Audre Lorde) counter such aspirations to mental emancipation with the reminder that, “freedom is not a possibility that is just mentally generated; it is particular and felt.” It is a statement that refuses and checks a liberal progressive impulse to convert Indigenous politics into a multicultural Western doctrine of liberation. Even as Graeber and Wengrow swagger through the past, inserting important textures into a dominant narrative of human history, what they offer in its place is simply more history that rolls over and obscures previously existing histories, ongoing traumas and vibrant relations among and between specific peoples, landscapes, and other forms of life. In short, Dawn’s history, which deploys the extractive power of imperial time, abandons actually existing humanities in order to ‘recover’ a particular past and a particular possible future for some humans.
It then makes sense that Graeber and Wengrow place significantly more emphasis on the mental rather than material dimensions of imagination and choice, revealing that they are devoted heirs and stewards of a long-standing European intellectual tradition who are not proposing anything so radical or rebellious after all.
To condense a culture and worldview into one charismatic individual, to condense this person into one pivotal concept in Western thought and political life—these are extractive, invasive and diminishing acts of translation, acts that reduce specific histories and civilizations to metaphor, metaphor which is then applied as scaffolding for a tale of Western intellectual and cultural development and futurity. Translation, as Natalie Diaz describes, is about knowledge, about who and what determines its value, its use, its dissemination, and to whom. It is no wonder that such knowledge is a source of distrust for those whose wisdom, relations, experiences and bodies have been extracted, consumed, misunderstood, misused and discarded by a (white) Western system in order to reiterate itself. Whose freedom do Graeber and Wengrow imagine they might make possible in writing this old-as-new history? And at whose expense will this freedom be forged? If there is a consequential lack of imagination impeding a possible future based on expanded freedoms and mutual aid, then it is also expressed through a scholarly and scientific unwillingness to abide the emancipatory potential of not knowing in the ways that Diaz and others cultivate and make space for as a form of love and care. What other futures are possible when encounters with the stranger, the unknown, the other (including non-human others and unknowns) proceed not from a brutalizing gesture of knowing, but rather in the spirit of Christina Sharpe and Ross Gay, from a gesture of beholding, being held, and being beholden—of witnessing, embrace and indebtedness? Perhaps for Graeber and Wengrow, it is impossible to imagine, but these possible futures already exist.
Carolyn Nakamura is a researcher and writer based in Amsterdam.
- Natalie Diaz. 2020. “The First Water is the Body.” In Postcolonial Love Poem. Graywolf Press.
- F. W. G. Schelling. 1798. Ailgemeine Übersicht der neuesten philosophischen Literatur,” Philisophisches Journal 8 (quoted in Koselleck 1983,196, n.7.).
- John Berger. 2005. “Pont d’Arc.” Here is where we meet. Bloomsbury Press, 129-142.
- Lisa Lowe. 2015. The Intimacy of Four Continents. Duke University Press, 136, n. 3.