W a y m a r k s ~: Bullsh*t Anthropology - Reading Graeber & Wengrow

For a long time, I’ve thought that anthropologists and archaeologists tend to make a lot of grandiose and sweeping claims regarding the origins of culture and human society which they can’t really substantiate. At last, I’ve found an anthropologist and an archaeologist who seem to agree with me.

THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING: A NEW HISTORY OF HUMANITY by David Graeber & David Wengrow (Penguin, 2022)

From the summer of 1994 to the summer of 1997, I was a student studying for a BSc in Anthropology at the University of East London (UEL). The Anthropology Department at UEL was staffed by academics who described themselves as Marxists. They maintained that what they were teaching us was ‘radical anthropology.’ One of the tutors was Chris Knight, an anthropologist who had come up with a novel idea for the origins of culture being linked to menstruation: – a theory which he maintained could be proved by meta studies of language and mythology, etc., wherein modern human societies had evolved out of a matriarchal primogenitor; presumably some long forgotten band of proto-communist hominids who had emerged ‘Out of Africa’ in the long dark and distantly remote millennia located at the other end of human prehistory. Folk memories of which, he maintained, still echo down the generations in common culturally-shared tales of myth and folklore. He called his theory the ‘sex strike’ theory, and he set out his elaborate thesis in a hefty scholarly tome, titled, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Yale University Press, 1991). This was the bible which we undergraduates were all expected to buy, imbibe, absorb, and adhere to, as well as to generally espouse as new radical anthropological-evangelists – especially (it was taken as tacitly read), if we wished to do well in our essays and the final exams, thereby earning our degrees.

It was an extremely well-choreographed curriculum, a slick syllabus which was very deftly delivered by a bunch of very clever and adept academics. In the first year we were all generally wowed, bowled over, utterly enthralled and completely taken in. But some students among our cohort began to have their doubts at some point or other during the second year of our studies. In the third year some even began to openly rebel. And, of course, the result was a graduating class neatly differentiated into thirds, two-twos, two-ones, and firsts, with the weightier majority of sceptics grouped at the lower end of this academic scale, and the few fully-paid up acolytes rewarded for their open homages to the guru in the rarefied elite group of first-class honours (a grand total of three out of thirty-or-so graduates, if I recall correctly). I was a lower-middling sceptic, who, having sought to divert and dilute my degree with as many scientific archaeology electives (run by the Environmental Science Department at UEL’s Stratford Campus) as I was permitted to take, somehow emerged at the other end of it all having gained myself a ‘Desmond’ (i.e. – a two-two).

Looking back, it was a truly bizarre and intellectually beguiling three years. I remember sitting and rather squeamishly watching what felt like a glacially-paced film screening of two Yanomami Indians with pudding bowl haircuts, somewhere deep in the Amazon, repeatedly bashing each other over the head with long wooden poles. It looked like a much more violent and far less funny version of Monty Python’s fish slapping dance. I remember wondering what I was meant to make of it all. Looking back now, it seems like an apt metaphor for my three years as an anthropology student. However, I no longer dismiss those three years quite as diffidently as I probably did at the time. Undoubtedly, I did learn a lot during my undergraduate degree, and what I learnt is something I’ve reflected upon and probably continued to adapt over the course of the intervening decades.

Karl Marx

Certainly, when I returned to university (after some 15 or so ‘gap years’) to study for an MA degree in World History, all that early grounding in Marxist theory meant reading Eric Hobsbawm made a lot more sense than I’d expected it would. During my BSc, I had become very interested in one area of anthropology which UEL termed as ‘cultures of dominance and cultures of resistance.’ And, rather naively, I thought I’d stolen an intellectual march upon my tutors by writing a short dissertation explaining the success of the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia using Gramscian-Marxist theories of hegemony and power. I really enjoyed researching and writing this particular piece, and it seemed all the more ironic to me that I did so while sitting at one of the desks in the old Round Reading Room of the British Library, where Karl Marx himself famously used to sit reading and scribbling.

The Round Reading Room, The British Library

But the truth was, much of my undergraduate studies completely befuddled me. I’d really wanted to study for a joint anthropology and archaeology degree at Durham University, but things had gone awry with my A-levels. And so, after running the grim gauntlet of ‘clearing’ (in which I very nearly got into SOAS), I ended up at UEL feeling utterly thwarted. One good thing about UEL though, was that the timetable was very compact. It was usually condensed into just two- or three-days attendance per week. This meant that during my undergraduate years I was able to spend a lot of my time working as a volunteer at the British Museum, and I also spent a month each summer camping on archaeological excavations in the UK, which is where I really wanted to be. Consequently, much of what I was taught at UEL seemed like it was a diversion from what I was properly interested in.

That diversion, I realise now, was essentially the theoretical side of things. I mistakenly thought I was solely interested in the ‘material culture’ aspect of our remote past, but the truth is (and always was) that there’s no divorcing the two aspects. Material remains only tell you so much. It’s true that a lot can be revealed from sophisticated scientific analysis: – for example, examining dental enamel from a skeleton can tell you that the person whose grave was excavated at Site X actually grew up and spent most of their life living at Site Y, which is mind-blowing because Site X and Y are thousands of miles apart and there’s nothing else associated with that grave which could have told you this remarkable fact about the physical mobility of both individuals and broader populations at this time. Although, that said, I did find it unconscionably tedious to sit through lecture-after-lecture on the slow multi-millennia-long evolution of emmer wheat, which it seemed as though it was being taught in real time! – But in many ways, listening to outlandish theories about how human culture had evolved out of a system of collective social coercion which was codified in cyclical systems relating to menstruation, sororal solidarity, and the phases of the moon seemed oddly mind-bending in an altogether totally different direction, and a trifle too speculative for some of us even as still wet-behind-the-ear undergraduates. As far as theories go, this one certainly qualified as being firmly ‘out there’ on the fringes. I took very few notes during my third year. Instead, I mostly sat there listening to our lecturers with a somewhat baffled sense of intense concentration, and at the end of each lecture my conclusions always seemed to amount to the same response, which was: “But how can you possibly know that for sure?”

It was only much, much later on in life that I came to realise that this is the point of the humanities. Even subjects such as archaeology, anthropology, and history, which draw on concrete aspects of science and scientific practices, are essentially nothing more than plausible fictions – ideas, opinions, theories – it’s as simple as that. Though some practitioners in these fields might evangelically espouse their academic revelatory notions as some sort of gnostic gospel truth which we should all revere and adhere to as the ‘be-all, end-all’ answer to the ultimate questions concerning the origins of life, the universe and everything – it’s still only a theory, their theory. It’s simply one theory among many which have gone before, and one which will be followed by many more still to come.

It was the cult-like hagiographical obeisance that came with the theory which really turned me off and caused me to tune out, although not drastically enough to make me drop out. I hung on in there. Partly, because it was a circus which, nevertheless, could still entertain even the most sceptical of minds. I clearly remember the closing moment of the final lecture for my BSc, when one of our tutors had wowed us for one last time with such a grand epiphany-like conclusion to their showman-like exposition, explaining some all-encompassing aspect of life rooted in the long lost deep-time of human prehistory, and one of my (by now deeply-jaded) fellow-students raised his hand and asked: “Yeah, that’s all very interesting, but where do the Spice Girls fit into all of that?” --- To which the long-suffering tutor concluded his lecture by telling my fellow student (and former housemate) to “F*ck off!” --- It was certainly a radical and rather definitive ending to three very long but ultimately intellectually-formative years.

Consequently, reading the first chapter of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Penguin, 2022) instantly catapulted me back to that 1930s-era lecture hall at UEL’s old Barking campus. Here was a book, at long last, which seemed to be echoing my baffled bemusement. A book which was also asking: “But how can you possibly know that?” – A book which was at last finally holding up a mirror to what (to coin a David Graeber-like phrase) I’d long thought of as being bullsh*t anthropology.

Graeber and Wengrow’s book begins by stating that: “Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 BC. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were.” – How fantastically refreshing. A book about everything which starts by stating that we know nothing as a point of fact! – But, of course, there has to be more to it than that. After all, how else could this book be over 700 pages long? – How the heck is it going to make sense of all of this unknowable stuff?

Well. This is a very smart book. One which balances both exegesis and exposition. Hence it should be read not so much in search of concrete answers, but perhaps more in quest of cognitive challenges. It walks a surprisingly genial line between hermeneutics and teleology (largely by means of avoiding the use of such words). It’s a real joy to read. An intelligently clear and conversational book. One which encourages us to engage with our own dialectical processes of reasoning: telling us that the answers we seek matter only if we give equal weight to the questions which beget those answers; prompting us to wonder why such questions need asking at all? – In essence, it is all a matter of perspectives. And, of course, awareness. Maintaining an awareness that individual and collective personal, social and cultural biases pervade all levels of critical thinking. In many ways, we are simply blind to our own blind spots. But we can escape this ever-decreasing circle.

In order to demonstrate this, the two Davids go back to the supposed rational objectivity of Enlightenment thinkers, such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, looking at their engagement with little-known contemporary world-views as were then held by the relatively recently encountered cultures of the New World. Asking not how the assumed proto-communist equality of our early ancestors was lost, and thereby wondering how inequalities within our societies first arose; but rather, asking why it was (and still is) assumed that we began our social evolution in these egalitarian bands of early hunter-gatherers? – Graeber and Wengrow speculate that perhaps the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity (within distinctly defined limits and constraints) came into being as a response to the interactions of colonial settlers and missionaries with the Amerindian populations they encountered in the New World.

It’s a fascinating reversal. And it is also a far cry from what I was taught as an anthropology undergraduate back in the mid-1990s. At that time the theoretical-side of physical anthropology was alive with debates between those who believed the ‘Out of Africa’ theory, advocated by anthropologists such as Chris Stringer and my own tutors at UEL, and those who adhered to the ‘multi-regional evolution’ theory of equally eminent scholars such as Milford Wolpoff, and also Lewis Binford’s ‘new archaeology’, which redefined processual approaches to the study of material culture. Elaine Morgan even came and gave us a special lecture on her ‘aquatic ape’ theory – a lecture which was partly disrupted by some Islamic fundamentalist students, who were regularly causing problems at UEL at that time (… I’ve often wondered in recent years what became of those guys and where they are today). Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976), a major scientific recalibration of Darwinian evolution, was a much-venerated text at this time at UEL too. The (then still relatively recent) DNA-sequencing findings regarding so-called ‘mitochondrial Eve’ were helping to bolster the popular image of the African Rift Valley as some sort of Garden of Eden for early humanity. And the eponymous Australopithecus, known as ‘Lucy’, along with the footprints found at Laetoli, were the superstar protagonists of most of our essays.

But, despite the very tempting allure of all this anthropological evangelism, I couldn’t help being niggled by my doubts, mostly arising from the sparsity of evidence which was so thinly but definitively staked out over such vast tracts of time – how could so much theoretical weight be borne by the stray findings of a single fragment from an incomplete hominid fossil dating from one distant millennium be made to quantum leap through the aeons and marry with that found in another? – The two Davids phrase it far better than I ever could have done so when I was writing about all this back in 1994-1997: “If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3 million years, there actually was an age in which the lines between (what we today think of as) human and animal were still indistinct; and when someone, after all, did have to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened. Still, we really don’t know how. It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened: stories which necessarily reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns. As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies.” (p.89*)

It wasn’t so much the theorisation itself which bothered me, but rather the imperative didacticism which went with it. The fact that we were required to nail our (preferably Marxist) colours to the mast and expected to defend them to the death. There was no room for bourgeois ‘middle-roaders’, even though all I wanted to do was keep an ‘open mind’ to all the different possibilities. And I guess around this time, the two Davids – who aren’t that much different in age to me, must have been thinking the same as fellow undergraduates in their respective institutions. As they say: “There are phases of literally thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominin activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of shaped flint. While the technology we are capable of bringing to bear on such remote periods improves dramatically each decade, there’s only so much you can do with sparse material. As a result, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to fill in the gaps, to claim we know more than we really do. When scientists do this the results often bear a suspicious resemblance to those very biblical narratives modern science is supposed to have cast aside.” (p.90)

In many ways, especially when looking at the Palaeolithic, all of this seems so massively remote that it is surely inconsequential to our own lives as modern human beings, isn’t it? – Well, maybe not. There is more than just a philosophical dimension to pondering the deep past. It is also a way of reflecting upon the present. If we haven’t always been the way we are now, what are the possibilities for the future, and who might we yet become? – In this sense, The Dawn of Everything does have another dimension. It seeks to go beyond a straightforward re-write of anthropological thinking. This book does have an agenda: “There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. To understand how this situation came about, we should trace the problem back to what first made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers and judges.” (p.87-88)

As already noted, modern thinking is to a large degree rooted in the ethos born out of the Western Enlightenment. It is a distinctly entrenched paradigm which surrounds us like a fog, but anthropology and archaeology can help us to wake up to the fact that not everything everywhere has been the same for all time. There are distinctly different ways of living, of organising and operating as collectively cohesive social animals. An excellent book, in this regard, which I value very highly is David Turnbull’s Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies In The Sociology Of Scientific And Indigenous Knowledge (2000), which really does show in a series of remarkably mind-expanding modes that there are many diverse epistemologies which can be used to understand our shared world, as well as re-orientating our perspectives within it – from the cross-generational collaborative means and methods by which enormous Medieval cathedrals were designed and constructed, to the global navigational systems whose subtleties were honed, adapted and successfully applied over centuries by Pacific islanders, regularly migrating over vast (and seemingly featureless) tracts of open ocean, almost like seafaring nomads. The way of the world forged in the mindset of the Western Enlightenment is far from the only way to collectively know and understand ourselves.

Indeed, this was also something we looked at as part of my Anthropology BSc. I remember, during that ‘cultures of dominance and cultures of resistance’ module I mentioned earlier, we studied E.R. Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), which, when it was first assigned to us, I thought qualified as perhaps the most boring sounding book title in the world. But, in truth, it was utterly fascinating. It spoke of the ways in which one society could periodically shift its social system of governance, operating in a kind of double morphology. Echoing the early work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on the Nambikwara in the Amazon, which Graeber and Wengrow discuss in some detail (in Chapter 3 of The Dawn of Everything), the Kachin of Burma regularly alternated between two organisational systems depending on prevailing factors at different times. As Graeber himself summarises Edmund Leach’s book (on GoodReads): “This is an anthropological classic of the first water – and one of the books that opened my eyes to what anthropology could be. It’s hard to explain how reading about hill tribes in Southeast Asia where powerful people periodically try to create little kingdoms (gumsa) in imitation of the Shan states in the valleys, but where the complexities of their forms of agriculture and marriage systems inevitably lead them to collapse and form democratic republics (gumlao) again – and then the whole cycle starts all over again – but when you read it, you are entranced. Well, okay, I was. It’s books like this that made me want to dedicate my life to anthropology.”

Since Leach wrote way back in the 1950s, much more recently this same region has inspired a whole new re-evaluation of so-called ‘anarchic’ states of being which has resulted in a much debated concept, dubbed ‘Zomia’, in which certain societies situated in the highlands of Southeast Asia have seemingly managed to avoid incorporation into the fabric of the modern nation states that surround them without being wholly cut-off from modernity, as is often assumed of remote Amazonian tribes and the like. James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) is the equally entrancing text which has sparked this revival of interest in such matters. It’s exactly these kinds of academic reappraisals which, as the two Davids highlight, is now causing a growing number of people to re-evaluate the long-held assumptions that there was some sort of uniform social and political progress within early human societies, leading from simple egalitarianism to more complex, codified and hierarchical systems; which in turn led to agriculture and urbanisation, then onto conquest and colonisation, etc., eventually resulting in the modern globalised world of capitalist, free trade and free market economies which we know and hold today as supposedly the ‘be all, end all’ perfection of human existence.

Essentially, we have lost sight of how societies can and do change in order to adapt according to their shifting ecological and economic circumstances. While I was at UEL I remember reading and writing about two starkly contrasting studies conducted by the same anthropologist. These ethnographies were The Forest People (1961) and The Mountain People (1972) by Colin Turnbull, which respectively describe life among the Mbuti and the Ik, two societies each located in vastly different regions of Africa. The first book presents a vision of a mobile band of pygmies living an idyllic, egalitarian, Garden of Eden-like existence, while the other confronts the reader with a harsh and hellish, Holocaust-like vision of a violently brutal and selfish society, having been pushed to the very brink of social cohesion by dislocation, drought, famine and an oppressive scarcity of resources (the Ik were previously nomadic, but had been forced to become sedentary). Writing an essay on The Mountain People was possibly one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. But it was an education in itself of how the norms we take for granted only afford us the narrowest of views as to what human life can be – particularly in its potentials for both good and ill. It taught me that an appreciation for difference, and a desire to know (even if it’s impossible to fully understand) another culture is the true gift of studying anthropology, i.e: maintaining an openness to insight.

Ever since completing those three years and graduating with my Anthropology BSc, I’ve had a long and troubled relationship with my first degree. At the time it seemed like a mistake, and I struggled with the pedagogical constraints through which it had to be negotiated; but ultimately, I don’t regret it. If anything, it has come to exert an ever-greater relevance to the things which I have done subsequently. I know anthropology has shaped and informed my outlook on life in general, and it still very much influences my approach to my continuing PhD studies as an historian. Hence, what once seemed like a bad hand which life’s croupier had dealt me, one that has long lingered with me like a cognitive millstone, now seems to have been a long unappreciated gift – one which only the passing of time has at last finally managed to unmask. As in Turnbull’s The Forest People, seeing the sacred molimo trumpet out of context is merely a prosaic act when contrasted with the importance of visualising what it embodies while hearing it at the appropriately sanctioned moment in its ritualised use. Essentially, behind the different masks of certainty which other people force us to choose between, I believe it is possible to maintain a sense of ‘negative capability’ (as John Keats described it: that is, the ability to balance and live with opposing or contradictory thoughts and ideas). Because this might very well be the only thing which (paradoxically) helps us to stay sane.

Looking back, I see two experiences: one at the very end of our undergraduate degree, and the other many years later, which put this conclusion into the most quotidian of contrasts for me – posing a fundamental question which I’ve never really been able to fully answer for myself, hence why the continual relevance of such a prolonged re-evaluation remains a constant in my thinking-life:

The first was a discussion that some of my fellow students had amongst ourselves after one of our last lectures at the end of our final year. It was a moment marking the culmination of all of us having spent three years steeped in a deep and meaningful appreciation of the rich, broad cultural and political diversity of humanity in all its myriad forms. Someone idly asked all of us what we were going to do once we’d finished our studies that summer. Most spoke of summer jobs and then of their aspirations towards future careers or further education: MAs, MScs, that kind of thing. But one lad, a young Israeli boy, said he was going home to do his National Service. Most of the group openly commiserated with him, but he looked up and quickly rebuffed us, saying: “Oh no, I’m looking forward to it. I’ll get the chance to shoot some Palestinians!” – There was an uneasy silence. No one was sure if he was joking or not.

The second happened a couple of decades later, when I was flying home to London from Seoul in South Korea. I was sitting next to a young Korean girl, and naturally enough at some point during the long flight we got talking. She told me she was travelling to the UK to begin studying at university. She quizzed me on what life was like in the UK, what my own experience had been of going to university there, and she asked me what I’d studied. When I told her I’d studied anthropology she said it was a subject which interested her and quizzed me further on what that was all about, so I did my best to summarise it. When I’d finished, she asked me with a dead straight face (the seriousness of which only just stopped me in the nick of time from bursting into laughter): “How do you reconcile all of that with your faith in Jesus Christ?”

Sitting back in my seat, traversing the world at 35,000 feet, far above the immense spectrum of everyday lives being lived out collectively and individually beneath the raft of pure white clouds passing below us at a rapid rate of knots in that sealed metal tube with wings, I found myself reflecting once again: how it is all too easy to take the world at face value and not realise that we are all only ever looking into a mirror which simply shows us what we already know and consequently take completely for granted. There’s no seeing the wood for all the trees. No wonder, then, that the world is such a messed-up place!

If life tends to confound our expectations, it’s no wonder we are always seeking to find the points upon which we can anchor ourselves. But the true challenge is trying to travel freely by casting those anchors aside. Attempting to see beyond that mirror, to look into other surfaces and perceive how things might be reflected differently there. For me, this book, The Dawn of Everything, is a mirror of one sort or another. I’m not sure if it represents a revelation of something new, or simply a confirmation of all the things I thought I already knew, but which previously I had no way of articulating for myself before reading it. I realise I am still very much stuck in my initial, overly-enamoured phase of admiration for this particular book. And it is a book which I’d highly recommend everybody to read. Sadly, my quasi-review here has barely even scratched the surface of all that it contains, nor have I done sufficient justice to the real aplomb with which this book is crafted. It is truly impressive (I could hardly believe my eyes, but the two authors’ description of the domestication of wheat is genuinely riveting reading!). Had he not passed away in September 2020, David Graeber could well have become for me the anthropological guru par excellence whom I’d managed so assiduously to avoid all these years!

And in this regard, I should perhaps end by coming full-circle, to append a somewhat amusing footnote, referring back to Chris Knight: who, despite his professed admiration for David Graeber, has recently taken Graeber to task by rather baldly stating that: “For David and his whole circle, I don’t exist. My book doesn’t exist, it never got written, and it’s irrelevant.”** – Knight seems to think that Graeber doesn’t give enough credence to the findings of ethnographers and consequently totally misreads the most fundamental truths about hunter-gatherer societies. Personally, I think Graeber and Wengrow’s new book does engage with all of the issues which Knight complains about (see Chapters 4 & 6 in particular). And likewise, according to my reading of The Dawn of Everything, I also think the two Davids very effectively expose a lot of the speculative assumptions inherent in ‘bullsh*t anthropology’ (which I’ve complained about at length above) by underlining my contention that speculations are all we really have to work with here. Consequently, as with any theory regarding the origins of human society, there needs to be enough latitude for doubt, even if they too (Graeber and Wengrow, that is) think they’ve managed to figure it all out and have very persuasively managed to argue their own particular case.

Ultimately, all churches – whether sacred or secular – are founded upon faith. In the end, the only choice we each have is deciding who we wish to follow. I guess – as with my ever-evolving reflections upon the strange fruits of my Anthropology BSc, fruits both sweet and sour in a world both complex and straightforward – the real test, I suppose, will be to see what I think of this particular book in 30 years’ time. After all, it’ll be fascinating to see where things go from here.

*NB – The page numbers I reference above are taken from the page counter of a PDF version of the book (which you can find here on the Internet Archive) which gives no actual page numbers on the text itself.

**Quote taken from an address which Chris Knight made to the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Online Communist Forum on 24 January 2021.

I have collated a playlist on YouTube of videos by and about David Graeber – including a couple of critiques of Graeber’s work by Chris Knight (as quoted above), and interviews with David Wengrow about ‘The Dawn of Everything.’ Knight has also written a blog post giving his own extensive critique of ‘The Dawn of Everything’ which you can find here: Chris Knight - Wrong About (Almost) Everything (FocaalBlog, 22 December 2021). There's also an interesting article on some of the early critical responses to ‘The Dawn of Everything’ here in The Observer (12 June 2022). Plus a reluctantly disappointed homage, which asks 'What Happened to David Graeber?' by Crispin Sartwell, LARB (20 January 2024).