This blog post discusses David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, focusing on the so-called ‘Agricultural Revolution’ and their radical emphasis on people from prehistory as, well, people.
For the past couple of months — feeling like I belong to a second wave after those who started it upon its release in October — I’ve been slowly making my way through the two Davids’ absolute masterpiece that is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). It’s fun, it’s charming, it’s hilarious, it’s snarky (to quote my sister when I showed her one of the subheadings in Chapter Four), it’s radical and life-affirming, both in its focus on the past but also on possible futures, and above all — or perhaps alongside — it’s playful. Playful: I don’t know if I know a better word to describe their work than this. (And only more heartbreaking does this make the recent loss of David Graeber.)
No doubt does the book’s size, weight, feel, typesetting (and smell, of course) influence my emotional state towards it, I won’t lie, but the book’s persistent radical emphasis on play is what’s struck me the most while reading it. That’s what I want to write about, however briefly, here.
Graeber and Wengrow’s consideration of people from prehistory as, well, people is particularly present when they write about the so-called ‘Agricultural Revolution.’ Believed to be a revolution, it was supposedly suddenly and irreversibly taken up by people in the Neolithic period, inevitably leading to the formation of centralised, bureaucratic states and therefore the oppressive structures we are now ‘stuck’ in today and forever, presumably. But no. They so insightfully argue that it wasn’t — isn’t — this clear, exact, or inevitable, and that the ‘Agricultural Revolution,’ hence the scare quotes, wasn’t one at all.
Why wasn’t it a revolution? Well, for one, it took 3,000 years… Graeber and Wengrow point towards evidence that shows that, in some prehistoric sites such as those in modern-day northern Syria, the initial cultivation of crops like wild cereals dates to around 10,000 BC, but the eventual biological domestication process was not fully realised until 7,000 BC. This alone, they argue, shows that people in the Neolithic period did not allow themselves to become entirely, irreversibly dependent on agriculture once they had begun to experiment, as the original narrative goes — one that I followed along with all those years ago when I’d draw diagrams charting certain moments in human evolution (pretending I knew what encephalisation was… like I even do now…). Indeed, this adoption of agriculture was diverse, which they devote Chapter Seven to documenting, discussing the manifold communities around the world and their approaches, both failures and successes, with a particular focus on ‘play farming’: dabbling, playing, moving in and out of farming owing to seasonal changes. (They also discuss the changing of seasons in relation to the hierarchical organisation of communities in Chapter Three — a flexibility that appears impossible now.)
Why did it take Neolithic communities so long to get more seriously into farming? It’s kind of a strange question, isn’t it? It’s as though there has to be a reason, something logical, mechanical, automated even, because past humans — unlike us, of course — aren’t really human at all, or at least they’re not people like we are. They’re sort of half-human at most, on the way to becoming human, a transition state to be passed through. But this is where Graeber and Wengrow’s radical emphasis on people from prehistory as people — playful and with agency — is particularly striking, I think, not least because it shatters the enduring narrative of human ‘development,’ ‘advancing’ from one stage to the next in a perfect and orderly linear progression. (But what a sorry state that this even needs to be considered ‘radical,’ but so is the case with anything radical.)
Simply put, they write, early farming was hard. But of course it was, surely no one was thinking otherwise. Why does this seem groundbreaking, then? Because, I think, the difficulty of such processes doesn’t matter when one’s considering people from the past as automatons, laying the foundations for the supposed incomparability of today’s world. In the most staggeringly matter-of-fact way, they consider this gap of thousands of years to be the result of people in the Neolithic period simply doing other things, being playful… and human: continuing to hunt and forage wild food, to produce art, to marry, and indeed anything one can think of, surely, like mourning and celebrating their dead, as well as, they go on to write, gambling, travelling, telling stories, and all manner of other cultural… pursuits. (I was going to say ‘pastimes’ but that reinforces the idea that these facets of humanity are ultimately unfortunate features that must only be limited to the brief moments between ‘production’ and ‘growth’ and ‘progression’ — when these ‘pastimes’ aren’t themselves commodified and manipulated towards a ‘productive’ goal, of course.)
Why does it seem so obvious yet so profound to consider people in the past as, well, people? It seems silly to even say ‘profound.’ But why would it be anything but profound, radical? I think it’s because these playful, deeply human qualities are deliberately overlooked by the grand historical narratives of advancement (ideas of linear progression, the Great Man theory, surely also capitalist realism and associated neoliberal Homo economicus) that are said to explain the apparent and inevitable greatness of today’s world. And indeed — and why they’re overlooked — these qualities are radical challenges towards these narratives too, and towards the social and political structures these narratives wish to consider justified, natural, inevitable.
People from prehistory ‘don’t just exist as paragons, specimens, sock-puppets or playthings of some inexorable law of history,’ as Graeber and Wengrow write in the opening pages. If these narratives and structures can be imagined and realised into existence, they can be radically imagined and realised away. (That sounded better in my head, but in light of (prehistoric) play, I’ll leave it as it is…)
