Now, today's event is called
Inequality, Past and Present, and it's a roundtable discussion
of The Dawn of Everything-- A New History of
Humanity, a book coauthored by the late
anthropologist David Graeber and the
archaeologist David Wengrow, who joins us today. Now, as a testimony to the
great interest here at Harvard in discussion about your
work, Professor Wengrow, today's event has attracted
no fewer than 10 cosponsors, and it is my great
pleasure to thank them all here, which I will do. And so it's the Inequality in
America Initiative, Mahindra Humanities Center, Standing
Committee on Archaeology, Science of the Human Past, The
Max Planck Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience
of the Ancient Mediterranean, the GSAS or The Graduate
School of Arts and Sciences Workshop on the History and
Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Ancient Studies,
the Department of History, the Department of Anthropology,
and the Department of Near Eastern Languages
and Civilization. And on behalf of
all of the sponsors, I especially wish to thank
Dan Smail and Rowan Flad for designing this event. It's been absolutely wonderful
working with both of you throughout the
planning for today. So thank you. A warm thank you for that. And now it is my great
pleasure to hand things over to Larry Bobo. Larry Bobo is the
Dean of Social Science and the WEB Du Bois Professor
of the Social Sciences, and he also holds an
appointment in the Department of African and
African-American study. So my honor to hand
it over to you. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you so much, Susie,
and welcome to all of you this afternoon for
what really should be a remarkably rich and
stimulating session today. We could say at the
dawn of the semester as we discuss the
dawn of everything. And on behalf of the
division of social science and the Inequality in
America Initiative, I want to say we were really
excited when, I think, Dan first reached out to us
to help support this very interesting symposium. But those of you who
don't know the IAI is a multidisciplinary effort
to elevate and energize teaching and research on
social and economic inequality, and to use what we learn
to inform public debate and indeed to shape public
responses to these challenges. And it's had an interesting
life since it started in 2018. We've now had three, I think,
highly successful cohorts of postdocs, so we've
got six alums out there in the world of the program. We actually have eight
postdocs in residence now, including one on
this panel here with us, who I assume will be
introduced to you all shortly. And it has been a truly
interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary
collection with young PhDs in economics, sociology,
history, psychology, political science, and
anthropology filling out the ranks of our
postdoc program. And a great number of grants
have been made to our faculty to support their research
activities again, and it covers that full field-- that full spectrum of fields. I will say, however, that the
Inequality in America Program has a very contemporary and
in some respects, arguably, presentist approach to
most of what it does. We don't look terribly far back. And so part of what
is fascinating to me and intellectually
really engaging here is this question
of just how baked in to what it is human beings
do is the problem of inequality, especially when we get to
living in large collectivities with one another. So I really look forward
to the opportunity to unpack the ideas that David
Wengrow and his colleagues have put before us here. My particular duty
here right now is to introduce my colleague
and friend, Rowan Flad, who was one of the key
organizers of this effort. He is the John Hudson
Professor of Archaeology in our Department of
Anthropology here at Harvard. He has also served as the
Archaeology Program Director and is department chair
here of anthropology. His own research focuses on
the emergence and development of complex society during
the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age in China. This work incorporates
interests in diachronic change in production processes
in technology, the intersection between
ritual activity and production, the role of animals in
early Chinese society, particularly their sacrifice
in sacrifice and divination, and the processes involved
in social change in general. And he's published
quite extensively and received numerous honors
befitting a remarkable scholar of Rowan's stature. So without further ado because
Dan is looking at me like my 3 minutes have been
exhausted, I'm going to turn it over to Rowan
Flad, but thank you all very much for sharing. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Dean Bobo. And thank you all
for coming today. It's really a pleasure to have
this event convened in person and to have so many
of you with us. I'm afraid I'm going to go
over my allotted 5 minutes, so I'll just get
right to my comments, and welcome you all to
this exciting event. I'm really delighted
to have the opportunity to say a few words
of introduction to the event generally and to
the speakers before yielding the floor to our
roundtable discussants for what you're
actually here to hear. In a distinguished
lecture in 2010 convening the 109th meeting of
the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans,
Louisiana, Jeremy Sabloff-- a Harvard graduate who went
on to a prestigious career at the University
of Pennsylvania-- made a plea to the practitioners
of our multifaceted discipline of anthropology to follow
the model of Margaret Mead, a towering figure
in anthropology, and a visible public
presence who was widely known in the 1960s and 1970. Sabloff called on us
to make accessible the ideas central
to our discipline, to strengthen public
outreach, and generally find ways to make our knowledge,
insights, and voices heard. Through the book at the
center of today's discussion-- so I'll lift up here-- The Dawn of Everything-- A New History of Humanity
and associated op editors and excerpts from
the New York Times and The Guardian and Sapiens
and numerous other places, as well as laudatory
and sometimes critical reviews in a whole host of
venues such as The Atlantic and the New York Review of
Books, Science, Artforum, and so on and so forth,
the anthropologist David Graeber and the
archaeologist David Wengrow have certainly taken
up this challenge. For decades, anthropologists
and archaeologists have been content
to shake our fists and raise our voices
in response to public. Facing grand narratives
about human history penned by ornithologists
like Jared Diamond, and/or historians like
Yuval Noah Harari. Now we can shake our
fists and raise our voices to representatives of
our own disciplines. And it's clearly not only
social anthropologists and archaeologists
who have something to say in response to the
stimulating and provocative revisions, reformulations,
and proposed frameworks that the book raises. The impact of the work ranges
from political philosophy, to economics, to comparative
history, and beyond. And today we are
delighted to have a range of scholars who
will stimulate discussion about this new human history. Without further ado, I
present to you our panelists. We've arranged the
speakers alphabetically. In the order in which they were
presenting from left to right, which conveniently ends up
with Wengrow at the end. And it is in that order that
I will introduce them briefly before they commence
with their remarks. Sue Alcock, is the
Barnett Family Professor of classical Archaeology at
the University of Oklahoma where she recently moved
after previous positions in classical studies at
the University of Michigan, as the inaugural
director of the Joukowsky Institute of Archaeology and
the Ancient World at Brown University, and most recently
as the interim provost of the University of
Michigan, Dearborn. Her scholarship is wide
ranging with widely influencing influential monographs on
the archaeology of landscape in Roman Greece, archaeological
approaches to monuments and memory, and the provincial
boundaries of ancient Rome. And she was also a pioneer in
massive online open content courses that exposed
thousands of interest, literally thousands
of interesting people at a time around the world
to cutting edge ideas and emerge from
archaeological work. We are delighted to have
her here with us, again, to join our community today. Gojko Barjamovic
is Senior Lecturer in Assyriology and Director
of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
here at Harvard, where he has served on
the faculty since 2013. His research also
covers the study of early state power and
international relations, and explores the functioning
of royal courts, diplomacy in local institutions
of governance, particularly in the
context of Assyria during the second and
first millennia BC. This semester he is
teaching a freshmen seminar on the beginnings of business
in which he and his students are wrestling with
the challenges posed in the Graeber, Wengrow
volume among other things, and we had Professor Wengrow
join that course the other day. Phil Deloria is the Leverett
Saltonstall Professor of History in the departments
of History and American Studies here at Harvard. His research and teaching
focus on the social, cultural, and political histories
of the relations among American Indian
peoples and the United States as well as the interconnections
among indigenous peoples in a global context. His publications examine
Native American experiences and the co-option of native
tropes in American society as well as a recent
comprehensive treatment of the field of American study. Aja Lans is a
postdoctoral fellow in the Inequality in America
Initiative about which you just heard from Dean Bobo. She completed her
PhD in Anthropology at Syracuse University
in 2021 where she concentrated on historical
archaeology, cultural heritage preservation,
structural violence, and the critical study of
bio-archaeological research, particularly related to
historical narratives surrounding museum
collections that include the remains of black bodies. Among her other accomplishments,
she recently received a grant from the Wenner-Gren
Foundation to conduct research on the remains of black
individuals held in the Harvard collection. And our last panelist
is David Wengrow. Professor of Comparative
Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology of the
University College, London. His research interests
are wide ranging as reflected in the copious
scope of the book that is the focus of
today's discussion with a particular
emphasis on early state formation and prehistoric art
and aesthetics in the Eastern Mediterranean. Trained at Oxford from his
undergraduate through his PhD, he joined the UCL
faculty in 2004 where he has produced
several outstanding books with increasingly
provocative titles. From The Archaeology
of Early Egypt-- maybe not as provocative--
to What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and
the Future of the West, to The Origins of Monsters-- Image and Cognition in the First
Age of Mechanical Reproduction, to the book that we
are discussing today. In addition to all this public
facing articles and dialogues that I mentioned earlier,
he is also an active present on Twitter where he has
nearly 25,000 followers, which I compared to a bunch
of other people in our field and is quite above many of them. And he will round out
the round table today. Finally, I will say a few
words about the chief faculty organizer of today's
event, Professor Dan Smail, who will act as our
moderator in the Q&A. Dan is the Frank B.
Baird, Jr., Professor of History here at
Harvard, and works on the history and
anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and
1600, and on deep human history. A topic about he is currently
coteaching a gen-ed course along with Professor Matthew
Liebmann-- who's in the back-- which Dr. Wengrow
joined yesterday. Among his many
publications are books on legal culture and material
possessions in Marseilles, households and debt
collection in medieval Europe, and on deep history. His drive and
organization has been instrumental to making
this happen today. And he was immensely enhanced
by the expert administrative support from Mary McKinnon of
the Mahindra Humanities Center and Jennifer Sheppard from the
faculty of Arts and Sciences. Of course, I would be remiss
not to once again thank all the various departments
and institutes and initiatives across Harvard who
provided various forms of logistical and financial
support for today's event. And with that, I
turn over the mic to Professor Alcock
for our first comments. [APPLAUSE] One of the more, at first,
disconcerting traits of The Dawn of Everything is
its frequent chapter divisions headed by statements in the
sort of "in which we" variety. Some 82 over 12
chapters in which we enter something of
an academic no-go zone and discuss the possibility
of Neolithic matriarchies, or in which we dispose of one
particularly silly argument about foragers. At first, I will admit, I found
this somewhat off-putting. It took me back to English lit. Gulliver's Travels. Vanity Fair. Tom Jones. And it all seemed a little
peculiar, a little precious, certainly more than
a little unexpected in a global
bestseller that quote, "Rivals fantasy, epics, and
heft and imaginative scope." That's the WaPo. And, quote, "The biggest book in
archaeology since Indiana Jones escaped from the snake pit." Thus The Guardian. But quite quickly
I got the point, or perhaps better
I got the joke. And that was this is a book
that does not feel constrained to mind its manners. It likes to ruffle,
scuffle and disobey. And in that it models one of
the principal-- and to my mind-- most important
themes of the book. The qualities of imagination,
creativity, experimentation. Disobedient as
they often are, are core to our human
experience, and indeed are what indeed make us
human in the first place. Or for the authors, are
what help to make us free. What I came to admire is the
book's bedrock insistence that peoples of the
long distant past shared in these
capabilities and capacities. Multiple quotes attest
to this here's just one. "We are projects of
collective self-creation. What if we approached
human history in that way? What if we treat people
from the beginning as imaginative, intelligent,
playful creatures who deserved to be
understood as such?" End quote. Now, some may wonder why
is this even necessary? Surely, to paraphrase
Dr. Zeus, a person's a person, no matter how old. But as the authors
make painfully clear, the academic tendency
which bleeds into what, understandably, what most
people know from school is to strip peoples of the
past of such qualities, rendering them far less
interesting, far less quirky, far less human. They become cardboard
stereotypes. Primordial human soup. Sock puppets. A paleo lamb chop. And thereby, to the authors,
making pre and early history far more dull than is
necessary, fair, or wise. I think it is far
from an accident that the word play or playful
recurs throughout the book. Now any archaeologists
reading The Dawn will have a kaleidoscope of reactions. Perhaps a proud, yes, I too
have rejected the sock puppet. Or a wistful, I just wish
they'd said more about x. Or I agree with the mission
and there are other ways to contribute moments. I, at least, had all three. First on sock puppets. I'm a survey archaeologist,
which means by and large I don't excavate. I don't work in cities. My materials sphere--
it tends to the rural, the nonmonumental, the
scrappy little bits and pieces lying on the ground. And with such limited
data it can indeed be perilously easy
to fall into the trap that the authors so
vigorously assail, that that of assuming
such ancient peoples didn't know much, do much,
think much, change much, and certainly not play much. And that is inequality indeed. For reasons both personal
and professional, I never bought such attitudes. Professionally, my focus on
the Greek world under the Roman Empire raised innumerable
questions of collective memory practices and remembrance
under imperial rule. Questions that I
refused to accept could be restricted to
the elite or to the urban. And while far from proving an
easy archaeological row to hoe, it beats by a mile drowning in
primordial soup in the embrace of a sock puppet. And that leads to my I wish
there had been more about x. The authors make much, rightly,
of our need to appreciate the deeply long term
processes of creation and experimentation--
often by women-- that led to acquired
understandings of domestication, craft
production, ultimately leading to the development
of properties of space, time, structure of mathematical,
and geometrical knowledges. And they speak to the
remarkable geographic spread of such ideas and outcomes. But how did such processes
manifest themselves? How did they take place? Can we seek to better trace
and articulate the memory work and transgenerational
transmission that The Dawn assumes
to have taken place? I suspect such
exploration would only add to the antic, playful
quality of the past. At very least, it appears to
me a valid next stage question. Now it may seem churlish to
whine for more given the book's already brobdingnagian scope. And as we all know,
The Dawn of Everything was intended as an act one. Establish the protagonists. Chew the scenery a bit. Make some noise, and come
to tighter resolutions if never closure down the road. As originally envisioned,
that sadly won't be the case. But that makes it
even more incumbent on those truly
struck by the book, not just on the bandwagon,
truly struck by the book to take up the challenge
posed by the authors to ask better questions. They suggest, for
example, exploring the correlation of gender
equality and social innovation. I've just made a modest proposal
in a different direction, and no doubt other
better questions are even now emerging to
assess and to calibrate some of the claims
that dawn has made. As for my personal
third reaction, I agree with the
mission, and there are other ways to contribute. David Graeber memorably
said, "It's time to change the course of history
starting with the past." Now perhaps, sadly,
few of us could manage to be that swashbuckling. But it would be a feeble
archaeologist indeed who did not conceive
of their role as some kind of change
agent in the classroom, the classroom writ large if
not always in our writings. The authors are right
to poke, poke hard at the insularity of much
of our professional academic discourse. The perplexing whys
and unfortunate wherefores to which I hope we
can pursue in our discussion. But through whatever media
share, the field of archaeology has some fundamental
lessons it can impart. It is a field where you
have very little of control over finding what you find. Often destroying what
you find as you go. A field where new discoveries
will constantly, and rightly, overturn and invalidate
a life's work, as indeed with some periodic
disparity in the book. As such-- while it can teach
one resilience and humility-- as a field that of
necessity is team oriented and an ever expanding
team at that, especially with the explosion in
archaeological sciences, it can teach the importance of
cross collaboration, dialogue, and nonhierarchical
intellectual exchange. And given the field's
ceaseless leitmotif of loss, change, and permanence
and death in a world that embraces magical thinking
and lionize the spin, archaeology can offer some
hard and elemental lessons about the human condition. If not epic interventions,
such lessons can nevertheless make a
difference in individual lives and for the long run. Now do such lessons always work? Of course not. No. Never. But that does not mean they're
advocacy should be abandoned. The two Davids stand by
their own stubborn optimism, and so do I. I began with my perturbation
over The Dawn of Everything's orotund chapter divisions. Let me quote you another one. From Henry
Fielding's, Tom Jones. Book nine, chapter one. "Of those who lawfully may
and of those who may not write such histories as this." I am quite sure that our
two authors would not take kindly to that lawfully may. So let's go with those who
courageously and playfully did write such a history
as this-- few could-- in which we give thanks, feel
sadness, and offer our respect to the one who carries on. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] That's a tough act to follow. The Dawn of Everything is
a massive piece of work. Staggeringly ambitious. Encyclopedic in scope. Rife with ideas. Choosing to engage societal
development in a trade book. Really bold and exciting. There is so much to unpack, and
with just 8 minutes to do it, I will do one deep dive
and go into the chapter about political hierarchies
in early cities. Those who haven't
read the book, this may seem a trivial
intervention but there are important issues at stake. There has been and continues
to be a line of thought which claims that the
invention of democracy is an articulated form of
governance to be historically placed in Europe. That a concept of freedom
is absent from most political traditions otherwise. That slavery was a baseline
that somehow freedom had to be taken out of. Democracy is central to
the West's story of itself, and its origin myth gives
direction and purpose. History comes with a
start and a finish line. The Dawn rejects such views. Presenting case studies
of a multiplicity of political traditions from
always and from everywhere, underlining this
plurality and fluidity. By decentering such core
concepts as popular rule and removing it from notions
of cultural evolution, the book frees us to
study each case presented as a unique instance. Of course, not independent
of geopolitical surroundings, environmental
constraints, or even global and local histories,
but free from classification, evolutionary doctrine. A favored term is playful. As we also heard. Time and again, the authors
emphasize the frivolous aspect of human interaction. A tendency to plan and
experiment and stumble and compromise in perhaps
roughly equal measure, though certainly not
without intent or direction, but often with a touch
of risk as societies look for ways to
make things work. This takes on
particular importance in the case of Mesopotamia
due to its tendency to loom large in conventional
models of social evolution. First cities often get presented
as archetypal structures, places of power, and
reinforcing of hierarchies. Whether they're styled as
patrimonial households, temple states, or hydraulic
despotism, their role as the original
architects of power has been repeated over and over. Dawn problematizes this notion. Using the case of
ancient Uruk, argue that executive power in the
early cities of Mesopotamia was wielded by civic
assemblies with extensive popular involvement. This idea goes back to an
influential 1942 article by Thorkild Jacobsen, who was a
professor here back in the day, and who drew on evidence
from epics and myths about divine
assemblies to propose an original political order
of parliamentary democracy, which later tradition
relegated to the divine sphere. Authors acknowledge the
idea has its problems, but keep the
conclusion that Uruk-- which about 3300 BCE-- covered a surface
of some 200 hectares and had an estimated population
of 20 to 50,000 people. Spatial terms centered
on civic institutions much like what was pictured by
Jacobson and I quote the book. "The public buildings
at Uruk seem to have been great
communal assembly halls. Modeled on the plan of
ordinary households, but constructed as
houses of the gods. There was also a great
court, comprising of enormous-- an enormous
sunken plaza, 165 feet across surrounded by
two tiers of benches. This sort of arrangement
with a congenial space for public
meetings is exactly what one would expect where
Uruk to have been governed by a popular assembly." They go on to propose
that in the case of Uruk, collective rule thus
predates monarchy. Interestingly,
this suggestion has seen direct push-back in some
of the reviews of the book, including the one
by Kwame up here in the New York Review of
Books, who specifically refers to this claim as, quote,
"Naked conjecture," and sees, quote, "The absence of a royal
court as being consistent with all sorts of political
arrangements," unquote. But I believe that one
cannot just substantiate the book's claim that early
Uruk wasn't a monarchy-- at least not in a
traditional sense-- but also substantiate its
assertion that the city was organized in a form of
collective self-rule. And given its
textbook importance, the case of Uruk in turn
has wider implications for the origin myth of
all of us, our state. I'll briefly
consider three points suggesting that executive
power at early Uruk was shared between a
large number of actors, then introduced
the case of Asuwa 1,000 years later, to
speak about fluidities of social hierarchy. First, the remarkable absence of
personified leadership at Uruk. Although a societal
figurehead is identifiable individual record,
not a single name of a ruler has come down to us. No display inscriptions. No sign of a dynasty. A colleague has recently argued
that this was characteristic of early Uruk statehood,
and said in marked contrast to contemporaneous Egypt,
where dynasty and display come into focus very early on. The analysis of
the written record focuses on a key official
bearing the title N who, it's been argued,
must be identified with the figurehead
found in the art, but there seems to be an
exclusive focus on office, not on the holder. Second, an overall assessment
of the administrative record excavated at Uruk. We have the earliest texts
known to us from that site, probably where writing
was originally invented. Some 4,000 texts came out of
the public buildings there. Most of them record modest--
record modest transactions of raw materials,
products, and laborers. Supervision is granular. Access through
doors and containers is monitored through the
use of official seals. Few interpretations
seem possible. A tightly controlled hierarchy
in which order is maintained through detailed accounting,
or a flat hierarchy in which a large
number of individuals are assigned to specific
areas of transaction and are monitoring
each other constantly. The latter seems to be
more likely from what else we know about the place. No evidence of large
palaces, no officials mentioned in the record that
as officiating et cetera. It would fit the cosmic
role of leadership expressed in the iconography
and the absence of the individualization of N. They were not
charismatic aristocrats, but faceless stewards. It was the office that came
with the distinct iconography. This does not mean that the N
wasn't a significant individual in society. Texts associated him with a
large household and tracts of agricultural land, but
there is no suggestion of wide ranging executive power. And here comes my third point. A text found in several
manuscripts among these very early records is the
so-called blue list which provides an
inventory of offices and institutional entities
found in this early state. Arguably, the first state. On par with similar
lists of farming tools, musical instruments,
minerals, and so on, it serves to group a set
of concepts according to a coherent overall scheme. Spread among this series
of official titles, the inventory contains a set
of 10 abstract concepts that identify areas of
professional responsibility, or officials collectively
responsible for those areas. These include the nam-umus,
the consulting body. Nam-urdu, the civic body. And nam-shita, the cultic body. It suggests that the ceilings
and records from Uruk reflect activities of exactly
such corporate entities, and that these are the groups
that you, David, suggest met in the assembly
area on the Acropolis. The archaic clay
tablets are the paper trails so to say of
this corporate entity. The delegates mandate the
large subset of its population and requires close reporting. This looks to me as
a possible attempt to reach some level of
functional egalitarianism. I end my comments
with a brief remark on the city-state of Asuwa
1,000 years after Uruk was gone as this kind of state. It's a particularly
well documented example of a corporate constitution
with a ceremonial. City-state governed by
a bicameral assembly was presided by
a dynastic ruler, but led by an upper
chamber of elders and run by rotating,
annual public officials. Decrees were subject
to majority vote, and issued by the assembly. Restraints of rulership-- Restraints on rulership
were constructed as a division
between the secular power of the assembly
and the ceremonial power linked to the royal
performance cult. Royal mandate is reflected in the way
rulers styled themselves as steward of a deity and
president of an assembly, but never King. It would be wrong to simply
retro-check this Assyrian Constitution of 1900
BCE to Europe 3300 BCE, but the example does
provide a clear case from the same cultural area
of corporate governance, and it seems to have shared
some of its features, the bicameral assembly,
ceremonial rule, public office. It also suggests
that such systems do appear, disappear, and
reappear again and again through time. It speaks to a central
point in the book that we discard old ideas of any
original form of human society, and underlines that nothing
is inevitable about the way we allow ourselves to be governed,
not in Uruk back then, and not yet now. Thank you again for your work. [APPLAUSE] [INAUDIBLE] I don't usually do this,
but the new computers don't talk to my old
printer, which I only discovered a few days ago. 1994, the Osage scholar Robert
Warrior's book, Tribal Secrets, made the first move in what
has become a vibrant tradition in American Indian discourse,
placing an adjective in front of the word sovereignty. In his case, the word
was intellectual. Warrior was
responding to what we might see as the consequence
of a quarter century long indigenous effort to
break through the walls of American higher education. That effort had taken
its toll, measured in tokenism, marginalization,
and as native intellectuals such as Elizabeth
Cook-Lynn argued, a loss of mission and identity. Native scholars had
responded in turn with a kind of mutual support
network that paradoxically robbed them of the
intellectualism they desired. And so Warrior called for
a robust, self-critical indigenous intellectualism,
internal discussions, and debates in which Native
critics acted formally as critics in relation
to one another rather than as a hard pressed
band of anti-colonial allies. He argued that such
intellectualism was what was not new or
exceptional, but would instead mark a return to
long traditions found in a range of indigenous life. In the book, he gave that
tradition a specific shape by constructing a dialogue
between two people who had no connection to
one another, my father, Vine Deloria, Jr., and
an underappreciated Osage intellectual of the 1930s,
John Joseph Matthew. And later as David
Graeber and David Wengrow would do with the Wendat
statesman, Kondiaronk, who makes up such
a heroic figure, Warrior would excavate other
indigenous intellectuals, including Samson
Occom, who seems to have schooled Phillis
Wheatley on being a transatlantic
intellectual of color. And William Apess,
whose blistering polemic on King Philip's war makes
clear the intellectual firepower behind the indigenous critique. And we could point
to several others. Warrior's critical concepts
seem to be intellectualism, and it was, but as
important was sovereignty. And he mapped the concept
analogically from the political to the intellectual and he homed
in on the internal structures of administration,
representation, and control that allow a sovereign
state or a discourse to function as such. As he moved between
states and ideas, however, a more significant
argument emerged from what we can think of as
the flipside of Westphalian sovereignty. That sovereignty also required
not only the internal aspects but the recognition
of other states. Or in Warrior's
reading, recognition coming from other
intellectual formations. Warrior's entire career has
been waged on this terrain because that
recognition has been hard to come by which is why
scholars in Native American and Indigenous Studies have
in particular appreciated of the ways that The
Dawn of Everything takes it as a central
animating presence. The indigenous critique of
European social relations and the alternatives
offered by Kondiaronk were heard, recognized,
received, and debated, and they helped shape
European intellectualism around questions of
freedom and equality. This is exactly what Robert
Warrior was asking for, a fairer and more respectful
intellectual history of colonial encounter. So one of the
histories of inequality then comes to rest on the
other side of this, right. The slap back of the
indigenous critique of Europe which the book argues saddled
us with an unhelpful master narrative built on social
evolution, primitivism, modernity, and linear progress. American Indian
critiques powerful because they came from a
place of difference that might have gifted Europeans a
point of intellectual leverage on themselves. These things were
in fact unthinkable because they came from savages. That rejection-- Like,
that particular rejection didn't just come
from nowhere, right. It required the building
of a vast edifice of what we can think of as
defensive ideas that could only make sense in the
context of universality to be imposed on a global scale
through European colonialism. Every tribal there
and every primitive then needed to be plugged
into a social hierarchy in a developmental scale. Add together if you would small
social group, plus isolation, plus social noncomplexity,
plus forager subsistence, plus Christianity
with its insistence upon a universalized
divinity and historicity, and you've defined
this primitive savagery and established the hierarchy
in which its people forever sit incapable of thinking
complex thoughts. And of course, The
Dawn of Everything decisively rejects this claim. Humans are humans and thus
capable of thinking and acting everywhere and every when
in the same kinds of ways. And those ways are contingent,
situational, creative, playful, multiple, local
flexible, experimental. The small thus becomes
evidence of the human tendency to separate, distinguish
localize, refuse, transform, and practice
schismogenesis, which is a great word by the way. The simple is revealed as
human experimentation based on situational
ingenuity rather than social evolutionary
patterns and categories that misimpose meaning. Forager turns out to
be a strategy imposed across all manner of
social organizations not the origin story of
developmental hierarchy, and isolation comes
to seem untenable in a world rich with movement. That thing once named
the primitive then is revealed as a positive
value and resource, not in the sense of a kind
of Rousseauian Romanticism, but in terms of the
patchiness and contingency of human social life. In this, Graeber and Wengrow
echo longstanding changes in environmental thinking,
for instance, away from developmental theories and
toward the discrete histories of patchy landscapes and complex
interactions among plants and animals with equally
complex water, weather, and soil system. And I draw this analogy because
so many folks in Native America have been struck of late by
the new ways forest ecologists, for example, have
started talking about webs of interrelation,
interspecies communication, contingency, and adaptation. These things show up in the New
York Times Magazine is sort of like new and heroic innovations,
but like [INAUDIBLE],, I think these native
folks might suggest, Indians have been saying
exactly these things and for a very long time. Alas, cast as primitives with
a little bit of knowledge and a lot of superstition, it
could never be taken seriously. The one forward facing critical
conversation in Indian country today concerns the ways
that the imposition of the categories of
religion and science onto native practice
has in fact obscured older and deeper
knowledges created out of close observation and
experimentation confirmed or rejected in practice. And that these things demand
a wider horizon of explanation than either religion
or science can provide. And what's cool about
The Dawn of Everything is that it makes room for
these possibilities, where the old hierarchies would
insist that indigenous thought was a model of inferior and
archaic primitive thought, Graeber and
Wengrow's inversion-- if you think of it
that way-- allows us to say it differently. Indigenous thought
may be a model of useful, open, and genius
early human thought that can jump the bounds of
both those categories and at least suggest
if not wholly make clear the possibilities
of the present. This project is beset
with dangers, of course. It's hard to move from
a critique of old models and calls for the new into the
actual practice of a new mode of thinking and being. And so we, I think, lament
volumes two and three. And Graeber and
Wengrow new narrative even as it elevates
multiplicity and disavows over confident category building
is nonetheless a new narrative. It rests as did
social evolution-- the social evolutionary
story on a confidence in scientific discovery and
a paradigm of objectivity and the inevitabilities
of narrative in constructing
morals and meanings. Social evolution could not
admit when it was wrong, and thus even now, I
think, struggles to admit can do wrong through the
ranks of global intellectuals. Graeber and Wengrow's argument--
built on a synthesis of new scholarship-- may simply represent a first
statement of a Kuhnian paradigm shift if we might go back that
far, which suggests challenge is not yet anticipated should
it take on paradigmatic form and have archaeologists
and anthropologists lining themselves up to defend it. But the book is in many ways
a reading of the past that explicitly hopes
to speak to change in the present and future
and thus much is at stake. My appreciation for the book, my
hopes for a future conversation rests upon what I hope
will be an antidote toward any untoward
paradigm defense because it's about
common human experience. But a common human experience
of contingency, unevenness, urgency, and possibility in ways
that make it, I think and hope, essentially
anti-paradigmatic, right, at its sort of heart and soul. And in that sense I will
close by an observation made by a friend, and Rowan it goes
back to your opening comments. Native intellectual who
observed of this book appreciatively, hopefully,
and thank God we can at last be done
with Yuval Noah Harari. [APPLAUSE] So like, Dr. Alcock,
I was kind of all over the place in my emotions
while reading this book, and so I hope I have
synthesized some of them here. So to start with,
I'm what we call a historical archaeologist,
and one of the first things that came to mind for me while
reading The Dawn of Everything is this somewhat arbitrary
distinction between prehistory and history, especially as
it pertains to archaeology. You can think along the
lines of Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History. This is something that comes up
often for us as archaeologists. How do we define historical? And the answer is always,
well, it's complicated. We also know that
certain regions and time periods of the world are
more likely to be studied archaeologically than
others, and histories are not valued equally. Consider a recent project
undertaken by our own Rowan Flad here and Bridget Alex
on how studies of China are vastly under--
archaeological studies of China are vastly under-reported in
mainstream scientific journals. So this brings me to one of
the most important aspects of Wengrow and Graeber's book. Who gets to tell history? Whose history is valued? What prejudices are either
hidden or overtly expressed in popular narratives? The book argues that the myth of
good things coming from Europe or the West is used to assuage
a lot of colonial guilt, to make it seem as though
where we have arrived-- have arrived, stuck, as they
say in our current moment was unavoidable. This is a crucial point to make. It's also important to
realize that if those who are telling, writing, or
sometimes outright making up history deem something
impossible or a certain group as incapable of an act in
many ways that becomes fact. So here I'd like to make a
push for the work of Trouillot in Silencing The Past
in which he essentially says this in his discussion
of the Haitian Revolution. I also bring this up because
this new history of humanity isn't exactly new. It's a new organization
way of looking at it and putting in this
book for so many people to see and to access,
but a lot of people, especially people of color,
have been making these sort of similar arguments. But again perhaps
our chance here is to reach a wider
audience and to produce a book that raises
truly new questions that should be starting points
for future research. This is also integral
to the argument being made by the
authors that we are asking the wrong questions. I say this all the time. I counter this incessantly in
my work with human remains. Especially in my
work with members of the African diaspora. Much of the shift
in my own specialty only came about through the work
of collaborative archaeology with descending communities. However, even recent
critiques of this sort of collaborative
archeology have pointed out that oftentimes it's only
collaborative in name. So we have to also
think about, again, whose questions we're
asking and if we're actually being collaborative in
helping the communities we are researching. Overall, in the
book, I would like to see some more
contributions and citations by people of color,
and in particular more indigenous and black folks. I feel it's
important to consider the work of our
intellectual forebearers, including Boaz, who turns up
in this book and who is near and dear to my
heart, but I think we need to consider more of
what living folks are saying, especially, living
people of color rather than just dead white
men, which is constantly come up in our field a lot. Further, there are
a lot of binaries that are being
reproduced, many of which have been attributed to
enlightenment thought. And so one of the things
that really stood out to me in this discussion,
I want to know where are the queer people? So there's a lot of discussions
of men and then sometimes women in that history, but I really
want to know as we move forward and take up some of these
questions in this book how we can look at other
marginalized groups. And part of this
issue is if we're-- Who do we deem qualified
to be asking questions, and who answers the questions? What forms do these
qualifications take to be considered scholarly,
and who do they exclude? So if you read this
book carefully you know that to understand
our current moment-- how we got stuck-- we do need to understand
our complete history, both prehistoric and historic. Whatever those mean. So the events from
not long ago are-- from long ago are still with us. In my research I
often invoke the work of Christina Sharpe and her
theory of the wake in which she talks about the wake of
slavery, the wake of the water, the wake as a form of mourning. So we are living in the
wake of so many events, and to understand the varied
perspectives and responses and experiences we're
all having, we must consider perspectives
outside of our own and also those that took
place very long ago. I'd like to take a moment just
to focus on a recent event that really resonated with
me while finishing up The Dawn of Everything. As you are all likely
aware, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom has passed
away last week on the 8th. A tweet by Dr. Uju Anya,
Professor and researcher in applied linguistics at
Carnegie Mellon University made headlines for
a tweet which read, "I heard the chief monarch
of a thieving, raping, genocidal empire
is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating." Now, whether or not agree
with this sentiment, let's consider some of the
backlash against Nigerian born Dr. Anya. Most of the discourse I saw
focused on notions of respect and how it was insensitive and
rude to say things while people were still grieving. Mind you at the same time,
I saw images of Irish folks taking to their stadiums and
celebrating the Queen's death, but I didn't see
as much backlash as this one lone black
woman scholar received. And here again I
thought of the wake. Who is given the grace to
grieve and whose grief matters? Certainly not the grief
of indigenous and black. Dr. Anya and others are
commenting on the role that the British monarchy
played in colonialism and the damage done the world
over by the colonial project. People often like to say that
such events happened so long ago, that they don't matter. Either ignoring or choosing
to be ignorant of the fact that many countries
only recently gained their independence many
are still occupied. And no matter when it happened
the wake of colonial violence is lasting, and it affects
nearly every aspect of their lives. Here we might consider some
of the contributions of Frantz Fanon and the experiences
of the colonized subject. Integral to all of
this, of course, is violence which comes up a
lot in the dawn of everything. Here's another suggestion. We can talk more about the
many forms that violence takes. Whether we invoke
structural violence or consider newer contributions
to studies of violence, such as slow violence
as proposed by Rob Nixon in which he looks at the
effects of capitalism on the environment and how
disproportionately the harm and people of color are harmed. Further, we might
consider necropolitics as defined by Achille Mbembe. It is how the
state, if you will, which we again cannot
necessarily define, maintains control. Inspired by Foucault's concept
of biopolitics, this nuance it brings in is just not these
immediate acts of violence, say executing your
own countrymen or executing an enemy. Instead, we're looking at the
power to dictate who may live and who may die. This means the state is
still complicit in deaths when it chooses to not
act, to not offer aid. More recently,
anthropologist Carolyn Ross used necropolitics to consider
the disproportionate suffering of Black and Latinx communities
in the United States during COVID. But none of this means that
people are not actors or do not have agency, a topic
that the dawn discusses. Agency has been
theorized many ways and oftentimes notions of
freedom are brought up. Here the authors invoke
freedom in three ways. It's the ability to
move or relocate, the freedom to ignore
or disobey commands, and the freedom to shape
entirely new social realities or shift between them. In my own work this
really resonated with me in the
similar discussions we have in the Archaeology
of the African Diaspora and how we define freedom, and
it's always oftentimes just in opposition to enslavement. But there's a lot more to it. There's a lot more,
perhaps, degrees of freedom, or types of freedom. And so I'd like to conclude
with one final thought that came to me actually
on the second to the last page of the book. And not to end on a down
note, but here we go. You say we are optimists,
and I applaud your optimism, I truly do. I wish I could be an
optimist, however, I'm a self-proclaimed pessimist. And I just want
to remind everyone that people of color, the
colonized, the marginalized, whatever you might call us
don't owe anyone optimism. As Ta-Nehisi Coates brought
up in one of his interviews shortly before he decided
to get off of social media, we often have very little
reason to be optimistic. However, this book and the
suggestions being made, and the future
routes that scholars might take to do
research, new questions give me a little bit
of optimism and I hope that this does change. [APPLAUSE] Oh, really. Am I audible? Perhaps I should say that
David did not have a chance to see all these
remarks beforehand, so he's going to wing it with
his customary brilliance. Taking notes. I just want to say thank
you, first of all, for the-- let me know if you
can't hear me-- just for having me here
and for the hospitality. I really appreciate it. And especially Dan
and Rowan for all the work you've put into this. Just before I come
on to the notes I've been taking on
all your comments, I just wanted to begin by paying
tribute to my coauthor David Graeber. We recently passed the two
year anniversary of his death. He didn't live, sadly, to see
the publication of the book or some of those
critical reviews. But I think it's well
documented that he didn't have an easy time at the
Ivy leagues to say the least. So I find myself wondering
what he would have made of the book's reception here. We'll never know,
but I am absolutely sure that he would
have been incredibly grateful and appreciative
for these really thoughtful reactions and
rich and generous thoughts. Thank you, first
of all, very much. I have made some
notes, so allow me to attempt in a way that
will do no justice to any of the presentations. Just to share some
thoughts on the hoof. I won't-- maybe I-- sometimes I find it easier
to go in reverse order, but I think I won't, actually. In fact, go back to Sue. Yeah. You raise this question about
memory and the transmission of knowledge and of traditions,
and I take your point with regard to let's say
technology, material, culture. But I think I would make the
argument that in other senses-- which perhaps Phil's
comments touched on-- memory is really central
to the message of the book because very often
what we're trying to do is recover processes
of remembering, or memory work as it's
sometimes called a bit clumsily. Where we feel that there is
evidence for people acting collectively based on a very
conscious rejection of what has gone before in
their experience, and that it is
possible to recover these acts of rejection. And even in the absence
of conventional, written, historical sources,
we can point to cases where what one might think of
as a revolution takes place. But of course, the
word revolution, and particularly the way that
it's used in archaeology, has always come to mean sort
of the opposite of memory in the sense that people
talk about hunter gatherers and then one is supposed to
have the agricultural revolution which sort of wipes
the slate clean, right. So the minute a sheep, woolly
sheep turns up or a leaf, corn. It's as if somehow
everyone suddenly forgets everything that happened
before, and none of the previous
categories apply and we're into a completely
new form of society. That's exactly the
kind of impression we're trying to counteract. I think it was Tolstoy who
had a very simple, I think, elegant definition of
revolution, which is different. Simply as what happens when a
people changes its orientation to power. And if we just take that
very simple definition of revolution,
then I think partly what we're arguing--
although it's perhaps not as explicit as it might be-- is
that history is full of those, or even what is sometimes called
prehistory is full of those. And when we talk about
societies that in those terms had a revolution
every autumn or fall on the basis of
seasonal transformations of political structures. So anyway, this is sort of in
defense of the place of memory generally in the book
while accepting your point about the transmission of
crafts and so on and so forth. And I can't argue with them now. I hope that makes sense. OK, good. And thank you, again. Gojko, thank you. Thank you so much
for those comments. All of which I need to
think about much more. David wrote in previous
works about what he considered to be the double
standards which are routinely applied in discussions
of democracy. You know, it's-- My favorite piece of his about
this is called There Never Was A West. Well, he just makes
the simple point that our received model for
the origin of democracy, fifth century Athens,
was a slave holding society where chattel slavery
was regarded as normal. It was a society that
was rather militant and in which women
were entirely excluded from the realm of politics,
and this is our model for the origins of democracy. And yet when
democratic practices in the sense of human
beings just sitting around collectively finding
ways to make decisions without coercing each other,
when these things are reported elsewhere, be it in the
pre-Colombian Americas or sub-Saharan Africa, there's
always a get out clause. Like, why it's not
really democracy, and yet in the Greek case
we make exceptions. So I wasn't surprised
when the day came when he asked me about
Thorkild Jacobsen, who I'd forgotten was a local. And what happened? We had a lot of these
kind of conversations. You say what happened
to that idea? What happened to that debate? As we were discussing yesterday. What happened to so-called
primitive, democracy in ancient Mesopotamia? To which I had to
frankly confess, I don't really know either. I mean, I don't really get it. It's a little bit like
the so-called influence debate about the
American Constitution, or the question of
matriarchal societies. These are debates
that essentially got killed in the academy. They didn't survive whatever
institutional structures we're working in. It's not that anybody sort of
thoroughly refuted the case or even exhaustively explored
it, people to some extent-- with the notable exception
of Gojko himself-- just stopped talking about it. And it was important
to me to be forced to confront these
questions again because when people like
Jacobson proposed those ideas they were exciting,
and they spilt over way beyond ancient history
or archaeology. They got philosophers talking. They got political science. They got everyone talking, and
I think somehow something's clearly gone wrong in the way
that topics just get kind of-- it's like death by a 1,000
cuts until they slowly fizzle out and vanish. And I can't explain
how it works, but it's strangely effective
and it is partly about citation. I agree. OK. Coming on to Phil. Thank you, Phil, is almost
all I've got to say. As you know I'm,
myself, on a very steep learning curve and
realizing how much more literature there is which
is pertinent to the material in the book which
we were drawn to. And I'm referring here
to not just Kondiaronk, but our whole characterization
of that colonial encounter in the northeastern part of
North America, which we were drawn to the very particular
question in mind, which was about trying to
understand the broader intellectual milieu
within which Rousseau, not just Rousseau, but
all those who began around the middle of the
18th century debating the origins of inequality
where that came from. And we did not have
a clue, I mean, we did not anticipate at all
that the history of the Huron Wendat nation would
come to play such a central role in the book. Even to the extent that our
reading of those sources actually completely redefined
the purpose of the book. I mean, it became the
framing of the book itself. That wasn't in
any sense planned. We just found ourselves
drawn into the literature, making the best use that
we could of the sources. And, ultimately, I think it
does come back to the question that Sue, I think, asked, which
is why is it necessary at all to have to even
make these points. That other people were smart. That other people had
intellectual traditions. It's kind of extraordinary
when you think about it. And with that just come
on to Aja's comments. Thank you also, Aja. I was secretly hoping
you'd talk more about museums and
galleries because I think they have a lot to answer for. And actually it occurred to me
in our-- when we were chatting earlier-- that museums-- especially
colonial museums-- are maybe like the most perfect
instantiation of something we talk about in the book, which
is what happens when acts of violence-- which
you did address-- not just that acts of
violence become systemic, but they are brought into
contact through institutions with their opposites, with what
you might call systems of care. Because, of course,
at one level, this is the idea of a museum. It's where objects go for
conservation and archiving. They get lovingly
caressed and cared for. But, of course,
when those objects originate in acts of
violence, something else happens which I'm not sure
we understand terribly well. But I think it has a
lot to do with what you call structural
violence, and the way that ephemeral and traumatic
acts of actual violence are transformed into something
that is actually much more durable. They become iconic. They become symbolic
of hierarchies. And that's just something that-- I see a relationship
there which I don't pretend to even
remotely understand, but I think there's something
there to be unpicked maybe. And just with regard to who
we cite and who we don't cite, I hope that the
scholars who we do cite will be more widely discussed. I don't-- It's a difficult
point to react to. You know, I hope that
the work of [INAUDIBLE] will be read again. It hasn't since the 1990s. I don't personally
count citations and perhaps there aren't
enough of this or that, but the contributions of those
scholars are not exchangeable. They're not interchangeable
with other contributions. They are the result
of PhD thesis. They answer very specific
points that were important to us in the book, and it
would be nice to hear them talked about, actually,
when it comes to this issue. I'm really grateful
for all the comments. And I'm going to be thinking
about them for a long time. And thank you again for your
warm reception of the book and of me, and I will stop
talking if that's all right. [APPLAUSE] So I'm Dan Smail. This event-- The part of
the idea for this event actually came out of this
class that Matt and I teach because we had been
engaging with Graeber and Wengrow's work for some
time in our deep history course, dealing with, in
particular, the weak, where we work with inequality. And what was so
striking about the book when it came out is that we-- at least Matt I won't speak for
you, but I'll speak for myself. I realized that
I had been caught in the trap of thinking
about inequality that is at the very center of
the book's critique, parts of which you have heard already. The book is large. It's complex. We've only gotten that fractions
of your fascinating components. You haven't had a
chance to look at it, I urge you to go and look at it. When I first began chatting
with David about this, probably about 10
months ago or so when we finally got
together on a Zoom just to chat about
the what, how we might bring David
here to speak with us, and I hope my memory
corresponds with yours. Speaking about memory, I
was thinking my own joy is to promote conversation
and to think about things, and especially
conversations that involve the everywhere and
every when and across silos. It's what makes us tick. And I said to David
somewhat with some temerity, I hope you would be
willing to come and not give a 50-minute
lecture, but just participate in a conversation. And as I recall David
you said, "Thank God. That's what I would love to do
more than yet another talk." So I just wanted to thank then
Sue and Gojko and Phil and Aja for leading us off
on this conversation so wonderfully
well, and for David for being able to respond to it. And the point now is
one of the things that was really important
to Rowan and I as we were chatting with us
and Susie and other people was to open the conversation
to even larger audiences. So this we have 50 minutes
now before the reception now to gather thoughts. I'm going to ask Luis to come
up here and take the microphone because Luis Escobar of
the history department's going to help me pass
this around to you. We need to record it for the
people on the live stream. So what we'd really like to
get is thoughts from you. We have undergraduates. We have graduate students. Postdoctoral fellows. Faculty, guests visitors. We have a diverse
audience here, and we want to hear from as
many of you as possible. I'm sure many of you
will want to talk to David about the book. You've read the book. It's very exciting. But all the panelists are
available to talk and develop some of the remarks
that they've developed. So without further ado,
let's collect some hands from people in the audience
and get some questions. I'm going to pass
the microphone. Hello. Thank you again my
name is Julia Pugliese I am a G6 in
Egyptology and NELC. Would like to thank you all
for a riveting conversation and I hope we can get started. I have a very quick question
with maybe not a quick answer. But during periods of
perceived collapse or decline of a first or
second order society or state if we want
to call it that. Their dusk if you will. How do the major tenants
in the book, ideas about what makes
us human, and what makes human history, the
mechanics of what makes human history help us understand
why civilizations end, if at all? I was hoping the topics
would get easier, but I-- is it me? I think so. [INAUDIBLE] Would anyone else by any chance? We, I mean, we
have things to say in the book about the concept
of civilization which, I guess, would define or maybe redefine
the parameters of your question when you ask why
civilizations come to an end. I think we can show very
easily that states sometimes come to an end. Kingdoms come to an end. Empires sort of come to
an end, but not really. But I think it's very-- I would find it very
difficult to talk about the end of
civilization, partly for the reasons we go
into in the book, which is that our kind of
habitual way of talking about civilisations--
particularly ancient Egypt and other ancient
civilizations-- is rather paradoxical. When we talk about
civilized behavior, it's generally got something to
do with co-operation, respect, and dignity. But when it comes to
classifying past societies as civilisations, we tend
to go for the ones that did the opposite. You know, empires and societies
of a certain brutality and monumentality. And part of the
argument about the book is that, well, the term
clearly isn't going away. I think somebody did
actually write a book called Killing Civilization. It didn't work. And arguably, it's
not very civilized. But it doesn't seem to want
to go away this word, so why don't we try
and redefine it. I mean, we do have
these phenomena in the archaeological
record that nobody knows what to call them. They used to be called culture
areas in anthropology as well. The Germans called them a
kulturkreise, culture circles. Now they invent all
kinds of great jargon like interactions
spheres and whatnot. But the truth is we're talking
very often about very large scale networks of
demographically sparse groups which nevertheless form
regional confederacy's. Maybe confederacy
is not a bad word, but regional confederacies. And this does come
down to transmission along which people
and things and ideas flow for hundreds or
even thousands of years with no clear
evidence of coercion or top-down centralized
coordination. Now, actually, the
sociologist, Marcel Mauss, proposed in the
early 20th century that why don't we call
those civilizations. And I think it's not
a bad proposition. In which case, when
they end actually becomes an easier question. They end when-- They end largely
through violence. They end through empire
colonialism and genocide. There's a new edition of the
Thames & Hudson big textbook-- archeology textbook--
called The Human Past, and they've asked us to remove
the word "civilization." Interesting. Across the board. Maybe it will work this time. Please, and please
introduce yourself. Hi, my name is Alaysia. It's like Malaysia
without the M. I'm a postdoctoral fellow
for the Inequality in America Initiative, and my background is
in human development and family science. So these are topics
that are new to me that I'm processing
and thinking through. And something that
I found interesting was your guys'
conversations about museums. And one thought
that I had is when we think about memorializing
racial violence, for instance, and
putting them in museums. I thought about things
like the Confederate flags. Things like swastika, and how
when you see those things it, a lot of times you have
a very visceral response to that when you think
about the violence that that particular
thing symbolizes. And so I think about
that same thing being in a museum, like
Trayvon Martin's hoodie being in a museum. And my question is and, again,
I guess, this is more just not specific to the book but just
in general, what kind of impact does it have on
individual psyche when we put these types of
things into museums? And why do we see that
as different than it just being if, like,
say, for instance, if we have the Confederate
flag in museum, why is that different
than just seeing it necessarily just out and about? So that's my question. Is about this idea
of monumentalizing, if that's a word, racial
violence in museums. I think that-- And that being a tradition
that we just kind of normally accept in our society. Like, why is that
seen is acceptable? Why is that normative? I think there are people
on the panel who are better qualified than me to respond. If that's OK. I mean, when it
comes to museums-- So closer to like
what anthropologists, archaeologists
work with, we often work with these old--
like the Peabody. They started as these sort of
like Culture History Museums sort of things. Ethnology museums. And so most of the collections
are stolen as most of us know. They're looted from
all over the world, and therefore the
simplest argument is when putting
certain things on display it's like that's stolen. It doesn't belong to you. Put it back. You didn't have
consent for that. When it comes to
more recent things, I think, the context and
especially the exhibitions and what they're trying to
get across really matters. So, for example, I went to
Germany for the first time this summer and I was so
impressed with their museums and how they discuss World War
II and the Holocaust in a way that I think the United States
will never be able to discuss like slavery or something like. It's just there, and
it's this undeniable fact about this thing that
happened and we're not-- we're going
to acknowledge it, you know, and actually
talk about what happened and everything
that led up to it. Here in the United
States it really depends because there could
be an exhibition where they're talking about the
Confederacy and perhaps they have this old Confederate flag
or something, or you could be-- I cannot-- I was in Missouri. I went into some
local museum and there were little hats with
Confederate flags for sale that you could wear. Like kids hats and those are
two completely different uses of that symbolism. And especially, I feel, in
the proper context in a museum these symbols that
really came to represent hate and oppression. It's important to see them
and get that background and for folks to be
able to understand why they are so damaging. I mean, out in the wild seeing
Confederate flags is just, at least for me
personally, pretty jarring. I mean, I'm from
New York and you'd be shocked at the amount
of Confederate flags there in upstate
New York, and they don't seem to realize that we
were on the side of the Union. But to so many
people they're like, oh, this just means rebellion. It means whatever and
I'm like, but you-- there's some very strange
mental acrobatics going on as I like to say,
and a lot of it comes down to just white
supremacy which actually to get at the heart of your
question I feel like the answer too oftentimes is
white supremacy. It's trying to keep
people in certain places, and museums can
really be a tool that wherein if you keep certain
people or cultures always on display or always-- what was it-- the perpetual
kind of like childlike state or something that we might often
put indigenous Americans in or black folks. The museum is like an authority. People can learn that and
you view people that way. So I think it's really important
that we look at museums as they are and we really reform
them and really consider what we're putting on display and
who's- How our exhibitions, how our museum education,
how all of those things work because they're
really important. I think it's a really
undervalued aspect of our society,
especially for museums. Like the many museums that are
free and open to the public, they're a great resource. Did I answer your question? I ramble. Thank you. Perhaps we'll come
back over here. And then jump over
there for the next. Thank you. Hi, My name is Andrew Delucas. I'm a fifth year PhD candidate
in the Department of NELC, Near Eastern Languages and
I suppose Culture Area. I want to thank you guys
all for being here today. I do have a rather
pointed question regarding Dawn of Everything. So for the field of Ancient
Near Eastern Studies as well as Levantine scholarship,
Max Weber's patrimonialism holds particular esteem. This is a model
that sort of finds its way within the chapter
on the origin of state or perhaps lack thereof. My question is really what do we
gain from utilizing this model? What assumptions are brought
in in utilizing perhaps Dr. Barjamovic address in
calling patrimonial households? Why use this term? What do we gain from it? What are we assuming when we
impose this on our readings? Yeah. Just the problem with the
big book because is it's often hard to remember exactly
which bit you're talking about, but I think I know what
you're talking about. And it's where we're discussing
something that came up actually yesterday in conversation with
the Egyptologist, Victoria. Oh, there she is. Yeah. It's kind of
fascinating thing that seems to recur across
a number of cases of what some people call early
state formation is about gender and the fact that it's
quite frustrating. It's often around
the very earliest beginnings of the
written record when you're hoping to get some new
insights into what's actually going on. You see this
interesting thing where references to women in
positions of authority are initially-- when
writing is still very limited in its functions,
they're actually very common. Except you can't say a great
deal about them because writing is still used for extremely
restricted purposes, so we don't get a long
excursus on how exactly the Constitution of this
or that place worked, but you can see
that they are there. And then they tail off. And what you're left with,
whether we're talking-- Rowan may correct
me-- about Shang, China or Early Dynastic
Mesopotamia or Old Kingdom Egypt or the Aztec, Triple
Alliance or whatever, you're left with a
model of a polity-- a political unit,
a political system, which takes as its template the
idea of what Weber would indeed have called a
patrimonial household or a patrimonial system
where the King conceived in masculine terms is sort
of the shepherd of his people and you know and the land is
his sort of extended estate. And I do think that the
language of the state has been extended too
broadly to ancient history and that it stopped
paying dividends, I mean, intellectually,
a long time ago to refer to all of these different
things as states and I know not everyone
agrees with me on this point. But what we tried to do
in the book, strangely, via the figure of
Kim Kardashian-- but we don't have
to go into that-- is deconstruct the notion of the
state as applied comparatively and break it down into a more-- we think, we hope-- a more exact
definition of systems of power based around three different
principles, one of which Phil has discussed
as sovereignty. And the others are based
on sovereignty control over knowledge or
information and the third is personal charisma. So with the use of those
ideas about patriarchy, we're trying to ask a question-- again, we don't have
the answers but at least trying to pose the
question of what came before these very well
evidenced, highly patriarchal systems, which then
forces you to confront the issue of other kinds of
systems which is often where the conversation breaks
down and archaeologists don't particularly want
to talk about them. So we're trying to shift the
debate a bit by doing that. Hi, my name is Vikeil Mansour. I am a junior fellow at
the Society of Fellows, and I am an
Egyptologist, so thank you all for this very thought
provoking and stimulating discussion. So my question is
concerns the book The Dawn and how this frequent theme
of questioning elements that appear together such as
government and monumentality or agriculture farming
and settlements, how you question
all this correlation between these elements. So my question, I guess, is
there any element that is-- that you still think is
a constant in inequality in past and present societies. Or if you will, another
way to frame this question will be has anything-- Is there any of these
previous assumptions that we have remained
constant as well after your reexamination of
all these different societies? When you say constant you mean
in the sense of a set of values that one could trace
across the ages to say that one has
more or less of it. I mean this is, I think, now
become very typical of the way that people across a
whole range of fields are approaching
inequality is to take-- as I was talking with the
students this morning-- to take something like
the famous Thomas Piketty book and the kind of metrics
that are used there-- Gini coefficient and suchlike-- and extend them way
beyond recent history, even back to the
last Ice Age where we've had estimates of
daily income in dollars and cents for paleolithic
mammoth hunters. And this kind of
thing is increasingly a very common approach
and it's predicated on precisely what you suggest,
the idea that one can find a common axis along which all
societies could be compared, presumably, ultimately, with
the aim of being able to talk about causality and
why inequality-- why rates of inequality
go up and down in particular situations. And I think-- cause we
say in the book-- it's a very laudable ambition. I'm personally yet
to be convinced that it's really produced
any great insights. Partly because when you
reduce things to one measure, the selection invariably
from a cultural standpoint is rather arbitrary. You know, I've seen
very extensive, statistically
rigorous studies that just compare enormous
spans of time and space. You know, the whole
of Eurasia, the whole of the Americas by measuring
the size of buildings, houses, buildings. Actually, not even
houses, just buildings. At no point is it asked what's
going on in the buildings. These measure them,
and they come out with metrics on inequality and
make very general assertions about was there more inequality
here or less inequality there. I'm personally not sure
that kind of approach answers the questions which
the investigators have set themselves. I think it's telling
us something. The data they produce
is interesting. You can probably interpret
it in other ways. I'm not saying it's
pointless, but I don't think it
necessarily tells us a great deal about
social inequality because as we say in
the book, you know, we have examples of
societies which actually found the whole notion that
material differences-- just having a bigger
house than somebody or having more stuff
than somebody-- the idea that those
kind of differences could automatically be
translated into authority or influence has actually been
quite alien to well documented known human societies. It is not a
universal, and I don't think it should be used
as a default assumption in making inferences
about rates of inequality. So the short answer is just, no. Thank you. We're moving back here now. Hi, I'm Ryan Lowe. I'm a fifth year in
the history department, studying medieval France. So a lot of the panelists
and public reviews have all brought up how the
book sort of calls upon us to respond to contingency
and experiment with different
political structures and to sort of play
with our ideas of what society is and can be. But I guess I have this
question of who gets to play? Who gets to do
the experimenting? And who has to sit
on the sidelines, watch everyone
else play and then live with the consequences
of they're playing and all the rules
they come up with? And I guess I have two sort of
ways of asking this question. The first is what
studying prehistory has taught you about
who gets to play. Who gets to be playful and
experimental and who doesn't? And then sort of looking
into the future, when you wrote that-- when you and David Graeber
wrote that you're optimists and that you were sort of
hopeful that people would take this upon themselves-- this
challenge upon themselves to be more creative
and imaginative, who did you have in
mind as your audience? Who did you have
in mind as being more creative and imaginative? Sue, would you like to have
a crack at this and then we'll turn it over to David. We'll give you a little
rest here for a while. You're very kind. Yeah, because of who
got to play in the past, I think you have to first
ask the question that I think was kind of stunning
to me reading the book was just this
awareness that, you know, are we looking for
the experimenters? Are we looking for
the out there folk? And the answer is usually, no. We're trying to figure it out. Hard enough to
figure out the basics without worrying about fluff. It's not fluff it's essential. I think the topsy turvivess of
the book can help us go back and look for who might
have been playing, but I think it's very,
very clear that-- I'm a Romanist, you
know, play was for some and certainly not for others. The question is the variety
of that through time. Going forward I-- This is kind of why-- I know it sounds
hokey, but going back to the role of
teaching in our world, I think not the big
change, change the world that Graeber and
present David was after, but that incremental
awareness of other people's humanity and other
people's capacity to change and other
people right to play is something that we can all do. Every little bit helps. I give you enough a break? Thank you. And if I can-- I can battle a war. If I can ventriloquism
perhaps for Phil here, it seems to me the
thrust of your remarks is that indigenous
people in North America once were able to play and
then lost that ability. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah Yeah. I mean, it feels like
part of the argument here is that the creativity
may be sort of best experienced in sort of small, heterodox
diverse kinds of things, right, and that there's some-- I don't know if you'd agree,
David, right, that there's this sort of sense of
like multiple-- moments of multiple diversities possible
in localisms possible and sort of perhaps a kind of closing
down over time as sort of larger structures
are created, but within that
always the possibility right of additional
and new diverse kinds of experimental, playful
kinds of things that happen and unfold on them. It's why I think you
go to James Scott kind of near the end
of the book, right, you've got this sort of sense
about like states and margins and things like data. But it does it does feel to me
like if you take that question and transpose it,
and, Ryan, I wonder if this is your question
into the present moment, it feels a little
harder to imagine that. I mean, you end up talking about
sort of counterculture counter social kinds of movements
that are they may be playing on the margins, but are
they actually having-- do they have any
potentiality or any future. I am-- Am I allowed to? Yes. Yes, please. OK. So David was a great advocate
of the philosophical approach of a man called Roy
Bhaskar, sometimes called critical realism. And I always regret not talking
to David more about this. But as I understand it,
one of Roy's arguments is that a lot of academic life
is fundamentally unserious. People talk the talk but
they never walk the walk. And it occurred to me a while
ago sitting on a platform rather like this in
Berlin at a place called the Haus der Kulturen
der Welt. We were having a very serious,
earnest conversation about God knows what. That there is a
weird thing that goes on where forms of
human activity, which perhaps should
be really serious, end up becoming forms
of play, and vise versa. And suddenly-- I
think we were talking about international relations. And it suddenly occurred
to me that actually why doesn't political discussion
look more like this. Look at what goes on in
our parliament back home in Britain. I mean, it looks like
they're having great fun. They're playing. They're fooling
around with our lives. And here we are sitting
by the fireplace having deeply serious
conversations about this and that. So, I mean, it's not
an original point. I think it was first made in
a very serious, interesting series of debates between
the Dutch medievalist Johan Huizinga and the Nazi
scholar Carl Schmitt, who were precisely
about how things move back and forth between the
realms of play and seriousness. And you're quite right
that it turns out to be quite a recurring
theme in the book is that we argue that
institutions, including monarchy which people
have sought an origin for don't really have an origin, but
they begin in the realm of play as it overlaps into things like
ritual and ceremony, carnival. And then at some times--
for interesting reasons that we don't fully
understand-- they break out of the realm of
play and into the realm of seriousness. And this, I think,
we would argue is where societies can get stuck
is precisely when they forget that they were just
playing, actually, and that there are alternatives. If I can just-- before we
move to the next question-- just provide some context for
some people who haven't yet had a chance to work all
the way through the book. Part of the reason
that play becomes so important in
the argument if you may permit me to
summarize something, is that the standard
model assumes that the-- I'll just call it the
socioeconomic formation of a forager societies
of the past lock them into a kind of a simple,
noncomplex egalitarianism. And one of the really
interesting features of the book is to
argue that they could move between different
political structures. This is this idea of play. They could turn over
at certain times of the year to things that
could be systematically political and unequal
in some level, but then leave that behind and
move on to different things. This is part of the play. So you get much, much
more complex societies in the deep past
which unstitches the idea that socioeconomic
formation drives structures of inequality. Could I add something
to that real quick. Though I had a question for-- I'm sorry I didn't
remember your name? Ryan. Ryan. Were you also asking-- The way I interpreted
it-- were you asking who now has the freedom
to explore these ideas? Like-- Well, I was asking, even
within a society [INAUDIBLE] within a society
where, let's say, people are generally
free to ignore the rules, for example, to
recognize the rules and choose not to obey them. Even in a society like that. It's still-- that
society is constructed, and there are people
who decide that this is going to be our value system
and there are people who maybe, I imagine, have no say in the
construction of that society, even in Neolithic,
Paleolithic time. There were people
in the community who decided that they would do--
that the community would do certain things in the spring
and other things in the fall. And then I'm just
kind of curious, were there people also
in those communities who had no say in the
construction of those and the performance
of those experiments. [INAUDIBLE] you make your
comments anyway because I actually read her-- your comments the same way
as you, I think, you did. I thought it just me. I appreciate you go with-- go with your thoughts. I thought it was just me. So I interpreted it
as like in your end with your optimistic call for
new questions and whatever, who of us like scholars
or people out in the world actually have the freedom
to do that because if you're an early career
scholar, you can't just go off and be like I'm going
to try to rewrite history. We don't have that
luxury oftentimes. And so I was going to say it's
up to senior scholars and folks with tenure to really encourage
their students when they want to ask these questions. I would never have done
my dissertation topic if it hadn't been for my advisor
because everyone else would be like why are you
researching this. And now it turns out
it's really important. So we just have to give support
to people who would play, who would ask these
questions and make it doable. Yeah. If I could follow
up that comment. Something that occurred to me
in the discussion up till now and that actually relates
to Marcel Mauss, who David mentioned earlier, is we've
been reading most just recently in a seminar that I'm
doing about technology, and the concept of
technology for whom he is a central figure
in the early discourse on this term and this concept. And there was an offhand comment
in his piece on techniques that struck me as we were
reading it the other day which relates to the comment you
asked previously about how certain intellectual
ideas get killed, which was that in that
discussion of techniques which is a little bit tedious
and pedantic in the end because he's talking about what
it is that ethnographers should be doing in order to understand
techniques in all the societies in which they are
making observations. He makes this offhand comment
that dismisses a current trend at the time in discussions
of emergence of agriculture that seemed in his opinion
if I'm not misremembering the phrasing to overemphasize
the role that women played in this process, which is super
ironic in the relationship to the subsequent 100
years of conversations about the origins of
agriculture as a phenomenon. Because it's in
recent times that it's been recognized or articulated
or emphasized that there must have been a greater
participation of women and people of different
genders in the processes that led to new ways of
engaging with the natural world, at least according to the ways
in which we assume that people were across society to engage
in certain types of activities. And my reading of Mauss's
offhand comment is that there was a little bit of too much
conversation going on-- which isn't cited-- by people who were
overemphasizing the roles of women, which
Mauss is essentially squashing in the context
of this commentary. And I'm a fan of
Mauss in many ways but this was a remarkable
thing that I observed because I think, in short, it's
the assertations of people who are situated in positions
of power within the academy and within intellectual
discourse that enables certain ideas
to be emphasized and others to be killed. And so when it comes to the
point of who gets to play, I think oftentimes
that really does relate to the configurations
of power within the academy as much as it does to the
data that we're dealing with. Can I just-- because,
Rowan, your points also reminded me of something
in your presentation which I forgot to respond to which
was about nonbinary and gender in the book, which is a
point that that's come up before in discussions
and it's quite true. The treatment of
gender in the book doesn't go explicitly
into any of those issues and is fairly simple and binary. I think it's completely
consistent with the spirit of the book and the arguments
of the book to go beyond that. I think the reason
it ended up that way is because to our minds
we were pushing back against some pretty
anti-female arguments, but then the reason
you reminded me of it is talking about the
origins of agriculture. A lot of that
discourse, we felt, is really quite openly
hostile to the idea of women's innovations
or women's science, and I've struggled with
this since the last time somebody asked me that
question is like how do you do both things at once. I guess I'm just
not clever enough. But you know how do you
how do you push back against an argument that's
predicated on binary principles but at the same time
critique the principle of-- Do you see what I mean? I know there's a way to do it. Probably lots of other clever
people than me have done it. But I think that's why
those passages read the way they do if that's
any help in just trying to reconstruct the
thinking process. Well, I think that's like
another book into itself, essentially. Right. Right I think that's right. Yeah. Thank you for waiting patiently. Our next question. Hi, everyone. My name is Aldo. I'm an undergrad here at the
history department at Harvard. I actually think my
question synthesizes a lot of the comments rather well. So we're talking
about inequality in the 21st century, arguably,
identity to a certain extent as well. And the reason
we've convened here is inequality, past and present. I'm curious about,
fortunately, if inequalities that persist in the future,
many of my peers right now, we want to study this. We want to make a change in
some sort of way moving forward, but we're not exactly quite
sure about how to do that. So my question for
all of you actually, or whoever has
comments on this matter is for those of us who want to
be involved in this very, very tempestuous topic, why is the
academic field something-- or how is the academia uniquely
equipped to solve the problem? We mentioned all these
different disciplines from archaeology to history to
economic, well, with, you know, Thomas Piketty. Why should someone my age-- why my classmates and I
enter academia rather than let's say blind
jurisprudence, for example? Gojko, I wonder-- Yeah. Gojko. No, I want-- Not on this one. Don't ask the
Assyriologist about that. Well-- What I can say, I
suppose, is that-- this is a rather cynical remark. But looking at history over
3,300 years in this case, which an Assyriologist
does, everything seems to come around again. And one of the things
that is really striking is this kind of-- you can modularize history
to a certain extent but you will see
these repetitions. Some periods, gender
morphs and ideas of gender morph in society. And other periods you
will see that sort of the economic conditions
change completely. Again, over 3,000 years
they tend to come back. You will see these
kinds of pendulous work. Does that mean that if you just
sit down and wait everything will be, OK? I'm not sure. I think part of my question was
inspired by Dean Bobo's comment at the beginning, and
it was an invitation to think how this book
among other things permits people in
Assyriology and NELC contribute to really important
conversations about inequality, but you've partially
answered that. You partially brought that up. Can we turn to Sue, and then
we'll come back to David. Very briefly. I mean, I've thought a
lot about your question when I'm talking to
intelligent, caring students who want to go on, but they
also see other paths. And my answer is usually for
the field of archaeology. If you can think of something
else you could do and be happy, do that instead. But if you can if you're
just like completely hooked. I think grow up and do
what the Davids did. Be very excellent scholars
in your own right, but always keep that
dimension of yourself open to speaking to the
public, getting out there. And, fortunately, I've been in
administration for a few years now. That is becoming more and more
faculty and public engagement, being recognized as
part of the package, part of what goes
into your tenure. We're not quite there
yet, but I think your generation can do it. Yeah. I like the premise of
the question, which is I don't think we
should take for granted that the academy has the answers
and I think we should also consider the extent to which the
academy obfuscates the issues. You know, how much
knowledge is produced, which actually distracts us. It was a point I was discussing
with Dan the other night about the book by the French
social historian, Pierre Rosanvallon. In English it's The
Society of Equals-- where he just makes
the simple observation that the better we get
at measuring inequality, all these precise
metrics, the less capable we seem to be of actually
doing anything about it. It was quite sobering, actually. And I think part of
the problem with this is that when one
looks at utopian movements or radical
attempts to change economic and political
structures over the last couple of centuries, we don't need
to be told how those ended, and this is often used as a
stick to beat people with. And I think that's
why, actually, there is a case for going
to the academy because we don't have
to confine our thinking about social change
to those last-- to our grandparents and
our great grandparents and their parents' generation. We have a broader canvas
now if we can break it open. You know, we can look
at thousands of years. Tens of thousands of years
to question the premises upon which those
movements were founded, which were often made of sand. Primitive communism. The idea that we are innately
this or innately that. That there is a kernel
of egalitarianism, you know, like an
inner hunter gatherer if only we could figure
out how to release it. These are powerful
ideas which people have died and been killed
over, and I think the only way to interrogate them is
through research, actually. So I would both
defend and attack the academy on its
record over this point, but it's your decision. Hi, I'm Eric Operle. I'm a fourth year PhD
student in Assyriology. I wanted to first observe
that one of the things that surprised me when I
first opened your book was that it was a history of
social and political inequality rather than economic inequality,
and just how little there is really devoted to
discussions of economics and economic anthropology. But I wanted to highlight
two particular concepts which you develop in the course
of the book which I thought might be interesting to ask
the whole panel essentially what their reactions were,
and whether you think that these particular narratives
will stand the test of time. The first is your rather
peculiar definition of slavery as a form of friendlessness,
which I thought was very interesting,
but also struck me as something totally
alien from the perspective of an Assyriologist. In that slavery in early
Babylonian society, slaves could have families. They could have
social relationships. And so usually within the narrow
confines of our Assyriological field, you know,
slavery is instead defined in terms
of alien ability, whether or not the slave
can be bought and sold. So there's that concept. And the other concept
which you developed which I found very
interesting was that of the sacral
nature of property. That property has sort
of a basis in ritual. So I wanted to ask the
panelists essentially. Do we buy these views? And also if not, what
alternatives you would offer? If I may just briefly,
we can't take credit for that observation about the
institution of slavery, which really comes from
the work of Orlando Patterson, the Jamaican
sociologist in his book Slavery and Social Death. Social Death. Yeah. Friendlessness if you like. I can respond to that definitely
because I study slavery at least here in the Americas. I actually-- I push back
against that a little bit. Like this-- because
social death-- how can I try and put this? So enslaved people
had multiple-- They had different
identities like us. Different ways you were in
different positions in society. So you might be different with
your family or your perhaps you do have friends,
but the goal of slavery really is oftentimes, at
least chattel slavery is to sentence you to social death,
wherein you are only property. So in that way it's correct. I think it's just you have to
be a bit more nuanced on whose perspective you are taking. Like, it's trying
to sentence someone to social death that doesn't
mean it's going to succeed. Like, if you have read the
work of Saidiya Hartman, Venus In Two Acts. I would highly recommend. Assyriological point. Sure. I mean, to me it depends
more on how we actually define the word slavery. We use it to oftentimes
describe wildly different social conditions, and
chattel slavery is really one of those
extremes, I would say, on this long perspective
of how people have been talking about slavery. I come from a
family where people were enslaved until
about a 100 years ago under the Ottoman Empire,
it is very different kind of slavery than the one
that was experienced here on this continent, right. So I think it's
really just that. It's a question of how
you define your word, and in this case also translate
the term into an English one which comes with an
enormous [INAUDIBLE] of baggage of historical fact. I mean, I think if you
think about North America, I've sort of always
suggested this is like the most diverse,
enslaved, unfree continent in the history of the world. If we start with
indigenous slavery-- and this is part of,
I think, the argument that we found in the book is the
multiplicity and the diversity and the unevenness
of these experiences. You can run as, for example, you
do a sort of California Pacific that sort of comparative thing. You can run across
the continent and find this range of unfreedoms
to which we apply the word slavery, oftentimes not
particularly usefully that run from sort of spiritual thing. There's moments where
to enslave someone is to tame them or
domesticate them like a dog, so slave is called the dog
not as a representation of the social status, but of the
act of taming and domestication and the stealing of
power from that person. Well, that's a pretty
interesting way that is pretty far from
chattel slavery, right, or sort of debt slavery or temporary
forms of enslavement that you would
pass in and out of. And so if you take that
whole range of diversity around sort of
indigenous North America, throw into that the multiple
and complicated diverse forms of colonial slavery,
imagine the hybrid forms that emerge out of that. I mean, what we're
talking about is in fact, one of these kind of multiple
sort of landscapes which too often I think has been
in popular discourse at least digested down to sort
of chattel slavery in the South or social
death when in fact there's this bigger kind
of universe to-- [INAUDIBLE] I just wanted to-- Oh, sorry. --just continue that
thought slightly. The book finishes with the
story of Franz Steiner, whose great, unfinished work
was precisely an attempt to unravel and disentangle
the differences between what he called preservile
institutions and the different gradations
of power relations, and so on. Yeah, sorry. I thought I'll throw that in. I mean, one reason
why I brought this up is just that both this
definition of slavery that you're using throughout
the book and also of property-- Oh, yeah. --they are inherently
social and political rather than emphasizing
the economic aspects. So of course, as
Gojko brought up and several of the other
panelists have mentioned, it is a matter of definitions. But you have explicitly
chosen to focus on the social and political
sides of these issues and left economic on the
sidelines from the rest. That's right. It's a very conscious, very
conscious decision to do that. And if you want to
understand the roots of it, you can do no better,
I think, than look at the work of the also recently
departed mentor of my coauthor, the great Marshall Sahlins,
who devoted much of his career to the demolition
of what he called Homo economicus, this phantasm
that has taken over everything. We are certainly
in that tradition, make no apology for it. One of-- it seems to me that
one of the spirits of the book is to say that, yes, economic
inequality is not good, but it really bites
when it's accompanied with political inequality. And the loss of freedom. The loss of freedom. So it's not to de-emphasize
economic inequality, it's to say you need
to understand it in its context which includes
the loss of these freedoms which is the inequalities that
really hover over our people. Hi, there. I'm Matt Lehman. I'm a Professor in anthropology,
but I received a question from the ether from
somebody watching on Zoom. This is from Chloe Chapin,
who's a G6 in American studies. And so she emailed to ask, or
to state first and then ask. The book offers a gloriously
radical feminist critique of the field of
archeology but stops short at questioning the
masculinist frameworks that guide their essential questions. Human systems and
experiences that they call the state political
systems, philosophy, intellectualism et
cetera are referred to as human experiences
when in reality they are experiences mostly of men. If asked better questions
is a gauntlet thrown, how can we ask new questions
about social inequality that do not still center
the lives, politics, intellectual interests,
or even creativity and playfulness of men. What disciplinary
boundaries need to shift for scholars to find a
truly egalitarian view of what or who is allowed to count
as humanity and the questions we bring to the human past? And you should direct
your answers to the camera not to me. Does she have a
dissertation topic yet? Yeah. She has an extraordinary
dissertation. That's then good. I'm wondering what app she's
using because that would exceed the limit of an [INAUDIBLE]. They're both actually email. Oh, email. OK. Right. Hello. In all caps. Yeah. No. I mean, this is a
really serious problem, and it's a particular
problem with using the ethnohistorical sources. For example, those
parts of the book where we attempt our
reconstruction of what went on the West Coast in the
historical lands of the Talawa and the Uruk and
the Miwok and so on. We have very-- Historians have a very
difficult call to make there. Do we make use of all
this material generated by the American
Ethnographic Bureau and Kroeber and his students
and so on, which was undoubtedly completely skewed to
the experiences of men? Right. I believe it was
quite unusual to even be able to talk
to women, or even attempt to talk to women
about their experiences. So do we try to use this
biased and skewed record? Do we abandon it altogether
and just say it's useless? I guess the decision
that we arrived at is that one should use it. Perhaps we don't use it
critically enough, I think, is the implication
of the question, and I think it's
a fair criticism. It's a fair cop. But, well, David used to refer
to the ethnographic record as anthropologist's
dirty little secret. And I think those are quite
personal issues and decisions that scholars have to
struggle with but-- Yeah, I think the
short answer is we can't go back and do
those things differently. We need new studies, I guess. New data. I think the idea that more-- I would just say that's
exactly it in my view that these studies can
be done and the evidence is there throughout history. And most of the societies
most of us study are not binary,
multiplicity of genders, and multiplicity of life forms. But those studies
haven't been done and, of course, this
book in particular engages what has
been done so far. So I think what you
do do which I found very interesting and
compelling is you sort of resurrect
Marija Gimbutas, and that whole sort
of discussion which is another one of these
dead by the wayside type debates that came
out of the '50s and which sort of transitioned
into modern religion and criticism and
things like that, but disappeared out of academia
for reasons I do not quite understand. But that is something that is
waiting there to be picked up by dissertation topics. I have a student right
now working on that. You'll hear a lot about
her in about three years. I think this note on
which we are ending here, which is that there's lots more
productive things to be done is the ideal note to end
this because the book itself is an opening, and there's
lots of things to do. I wanted to thank all of you
in the audience for coming. I especially wanted
to thank our guests. And thanks to Chloe in
particular for reminding us about our live stream audience. And I hope this event has
been audible and enjoyable for all of you. To our panelists, our
sponsors, my colleague Rowan, this has just been
a joy to organize. I'm so happy. And one final note, this
is inequality of power, I'm going to volunteer
all of our panelists to you for your
follow up questions. I didn't ask your
permission in advance, but this can take place
over the reception that we are having right now. It'll take us a
couple of minutes to set up the reception, but all
are welcome to stay and join us for more conversation. But in closing then
let me-- join me in thanking all of our speakers. David and Sue who flew
in from a distance. Our local, our
colleagues Aja, Phil, Gojko for joining this panel,
and to you for this event. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
