Graeber & Wengrow in defiance of Stages & Fairy Tales
Seasonally differentiated governance vs ‘Man the Hunter’
Graeber and Wengrow wrote:
Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the few mid-twentieth-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals; hence his famous argument in The Savage Mind that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of ‘neolithic science’ as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles. Less well known – but more relevant to the problems we are grappling with here – are some of his early writings on politics.
In 1944, Lévi-Strauss published an essay about politics among the Nambikwara, a small population of part-time farmers, part-time foragers inhabiting a notoriously inhospitable stretch of savannah in northwest Mato Grosso, Brazil. The Nambikwara then had a reputation as extremely simple folk, given their very rudimentary material culture. For this reason, many treated them almost as a direct window on to the Palaeolithic. This, Lévi-Strauss pointed out, was a mistake. People like the Nambikwara live in the shadow of the modern state, trading with farmers and city people and sometimes hiring themselves out as labourers. Some might even be descendants of runaways from cities or plantations. Still, he noted, their ways of organizing their lives could be seen as a source of insights into more general features of the human condition, especially as these pertain to politics.
For Lévi-Strauss, what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were averse to competition (they had little wealth to compete over anyway), they did appoint chiefs to lead them. The very simplicity of the resulting arrangement, he felt, might expose ‘some basic functions’ of political life that ‘remain hidden in more complex and elaborate systems of government’. Not only was the role of the chief socially and psychologically quite similar to that of a national politician or statesman in European society, he noted, it also attracted similar personality types: people who ‘unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward’.
Modern politicians play the role of wheelers and dealers, brokering alliances or negotiating compromises between different constituencies or interest groups. In Nambikwara society this didn’t happen much because there weren’t really many differences in wealth or status. However, chiefs did play an analogous role, brokering between two entirely different social and ethical systems, which obtained at different times of year. Allow us to explain. In the 1940s, the Nambikwara lived in what were effectively two very different societies. During the rainy season, they occupied hilltop villages of several hundred people and practised horticulture; during the rest of the year they dispersed into small foraging bands. Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the ‘nomadic adventures’ of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner; in the wet season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. In doing so they cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.
How should we think about these chiefs? They were not patriarchs, Lévi-Strauss concluded; neither were they petty tyrants (even though for certain limited periods they were allowed to act as such); and there was no sense in which they were invested with mystical powers. More than anything, they resembled modern politicians operating tiny embryonic welfare states, pooling resources and doling them out to those in need.
What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was their political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. But in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists … insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters and foragers to farmers and back again.
It was precisely this quality that made the Nambikwara chief such a peculiarly familiar political figure: the calm sophistication with which he shifted between what were in effect two different social systems, all the while balancing a sense of personal ambition with the common good. These chiefs were in every sense self-conscious political actors. And it was their flexibility and adaptability that enabled them to take such a distanced perspective on whichever system obtained at any given time.
Although Lévi-Strauss went on to become the world’s most renowned anthropologist and perhaps the most famous intellectual in France, his early essay on Nambikwara leadership fell into almost instant obscurity. To this day, very few outside the field of Amazonian studies have heard of it. One reason is that in the post-war decades, Lévi-Strauss was moving in exactly the opposite direction to the rest of his discipline. Where he emphasized similarities between the lives of hunters, horticulturalists and modern industrial democracies, almost everyone else — and particularly everyone interested in foraging societies – was embracing new variations on [evolutionary stages], though with updated language and backed up by a flood of hard scientific data.
Throwing away old-fashioned distinctions between ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’, which were beginning to sound a little too condescending, they [anthropologists] settled on a new sequence, which ran from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’ to ‘chiefdoms’ to ‘states’. The culmination of this trend was the landmark Man the Hunter symposium, held at the University of Chicago in 1966. This framed hunter-gatherer studies in terms of a new discipline which its attendees proposed to call ‘behavioural ecology’, starting with rigorously quantified studies of African savannah and rainforest groups – the Kalahari San, Eastern Hadza and Mbuti Pygmies – including calorie counts, time allocation studies and all sorts of data that simply hadn’t been available to earlier researchers.
The new studies overlapped with a sudden upswing of popular interest in just these same African societies: for instance, the famous short films about the Kalahari Bushmen by the Marshalls (an American family of anthropologists and film-makers), which became fixtures of introductory anthropology courses and educational television across the world, along with best-selling books like Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People. Before long, it was simply assumed by almost everyone that foragers represented a separate stage of social development, that they ‘live in small groups’, ‘move around a lot’, reject any social distinctions other than those of age and gender, and resolve conflicts by ‘fission’ rather than arbitration or violence. The fact that these African societies were, in some cases at least, refugee populations living in places no one else wanted, or that many foraging societies documented in the ethnographic record (who had by this time been largely wiped out by European settler colonialism and were thus no longer available for quantitative analysis) were nothing like this, was occasionally acknowledged. But it was rarely treated as particularly relevant. The image of tiny egalitarian bands corresponded perfectly to what those weaned on the legacy of Rousseau felt hunter-gatherers ought to have been like. Now there seemed to be hard, quantifiable scientific data (and also movies!) to back it up.
In this new reality, Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara were simply irrelevant. After all, in evolutionary terms they weren’t even really foragers, since they only roamed about in foraging bands for seven or eight months a year. So the apparent paradox that their larger village settlements were egalitarian while their foraging bands were anything but could be ignored, lest it tarnish this crisp new picture. The kind of political self-consciousness which seemed so self-evident in Nambikwara chiefs … had no place in the revised framework of human social evolution …
… [For] Lévi-Strauss, there was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom. The fact that one structure applied in the rainy season and another in the dry allowed Nambikwara chiefs to view their own social arrangements at one remove: to see them as not simply ‘given’, in the natural order of things, but as something at least partially open to human intervention. The case of the British Neolithic – with its alternating phases of dispersal and monumental construction – indicates just how far such intervention could sometimes go.
Writing in the midst of the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss probably didn’t think he was saying anything all that extraordinary. For anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century, it was common knowledge that societies doing a great deal of hunting, herding or foraging were often arranged in such a ‘double morphology’ (as Lévi-Strauss’s great predecessor Marcel Mauss put it).43 Lévi-Strauss was simply highlighting some of the political implications. But these implications are important. What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. It might be useful here to look back at this forgotten anthropological literature, with which Lévi-Strauss would have been intimately familiar, to get a sense of just how dramatic these seasonal differences might be.
The key text here is Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat’s (1903) ‘Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo’. The authors begin by observing that the circumpolar Inuit ‘and likewise many other societies … have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin – much more so than the Nambikwara chiefs in the dry season. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea.
Mauss thought the Inuit were an ideal case study because, living in the Arctic, they were facing some of the most extreme environmental constraints it was possible to endure. Yet even in sub-Arctic conditions, Mauss calculated, physical considerations – availability of game, building materials and the like – explained at best 40 per cent of the picture. (Other circumpolar peoples, he noted, including close neighbours of the Inuit facing near-identical physical conditions, organized themselves quite differently.) To a large extent, he concluded, Inuit lived the way they did because they felt that’s how humans ought to live.
The Source:
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Penguin Books, 2021 [pp. 98-101, 107-108]