Alternatively: respecify (rather than eliminate) means-to-ends teleology and stages ...
Graeber & Wengrow, the newest scholarly book on ‘the origins’
Graeber and Wengrow wrote:
Since the 1950s, a body of neo-evolutionist theory has sought to define a new version of the sequence, based on how efficiently groups harvest energy from their environment. As we’ve seen, almost nobody today subscribes to this framework in its entirety. Indeed, whole volumes have been written taking it to task, or pointing out the many exceptions to its logic; we are ‘over all that’ and have ‘moved on’ would be the standard reaction of most anthropologists and archaeologists when confronted with such an evolutionary scheme today. But if our fields have moved on, they have done so, it seems, without putting any alternative vision in place, the result being that almost anyone who is not an archaeologist or anthropologist tends to fall back on the older scheme when they set out to think or write about world history on a large canvas. For this reason it might be useful to summarize the older scheme’s basic sequence here:
Band societies: the simplest stage is still assumed to be made up of hunter-gatherers like the !Kung or Hadza, supposedly living in small mobile groups of twenty to forty individuals, without any formal political roles and minimal division of labour. Such societies are thought to be egalitarian, effectively by default.
Tribes: societies like the Nuer, Dayaks or Kayapo. Tribesmen are typically assumed to be ‘horticulturalists’, which is to say they farm but don’t create irrigation works or use heavy equipment like ploughs; they are egalitarian, at least among those of the same age and gender; their leaders have only informal, or at least no coercive, power. ‘Tribes’ are typically arranged into the sort of complex lineage or totemic clan structures beloved of anthropologists. Economically, the central figures are ‘big men’ – such as were typically found in Melanesia – responsible for creating voluntary coalitions of contributors to sponsor rituals and feasts. Ritual or craft specialism is limited and usually part-time; tribes are numerically larger than bands, but settlements tend to be roughly of the same size and importance.
Chiefdoms: while the clans of tribal society are all, ultimately, equivalent, in chiefdoms the kinship system becomes the basis for a system of rank, with aristocrats, commoners and even slaves. The Shilluk, Natchez or Calusa are typically treated as chiefdoms; so are, say, Polynesian kingdoms, or the lords of ancient Gaul. Intensification of production leads to a significant surplus, and classes of full-time craft and ritual specialists emerge, not to mention the chiefly families themselves. There is at least one level of settlement hierarchy (the chief’s residence, and everyone else), and the main economic function of the chief is redistributive: pooling resources, often forcibly, and then doling them out to everyone, usually during spectacular feasts.
States: much as already described [by James C. Scott and others], these tend to be characterized by intensive cereal agriculture, a legal monopoly on the use of force, professional administration and a complex division of labour.
As many twentieth-century anthropologists pointed out at the time, this scheme doesn’t really work either. In reality, ‘big men’ seem almost entirely confined to Melanesia. ‘Indian chiefs’ such as Geronimo or Sitting Bull were, in fact, tribal headmen, whose role was nothing like big men in Papua New Guinea. Most of those labelled ‘chiefs’ in the neo-evolutionist model, as we’ve already noted, look suspiciously like what we normally think of as ‘kings’ and may well live in fortified castles, wear ermine robes, support court jesters, have hundreds of wives and harem eunuchs. However, they rarely engage in the mass redistribution of resources, at least not in any systematic way.
The evolutionist response to such critiques was not to abandon the scheme but to fine-tune it. Perhaps chiefdoms are more predatory, evolutionists argued, but they are still fundamentally different to states. What’s more, they can be subdivided between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ chiefdoms: in the former, the chief really was just a glorified big man, still working like everyone else, with only minimal administrative assistance; in the complex version, he was backed up by at least two levels of administrative staff, allowing a genuine class structure. Finally, chiefdoms ‘cycled’, which is to say that the simple overlords were constantly, often quite methodically, trying to patch together tiny empires by conquering or subordinating local rivals, so as to catapult themselves towards the next stage of complexity (characterized by three levels of administrative hierarchy), or even to found states. While a few ambitious chiefs did manage to pull this off, most failed; they reached their ecological or social limits; this rankled with people; the whole jerry-built contraption collapsed, leaving it for some other aspiring dynast to begin trying to conquer the world – or at least, those parts of it considered worth conquering.
In academic circles, an odd disjuncture has developed around the use of such schemes. Most cultural anthropologists view this kind of evolutionary thinking as a sort of quaint relic from their discipline’s past, which no one today could possibly take seriously; while most archaeologists only employ terms like ‘tribe’, ‘chiefdom’ or ‘state’ for lack of an alternative terminology. Yet almost anyone else will treat such schemes as the self-evident basis for all further discussion. Throughout this book, we have spent a good deal of time demonstrating how deceptive all this is. The reason why these ways of thinking remain in place, no matter how many times people point out their incoherence, is precisely because we find it so difficult to imagine history that isn’t teleological – that is, to organize history in a way which does not imply that current arrangements were somehow inevitable.
The Source:
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Penguin 2021 [pp. 249-251]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.