David Wengrow: “Is this really how the human story ends?”

The Dawn of Everything may be one of the most remarkable titles to come out in Bulgarian translation this year. First published in 2021 by Allen Lane, it became an instant New York Times bestseller and has so far over thirty foreign translations in the works. It is no coincidence the American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky described the book as “challenging and illuminating”.

The book is a culmination of a decade-long writing project between the American anthropologist and activist David Graeber (1961-2020), who was also instrumental in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the British archaeologist David Wengrow (b. 1972).

Unfortunately, The Dawn of everything is also David Graeber’s final book, having been finished only weeks before his sudden death in September 2020. His co-author David Wengrow is an Oxford-trained archaeologist (1993), and a professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London (since 2004).

In it, they challenge some widely accepted assumptions. For example, that the State is a necessary evil and that complex societies cannot function without leaders, police or bureaucracy. The book also offers some highly provocative theories, for instance that the European Enlightenment was influenced by a Huron-Wendat chief by the name of Kondiaronk (1649-1701).

Of course a book containing such radical ideas can also divide opinions. Some reviews called the book revolutionary, while others were more sceptical; but, as one of them notes, the book is like “a hail of bullets; if only some hit the target, that's enough”. The Dawn of Everything captures the imagination of readers and according to some sources has even led to an increase in applications for the study of archaeology in universities worldwide.  As The Observer put it, “it’s probably the biggest boost to the field since Indiana Jones escaped from the snake pit”.

David Wengrow agreed to talk to Vij! from London ahead of the Bulgarian translation of The Dawn of Everything, expected to come out later in 2023.

 

How did you and David Graeber meet? 

I think the very first time was when he applied for a position at my university in London, but we didn't get to talk much on that occasion. Our first proper conversation was in 2010 in an airport lounge in New Orleans, on our way to an anthropology conference. I was impressed by David's knowledge of archaeology. An ex-girlfriend of his showed up to collect him from the airport and he insisted I jump in the car so we could keep on talking. I promised to send him a copy of a short book I'd written called What Makes Civilization?, which I did. He read it, and responded with questions that made my mind race. It was inevitable that we'd continue the conversation. David eventually took a job lecturing at Goldsmith's in London, but still had his home in New York. At the time, I was a visiting professor at New York University, so we'd meet up in Manhattan. It was around the time when the Occupy movement was at its height, but mainly we discussed things that happened thousands of years ago. Then David moved to London and became professor at LSE, so suddenly we were neighbours. Intellectually, it was an exciting time.

 

How did you two work together? Did you meet and spend time together on a regular basis or did you work from a distance, using Google Docs for example? 

We regularly researched topics into the small hours of the night, but it never felt like work. More like fun or play, without deadlines or a sense of obligation. In 2015 we published our first scholarly paper together in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society. David knew that the ideas we were developing would be considered subversive by some colleagues, and it was important to publish them first in top academic journals, so nobody could claim the ideas had not been “tested“ by the academy. Our writing process was like ping-pong: one of us would draft the first version of a chapter or argument and then the other would work on it and send it back, and so on, with both of us reading the same sources. It was a true collaboration from start to finish. Which is even more important, now that David is no longer around and I have to represent our work alone. The first and only time we used a google doc was when Covid made it impossible to meet up. I was actually in Bulgaria when we completed the book, in August 2020. I remember sitting outside a cafe in Sofia talking to David on the phone. We were both depressed that the book was finished, because we enjoyed working on it so much, and decided the only thing that would cheer us up is to immediately start in on a sequel. 

 

 

When did you realize you have accumulated enough knowledge to write an alternative history of humankind? 

We knew from the very beginning that something was seriously wrong with commonly received notions of human history of the kind that you'll find in popular science books by Harari, Pinker, Fukuyama, Diamond, etc. Like the idea that before the invention of agriculture humans lived mostly in tiny, egalitarian bands roaming about the landscape with no real political structures or notions of property. Or that the growth of farming and cities inevitably meant the rise of the State. These ideas are presented as common-sense or even as laws of historical development, but actually there is almost nothing to back them up. Actually there's no particular reason to believe that humans living in small groups are especially likely to be egalitarian, or that living in cities necessarily implies top-down government. So it was really a case of trying to bring together enough examples to show that the familiar structure of human history is at best shaky, and at worst simply wrong. By 2018 we were ready to present the outlines of an alternative vision. We did it in a popular article for the online journal Eurozine, called How to Change the Course of Human History (At least, the part that's already happened).That piece generated a huge amount popular interest as well as strong responses from other researchers. It convinced us that we were right to pursue this as a larger writing project. It was quickly translated into multiple European languages. I think Ukrainian was the first.

 

Both you and Graeber were well established in your respective fields - archaeology and anthropology. What are the pros and cons of using an interdisciplinary approach? 

I trained in both subjects at the University of Oxford, where you can only study archaeology and anthropology in combination at undergraduate level. So for me, there was never any other way of going about my research: it was hybrid from the start. In fact, these days, one of my main responsibilities at University College London is teaching a degree that I helped to create about 15 years ago called "Archaeology & Anthropology", where students learn these subjects as an integrated whole. David shared that vision of anthropology as being about asking the really big questions: what does it really mean to attempt to step outside your particular cultural frame of reference, and view human societies on a much broader scale? What do we learn about the nature of, say, politics or economics or family structures by doing that? There were no cons really.

 

Everything about The Dawn of Everything is ambitious and provocative - the title, the subject matter, the sheer volume of it. Did you plan the book to be so wide in its scope or did it grow gradually, while working on it? 

Actually, it's really just the beginning – a kind of prolegomenon to a much larger project of rethinking human history. It's about asking better questions of the human past than the ones we inherited, mostly unthinkingly, from the European Enlightenment. In particular, we are trying to challenge this notion that early humans were somehow incapable of making conscious decisions about the kind of societies that they wanted to live in. We call this 'the myth of the stupid savage' (as opposed to the more familiar 'myth of the noble savage'). Once you abandon that strange idea, all sorts of new and fascinating things about our species' past come flooding into view. The scope of the book began to grow, as we realised just how much exciting ground there was to cover about the true history of hunter-gatherers, or what was actually going on in those periods of history that are usually described - rather blandly - as "the origins of the State." The real evidence turns out to be a thousand times more quirky and interesting than the simple fables we've been telling for centuries. Our main problem turned out to be deciding what to leave out, because the book was getting far too long. I guess we judged it about right, because despite having over 700 pages and a 63-page bibliography, The Dawn of Everything landed at number 2 on the New York Times bestseller list, just below Will Smith's autobiography.

 

 David Wengrow. Photographer: Udoma Janssen 

 

A slogan meant to promote The Dawn of Everything says “It’s time to change the course of human history, starting with the past”. When did things in the past go wrong and what can we do to change them? 

I think it's important here to reflect on the dominant political paradigms of our age, and where they actually come from. Basically there are two standard answers to your question (we think both of them are completely wrong, by the way). One takes its inspiration from the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the other from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a century later. Hobbes lived through the English Civil War. For him, nothing went wrong, because everything was already wrong from the start. He felt our natural tendency as a species is to be warlike, selfish, and competitive, and that things only improved through the creation of strong States to control those basic instincts. For Rousseau, by contrast, there was a fall from grace. Supposedly, we began in a state of blissful innocence, and it was only with the rise of agriculture that things started going downhill: the concept of private property appeared, leading to warfare, and ultimately the rise of the state. Whichever version you accept, inequality appears to be the inevitable result of human societies growing larger and more complex. Today's writers of “big history“ model their positions explicitly on either Hobbes or Rousseau. This is strange, since both philosophers were clearly making up stories that were never supposed to be taken as fact (after all in the 17th and 18th centuries there was no real evidence to speak of, about early human societies). They were more like allegories or imaginative commentaries on the most urgent issues of their time.

 

If we look at the evidence available today, we see early human societies that were very far removed from the simplistic ideas of Hobbes and Rousseau, or their modern imitators. We see remarkable evidence for flexibility and inventiveness, such as those societies of the last Ice Age that oscillated routinely between different political systems, switching their social and moral systems around as they changed the size of their groups, in accordance with the changing seasons and the availability of resources at different times of year. 

 

We see hierarchies being set up in the context of seasonal rituals, and then torn down again just as quickly. People before agriculture were not innocent of politics or hierarchy. Agriculture didn't mean a departure from some egalitarian Eden. In fact, some of the first farming societies appear more egalitarian than their hunter-gatherer neighbours. Sometimes people adopted agriculture and then changed their minds, going back to living mostly from wild resources. The rise of cities sometimes meant despotic government and bureaucracy, but in other cases it meant just the opposite. For instance, in prehistoric Ukraine, we have evidence for cities that are 6000 years old, and just as large as the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, but with no evidence for temples, palaces, or any form of social stratification. Egalitarian cities, more than five thousand years before the “birth of democracy“ in ancient Greece!

 

 

So the first step is really to eliminate all those familiar but false ideas about when things supposedly went irreversibly wrong. What, then are we left with, by way of an explanation? We suggest a number of new lines of investigation. One of them is about the breakdown of what we consider to be basic social freedoms, which used to be common to a large number of human societies. We define three: the freedom to move away and find refuge, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to create new social worlds. So, for example, we begin to consider how the breakdown of hospitality and asylum makes dissent more difficult on a local scale. Perhaps we've simply been looking in all the wrong places for the roots of domination. Most likely, they begin at the small scale: in the realm of gender relations, household structures, domestic servitude, relationships between the young and the elderly, and so on. We were particularly struck by the way in which violence and domination are transformed from something ephemeral into something structural, embedded in the very notions of "family" and "society."

Understanding the roots of this process is much more difficult than telling simple stories about the origins of inequality, patriarchy, or warfare. The Dawn of Everything isn't about providing definitive answers: it's mainly a work of clearing away the philosophical rubbish, accumulated through centuries of conceptual confusion and bad history, so that we can be free to ask new questions again.

 

One of your academic areas of interest has been inequality. And this topic was the initial impulse that led to writing The Dawn of Everything. Where does modern inequality come from and what can be done if we want to achieve a more egalitarian society? 

We tend to forget just how much violence was required to actually create the kind of economic and political systems we have today, and spread them around the globe. Attributing the roots of inequality or the origins of the State to things that happened in the remote prehistoric past is a convenient way of sublimating this modern violence, but it has little basis in fact or evidence. To do away with these myths and acknowledge the conceptual damage they cause us is a first step towards creating something different. For example: a world where no one can turn their rights in property into a means of enslaving others, or where nobody can be told their lives and needs simply don’t matter. We've been told these things are an inevitable consequence of living in large, complex societies - but this turns out not to be true.

Let's imagine the conventional view of human history as a kind of iron ball and chain, which hangs around your ankle and tells you there's no point struggling to move or change your situation, because the forces of history will stop you in your tracks. In The Dawn of Everything we use the evidence of the past to chip away at the links in the chain, so that it begins to loosen and wobble, and eventually the iron ball falls away. We are not trying to tell anybody where to go next, but we are saying you can go there without this dead weight around your ankle. There are so many obvious obstacles to change, so many vested interests. History and evolution don't need to be part of the problem. In fact, with the knowledge we have today, they can become part of the solution.

 

Should the prosperity we tend to associate with modern life always be linked to inequality? Is it possible to govern complex societies in a less authoritarian, less hierarchical manner? 

Yes, absolutely. And prosperity is a good way to put it, as opposed to “growth.“ In the book we show that throughout history there have been many societies that achieved high levels of prosperity, without embracing hierarchy or authoritarian government. One of our favourite examples is the ancient city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, which begins around the year 0 as a hierarchical society, with monumental pyramids, and evidence of human sacrifice. But after a couple of centuries, everything changes, and this urban society of at least 100,000 people reinvents itself in a different form. The labour that went into building great monuments is diverted into high-quality housing for the majority of the population. Archaeologists mapped out a carefully planned grid of housing covering the entire city, so that almost all of its citizens could live in spacious apartment blocks with sub-floor drainage, large open courtyards, and beautiful murals.

 

British archaeologist David Wengrow and american anthropologist and activist David Graeber. Photographer: Kalpesh Lathigra

 

When these apartments were first discovered at Teotihuacan, they were thought to be palaces. Then it became apparent that just about everyone in the city was living in a “palace.“ There are other examples of large, complex, urban societies that present no evidence for authoritarian government in the forms of kings or emperors. The Bronze Age cities of the Indus Valley, for example, or the Ukrainian "mega-sites" I mentioned earlier. These were mass societies, where tens of thousands of people lived together in radical proximity, but unlike say ancient Egypt or the Classic Maya or Shang China, they found a way to flourish for many centuries, without putting hereditary elites in charge.

 

You write that the early societies resembled “a carnival parade of political forms”. Do you think the modern society has lost its willingness for political experimentation and how can we regain our “diminishing political imagination”, our capacity for “societal experimentation” and the “the freedom to rethink the social order”? 

We live in the an age where, on the one hand, the rates of inequality are constantly soaring, and we can measure their growth more accurately with every passing year; but on the other hand, we seem increasingly incapable of actually doing anything to reverse this trajectory. It is regarded as common sense to claim there is basically no alternative to the prevailing global system, unless you want to go back to some kind of primitive existence as hunter-gatherers, or to live under a totalitarian regime. Is this really how the human story ends?

 

One of the ways in which we can begin to regain a sense of possibilities is simply to  look with open eyes at the history of our species. Many things about our past simply don't fit the standard narrative. 

 

Bureaucracy, for example, has its origin in small-scale societies, not large ones. Historically, hunter-gatherers have sometimes been known to practice slavery and live in stratified societies of nobles and commoners, even without agriculture. Or take democracy. We're taught to believe that we owe our democratic values to a unique series of developments in fifth-century Athens: a society that relied on chattel slavery, and where women were forbidden from engaging in politics. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that we have such low expectations from our democracies today.

 

Once we realise that slavery has been abolished multiple times in human history, or that participatory forms of democracy have actually arisen in all sorts of places besides ancient Greece, it enriches our sense of what's possible. We don't have to confine our thinking about social change to just the history of the last two hundred years, with its catastrophic stories of utopian experiments gone wrong. Today we have a much richer archive of human experience to draw from. It's why we started the book with a quote from Carl Jung - hardly the most fashionable of modern philosophers, but it somehow seemed to capture the spirit of what we wanted to convey. The quote comes from a book that has the English title: The Undiscovered Self. We are living he says, in what the Greeks called the kairos: the “right moment“ for a “metamorphosis of the gods”, a transformation of the fundamental principles and symbols that we live by.

 

 David Wengrow. Photographer: Udoma Janssen

 

The Dawn of Everything has been translated in more than 30 languages. Later this year it is meant to come out in Bulgarian too. Did you expect the book to be such a success and how do you feel about it? 

I'm very excited about the Bulgarian translation and I'm grateful to Vij!, and to Capital, for helping to introduce the book to Bulgarian readers. For me the book's success is bitter sweet, because this book is the outcome of a friendship, which ended very suddenly and without warning. I am grateful that David and I completed the manuscript together. I remember how excited and impatient he was for its release. I think he knew it would create a stir, but I doubt even he could have anticipated just how many lines it has crossed, and not just internationally. I receive enthusiastic and often very moving communications on a weekly basis from readers of every age group, from teenagers to pensioners, from every social class, and from many different political perspectives.

 

I think that was one of David Graeber's great gifts, to bring this important knowledge out of the "ivory tower" of specialist scholarship and make it accessible to the person in the street.

 

According to some sources when The Dawn of Everything published the applications for archaeology courses went up. Is that true and how do you feel about it? 

It's true, including at my own institution. Candidates mentioned the book in their applications, and in some cases they mentioned that their parents had read it and approved their decision to study archaeology at university. This is actually very important. We live at a time when higher education is increasingly for the rich and the elite, at least in my home country, so young people from more modest backgrounds are discouraged from following their true interests, and get pressured into studying more “practical“ or lucrative subjects instead. Of course, those subjects are important too – but if interpreting the human past becomes a special prerogative of the most privileged people in society, then we are all impoverished as a result.

 

I read somewhere that you were planning three sequels to The Dawn of Everything when David Graeber passed away. What were these sequels going to contain?

That's correct. We had decided there would definitely be three sequels – so this would be like The Hobbit, and then we would do the Lord of the Rings (as the other David liked to joke - although I pointed out to him on more than one occasion that really, in that case, we should have started with a much shorter book). But actually we had no firm or fixed idea yet about what they would contain. That may seem odd, but it's a pretty good reflection of how we worked together in general. We embarked on an unexpected journey, without always knowing where the road might lead us, but in the certain knowledge that it would never be boring.