Anthropologies Beyond the Human
This brief dispatch is the third of my reflections on David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.
My two previous reflections, “Three Freedoms” and “At the Confluence of the Black and Indigenous Critiques of Western Civilization”, took up thoughts that I found present in Graeber’s and Wengrow’s text and tried to develop these thoughts out from the text. This reflection, by contrast, takes up a thought which is noticeably absent from Graeber’s and Wengrow’s text.
This dispatch was occasioned by my learning that David Wengrow will soon be engaging in a conversation with Amitav Ghosh. The thought that I aim to articulate in this dispatch is very much present in the works of Amitav Ghosh, especially The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg’s Curse.
When David Graeber and David Wengrow wrote The Dawn of Everything they were “determined to write prehistory as if it consisted of people[s] one would have been able to talk to, when they were still alive — who don’t just exist as paragons, specimens, sock-puppets or playthings of some inexorable law of history.”
Whereas many anthropologists and historians treat pre-historic peoples as if their thoughts and feelings about their social arrangements were of no consequence to their development, Graeber and Wengrow work from the assumption that the thoughts and feelings of pre-historic peoples were crucial to the development of their social arrangements. What’s more, Graeber and Wengrow work from the assumption that pre-historic social arrangements developed in the manner that they did because pre-historic peoples communicated, compared, and evaluated each other’s thoughts and feelings and then made collective choices and took collective action to re-arrange their societies in line with their collective sense and understanding of the greater good.
I applaud Graeber’s and Wengrow’s determination to (re-)write pre-history in this way, and I will be forever indebted to their writings on pre-history. I do, however, wish that they had taken their determination a few steps further…
What if Graeber and Wengrow had been more attuned to what Eduardo Kohn has called “anthropologies beyond the human”? What if Graeber and Wengrow had also assumed the existence of places that could speak to and through peoples? What if the thoughts and feelings of the Forest, in addition to those of humans, were taken into account by the pre-historic peoples of, say, the Congo rainforest? What if the pre-historic peoples of the Congo rainforest considered all beings in the Forest to be a part of their societies and, thus, made efforts re-arrange their societies in line with the thoughts and feelings of all beings in the Forest and not just those of human beings? Would it not be important to seriously consider the thoughts and feelings of the Forest and its many sentient non-human inhabitants in writing about the pre-historic peoples of the Congo rainforest?
Graeber and Wengrow are adamant that human peoples do not exist simply as “specimens”, but they seem to be okay with treating non-humans as no more than that. As such, Graeber and Wengrow’s text is an implicitly humanist text. But I wish that it wasn’t. To borrow some language from Amitav Ghosh, I wish that Graeber and Wengrow had made an effort to treat landscapes as “places of dwelling enmeshed with human life in ways that [are] imaginative as well as material.” I wish that they had not dealt with land as a “mute resource” for human beings to use as raw material when constructing social worlds but, instead, that they had dealt with Land as Max Liboiron does, as “the unique entity that is the combined living spirit of plants, animals, water, humans, histories and events…”
I support Graeber and Wengrow in dismissing those mechanistic ecological determinisms that have tended to treat pre-historic peoples as little more than specimens in ecological petri dishes. However, I am frustrated that Graeber and Wengrow implicitly embrace a humanistic social constructivism as a counterpoint to mechanistic ecological determinisms. I would’ve liked them to have embraced a vitalistic ecological enactivism.
I found the humanistic perspectives of Graeber and Wengrow particularly frustrating in “Imaginary Cities”, the eighth chapter of The Dawn of Everything. This is the chapter in which Graeber and Wengrow debunk the idea that the “urban revolution” enabled humans to conceive of themselves as living in immense societies with others whom they did not know personally. In this chapter, Graeber and Wengrow argue that what has made humans unique from early on in pre-history, long before cities ever emerged, was the fact that “Humans tend to live simultaneously with the 150-odd people they know personally, and inside imaginary structures shared by perhaps millions or even billions of other humans.” What is most remarkable about this argument is the fact that it is entirely concerned with human relations. As I see it, since the dawn of everything, humans have not just lived with the 150-odd humans they know personally but also with multitudes of non-human lifeforms and landforms, only a few of which they know personally, have names for, occasionally regard as kin, and communicate with by way of symbolic and non-symbolic signs. To live in the Congo rainforest, for instance, is to live in a place more densely and diversely populated than any urban jungle, a place where there are some beings whom one knows personally and other beings whom one knows only with respect to a structure that is part imaginary and part material, the Forest.
It amazed me that Graeber and Wengrow did not think to re-consider the notion of the “urban revolution” by citing the fact that humans have, since the dawn of everything, always lived with multitudes of non-human others whom they regarded as sentient beings and with whom they maintained relations on both a personal level and on the level of large scale imaginary social structures. If they had recognized this, Graeber and Wengrow could have argued that the “urban revolution” might, in fact, have created large scale human societies for the first time: these being societies that included humans and their domesticates but increasingly excluded “feral” and “wild” non-human others. Going further, they could have argued that the notion of an “urban revolution” does not involve an increase of the human capacity to live in immense and diverse social structures but, rather, a limitation of this capacity. Ay, and this argument would only have strengthened Graeber’s and Wengrow's propositions regarding the limits of the contemporary political imagination.
An Mbuti of the Ituri rainforest of the Congo.
Indeed, going further along this line, I must say that I took personal umbrage at Graeber’s and Wengrow’s assumption of the prevailing anthropological claim that “African foragers like the Hadza, !Kung, and the Pygmies”, from which I am partially descended, live in “small bands”. I found this preposterous insofar as all of these peoples believe that they are members of large societies consisting of multitudes of non-human others with whom they maintain relations on a concrete, personal level and on an abstract, imaginary level. A born New Yorker like me senses and says, “The City is on edge today.” In so doing, the born New Yorker is using the same sorts of imaginative social capacities that my Twa ancestors used when they sensed and said, “The Forest is on edge today.” The difference between the New Yorker’s statement and the Twa’s statement is that the latter is more likely to be inclusive of multitudes of non-human others. I was particularly frustrated that Graeber and Wengrow did not make this point because I thought that this point would have only bolstered their position that scale is not the decisive factor when it comes to the formation of certain kinds of oppressive power formations. Indeed, I would like to suggest that what is more decisive is the development of “social monocultures” in which humans are by far and away the most influential social actors and, concomitantly, the diminishment and destruction of “social polycultures” in which humans and non-humans are comparably influential social actors.
Why must Western(ized) anthropologists speak of peoples living in “small foraging bands” when the peoples they are referring to can and do live as if they are part of immense and complex societies that involve great multitudes of sentient non-human others? What social alternatives might those of us living in Western(ized) societies be able to imagine if we took these peoples at their word and considered how we ourselves might live in immense and complex societies that involve great multitudes of sentient non-human others?
Amitav Ghosh puts a fine point on these probing questions:
It is now beyond dispute, I think, that the Western scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals who believed that non-White peoples were by nature brutish, lacking in sensibility, and effectively mute were profoundly and utterly wrong. What, then, if they were wrong also about the inertness and brute materiality of what they called “Nature”? What if it was the people who were regarded by elite Westerners as brutes and savages — the people who could see signs of vitality, life, and meaning in beings of many other kinds — who were right all along? What if the idea that the Earth teems with other beings who act, communicate, tell stories, and make meaning is taken seriously?
