Temporary Cities and Cyclical Hierarchies

David Graeber has received abundant praise this year for his new book Bullshit Jobs. It deserves the attention. For my money, though, the most intellectually exciting thing Graeber has written in 2018 was the essay he cowrote with David Wengrow in Eurozine, on the alleged origins of inequality and how its (false) history affects modern policy debates. “How to Change the Course of Human History” affects no false modesty. Wedding “big history” to radical social critique, the article offers both a new model of ethnohistorical interpretation and hope for the future of human societies. Not a lot of scholarship like that nowadays.

Wengrow and Graeber start by observing the sense of futility bred by modern studies of human social evolution. Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and their imitators argue that social “progress” is both a one-way street and inseparable from the increasing concentration of wealth and power. Humans allegedly began their history as small, egalitarian bands, but as they developed agriculture, cities, and the rudiments of industry they necessarily embraced forms of specialization bound to enrich some and immiserate others. Moreover, these civilizational advances trapped human beings who developed them, much as a fishing weir snares a fish. Farmers, city-dwellers, or beneficiaries of an industrial revolution cannot abandon these innovations without depriving most of their enlarged population of work or food. As with human individuals, human societies cannot return to their historical childhood, even if doing so could alleviate poverty and inequality. Kings, robber barons, and one-percenters, in this framework, become necessary evils. The only alternatives to Pareto are Malthus or Hobbes.

The authors agree that this pessimistic, “realist” view of human history must appeal to at least some readers. To argue that struggles against inequality are futile or dangerous is to comfort the comfortable and empower the powerful. They also demonstrate, I think very persuasively, that this argument has little basis in historical reality. Go back to the Eurasian Pleistocene and one finds many of the features of more hierarchical, “civilized” societies: valuable luxury goods, like ivory beads, buried with (necessarily high-status) children, “micro-cities” where hunting bands came together to trade and feast and worship, and even monumental architecture, like the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe (9,000 BCE). Then come forward a few millennia to the early Holocene, and one finds early agricultural societies who retained their egalitarian social structure, and who, far from finding themselves caught in a Malthusian trap, were able to replace horticulture with gathering when it suits their interests. Examine early urban societies, like the Indus Valley culture and the Sumerians, and one finds little evidence of armies, personal monuments, or the other trappings of a political elite. Hunter-gatherer societies could develop gaudy hierarchies, and farmers and city-dwellers could pull them down. Civilization was not an antisocial trap but a social opportunity.

Graeber and Wengrow's thought-provoking article made one observation that particularly appealed to me: that societies can develop seasonal, cyclical hierarchies of rank and authority, and that we most commonly associate these shifting modes of social organization with Native Americans. At certain times of the year, usually spring and summer, the Inuit, Lakotas, and Pacific Northwest nations dispersed into small bands in order to fish and hunt. In the colder months, they assembled into large-scale winter meeting houses, massive hunting encampments, and chiefly towns, there to exchange gifts and contract marriages. Among the Inuit, the mobile hunting bands were patriarchal and the winter meetings more egalitarian; among Indians in western North America, the reverse held true. In each case, however, neither cities (or large-scale settlements, if you prefer) nor rulers were permanent parts of the physical and social landscape. This cyclical social pattern also pertained in the Ohio Valley during the Hopewell era (200 BCE to 500 CE). As I learned while writing my recent book, the Hopewell people lived most of the year in dispersed settlements, but assembled part of the year to hold ceremonies and build mounds and monuments for their elite. Their elite may have had considerable economic power, but according to Matthew Coons, commoners appear to have had the means to challenge their authority. The Hopewell culture lasted rather longer than later Native American cultures which built more permanent cities and towns and had less challenge-able ruling classes, like the Mississippian city-states exemplified by Cahokia. Given that the problems Cahokia encountered - resource exhaustion and an increasingly self-absorbed leadership - grew out of its fixed geographic location and fixed hierarchy, the more flexible arrangements of the Hopewellians may have contributed to their comparative longevity.*


* The Mississippian culture as a whole actually lasted for about six centuries, but larger cities had significantly shorter lifespans, about 200 years or so in Cahokia's case.  The Ancestral Puebloan culture (900-1300 CE) of western New Mexico is perhaps a better comparative example.