 Fawr, yn fawr, ddwy'r diwethaf y Llyfrgell Fryddu. Felly, rydyn ni'n fawr i'r llyfr yw'r hynny i'w fawr yn fawr. Fawr o'r fawr yn fawr yn fawr o'r gweithio'r fawr ac mae'n ddweud, ac yn fawr i'n fawr i'r fawr yn fawr. Mae'n ddweud i'r fawr o'r ddweud yw'r fawr wedi'n ddweud y fawr yn fawr o'r gweithio ymlaeth, yn fawr, mae'n ddweud i'r fawr. Mae rhaid i ni'r hyfforddiad o'r ffordd o beth â'r hyfforddiad ar y ffordd. Yn dweud, credu'n arweinyddio ar gyfer y guffredd yn y bydd hynny yn beth rwy'n adill o ddaint â'r bwysig, a oedd wedi drefnio gwahanol yi i'r ffordd, y gallwn hi ar y ffordd. A'r roi'r hoffa ar gyfer. Fyddwn i'n gweithio'r hoffa'r honniol, gan gymryd y gyd, ddiddordeb yno yn meddwl am y cyfancur David Wengrough ac yn cyfnod o'r Emmer Dabbiri ac yn ymddych chi'n gweithio David Graver. Mae'r cwrs, dod yn y pethau, sy'n ddod yn y blynyddoedd ar hyn. Ac rwy'n rydw i'n gweithio'n ddiddordeb. Rwy'n gweithio, rwy'n gweithio emmer. Mae'r Emmer Dabbiri yn y TV o radio, yn y bwysig, ond rydyn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio, ac yna'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Fel ein fisiaid â rhai d computers a newidio paedwch sydd eisiau ag aelodau neu fyddai gennymau sydd gyda'u gyfnodol, a'r cychwyn i gyfnodol yn y cwestiwyr wedi amser i fynd i gwrs lle ganfedd yng Nghyrchu. Fel yna, mae'n ddweud bod yn bywch iawn fod yn symud at yr adill o'r sgwrthedd i ddweud i'w mhagio. Yn dechrau gyda'r gyda'i nhw, yna, mae'r ddaf yn cair o'n gweithlu a'i gweithnu ar y cyfrifnodol, ac mae'n dynnig i chi'n arveigio'i ardal. Byddwch sut y panwl a gwaith mi ddweud wedi ei hun o'r gwerthoedd y cyfrifol iawn. A ydych chi'n gweld y bwyddo'i'r drwy'r ffordd, yna'r rhaid i'r bwrddwn y gwaith o'r ffordd, yn y bwrd yn dwylo, yn yr unol, a dwinio'r sweddo chi'n heddiw i'ch mae'r byw blaen, sy'n gweld i'r ffordd yn mynd i chi'n cymryd hyn. Roedd yna'r rhaid i'r ffordd yn gwybod sut amser y cael ei wneud. If you want to buy a copy of the Doorn of Everything, again online audiences, just go to the top of your screen. There's a little tab that says Books. Those of you here usual fashion out in the bar with a glass of wine and a signing afterwards. So please enjoy the evening and for now I'll hand over to Emma Tavari. Thank you. Good evening everyone. We will be to see you all here. Tonight I'm very excited to be in conversation with David Wengrill, Yr argynwys yw ein profesor yng Nghaerdydd Archeolegi yn y Ffwrdd Archeolegi ar y unsiolfyniad Llywodraeth ac yn ei gyrsgwyr ysgrifennol yw'r Argynwys yng Nghaerdydd. Mae'n ddeg i'r ddweud yma ym 3 ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw ar gyfer y cyfle, ac yn yng Nghymru, Cymru, yn hanes yw ymdyn nhw ymdyn nhw ymddyn nhw, Dyna yw'n dweud i mi, a David yn ymddiwch ar gyfer arddangos ar gyfer y ffordd yn y ffordd afrygiadau a'r ysgol. Yn ymddiw'r llwyddoedd yn co-awrthyrd yw David Graeber, y profiadau anthologig ar y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, ac ymddiw'r llwyddoedd yn ymddiw'r llwyddoedd, yn ymddiw'r llwyddoedd 5,000 oed, ac ymddiw'r llwyddoedd ymddiw'r llwyddoedd, ac yn ymddiw'r llwyddoedd ar y magazinell, ymddiw'r llwyddoedd, a chyfnodol, a chyfnodol, ymddiw'r llwyddoedd, y llwyddoedd ymddiw'r llwyddoedd yn gyd-dwylliant, ymddiw'r llwyddoedd, yn ymddiw'r llwyddoedd, ac rydym yn ysgol y 2 ym 20 ar y cyfnod. Felly, rwy'n meddwl. Dyna David. Rwy'n meddwl. David Graeber gwerthodd i mi yw ddwych arall, ond rwy'n meddwl i mi ac rwy'n meddwl i'n meddwl am y gallu. After a period of what seemed to be quite a mild, almost, David died very suddenly about three weeks after we finished writing this book together, The Dawn of Everything, about human history. It had absorbed us on and off for over ten years, and it's called The Dawn of Everything because that was David's choice. He didn't actually think publishers would let us go with it, but it seems to have got away with it. David and I, we actually first used to meet on work trips that I was doing to New York at the time, and he was very generous. I mean he'd always say every time we met he learned something new. Really I was learning much more and that's basically how we bonded. He was a person who opened horizons. We will change the course of history, he said, starting with the past. He wasn't just a brilliant anthropologist and researcher. David really tried to live his social science. It wasn't just theory, you had to do it, practice it, share it, otherwise it was kind of trivial. David's role in the global justice movement, where Aisha Chabukchu, who we'll talk later, was also deeply involved. David's role in that movement is very well known. At least the way I see it, it really all centered around a simple problem. Is this really the only way for us to live and organize ourselves as a species, or are other worlds still possible? One obvious way to address that question is just to start looking at all the different kinds of societies that human beings have built, not just over the last few hundreds of years, but over many thousands of years of history that David's field of anthropology, my field of archaeology lay the evidence before us. We quickly realized that when scholars have come to do this, when they come to address the broad sweep of history, if you like, what they tend to present is almost exactly the opposite. It's almost the opposite. It's kind of a teleological story of how the present was kind of inevitable. How we moved, how humanity moved from one cage to another, sort of little cages in prehistoric times to bigger and bigger institutional cages as we move on. You pick up a modern treatise on human history and you'll probably find some version of a kind of coming of age story, how humankind spent most of its time in a state of childlike innocence, until our departure on some voyage of discovery that would guarantee our cultural development, but also the loss of basic human freedoms. This conventional wisdom tells us that we originated in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers, and then somehow fell from grace into a state of inequality. We could live in societies of equals when we were few, and our lives and material needs were simple. Small in this story means egalitarian, big means complex, but also hierarchical. If there are eight billion people on the planet, it's pretty clear what the general message is. We're sort of destined to reproduce the kind of radical inequalities of our present system. So it seemed to us that the overriding message of these other big history books is that you ought to feel small. What they tell us is that, aside from all the other kinds of obstacles to change, everything from everyday racism to gender inequalities or warfare, state violence, crony capitalism, in addition to all those things, history and social evolution are also not with you. They're not with change. Fortunately, as David and I discovered, none of this is actually true. Using the latest evidence from our fields, what we show in the book is that this familiar story is in almost every respect a myth, albeit a very tenacious myth which for more than 200 years has captured the imaginations and exercised a powerful hold over scholars, all fully equipped with academic credentials, and through their writings and research has kept its hold over the imaginations of a much wider public constituency. I'm going to stop, but I can't still really conceive of the dawn of everything coming out without David Graeber. He was so looking forward to it and had actually already started work on a sequel, which was going to be one of three. He insisted. He had a lot of energy. But I'll just end with something that he wrote. He said, for a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask great questions. But increasingly, he said, it's looking like we have no other choice. So I thought I'd finish there and ask some questions. Thank you. So I have so many questions about the concepts and ideas in the book and the way that the book really serves as an intervention in many ways. But before I get into all of that, I wanted to ask you something more technical, just about the, if you would share the experience and process of co-writing and how you guys managed to write it together. Well, it started on email. He read a short book that I wrote. I think he mentioned it, actually. And he sent me these notes, which were pretty long. And I replied to his notes. He replied to my notes. And it sort of went on like that for a few months until we realized we'd actually written about half a book on email. And at some point it just started to become pretty obvious that we ought to do something about this. So we did. But the thing about David was he worked really, really hard, but he hated work. I mean, he hated the concept of work. It was more like play. He's incredibly thorough and methodological. I remember once there's actually the bit that I'll read later from the book is about this rather unfortunate anthropologist whose PhD thesis of 800 pages or whatever was lost back in the 1950s. And it was never found again. But there is a kind of edited version of it, which very few people have copies of. And I was lucky enough to get my hands on one. And David immediately raced off and put this whole thing under a scanner, made it searchable. He was constantly creating archives. But we just had a tacit sort of agreement that this would never become a pain in the neck, never become an albatross. We just do it when we feel like it. And over the years that became more or less every day, which is how we finished it in the end. So it was all in the spirit of, you know, no deadlines, no pressures, just kind of a wonderful escape actually from most of what you end up doing as an academic. Yeah, and I think that that playfulness and, you know, kind of fun lovingness and irreverence comes across so clearly in the writing. When I first got the book, I didn't expect to be like literally lolling, like kind of two or three pages in. I was probably like cracking up. Is that when we're being slightly rude about other books? You are occasionally slightly rude about people. There's parts of the book where I've even written things like tea, you know, and kind of like internet, as we say on the internet. When you're kind of like dragging somebody and I'm like, I wasn't necessarily expecting this. But I found it, you know, just really irreverent and fun to read as well, you know, as well as the idea of just being like really inspiring and radical in that way. It kind of reminded me of something like to lose in guitarry and like a thousand plateaus, that kind of vibe. But how important was humour to the project? It seems like a central piece. Oh, that's a really great question. It was completely essential. But I cannot possibly share any of the jokes with you because they're completely unrepeatable. But yeah, we had jokes. There are actually jokes hidden in there like where's Wally, you know, if you're boring enough to search for them. But yeah, David loved laughing. And yeah, we were often in fits of hysterics and giving ridiculous nicknames to bits of the book and characters and verses. I'm not repeating any of it. So humour yet totally central. That's very tantalising. I'm going to have to go through it with a fine tooth comb now. Yeah, maybe later on. So as you mentioned in your words, you said you're, I think this was your words, but you said when you're slightly rude about people. So I wouldn't necessarily say that you're rude about people, but you certainly, you know, do challenge, not even challenge these sacred cows. You just kind of like completely knock them down. Do you feel any sense of trepidation, you know, taking these kind of foundation myths of Western civilization holding them up to scrutiny and being like these are ludicrous and also naming some of the main proponents, you know, some of the academics who uphold those kind of ideas because you name a lot of names. And some are dead, but some are also very much living. So yeah, is there a sense of, is there a sense of trepidation? I'm just checking if any of them are here before I say it. They're all wearing masks. No, I mean it's funny because, you know, nobody kind of trains you to write this kind of big historical work. You know, I don't think you can take a course anywhere in writing big history or something like that. People who do it, I guess they do it because they feel that they have something unique to say on that kind of scale. And that takes a lot of guts, you know, I've got a lot of respect for anyone who does that. It so happens that for quite a while the people who've been doing it are not archaeologists, they're not anthropologists, they're coming from fields that range away from psychology to biology to economics, which is fine and I'm all for people moving across disciplines, but you know, when they start getting it all wrong, you know, at some point you have to intervene. And this is, yeah, we felt things had kind of reached that point where we wanted to talk from the evidence that we have because actually what's often presented as cutting edge science to the public is really the state of knowledge as it was about 50 or 60 years ago in our fields. So there was just a certain basic element of wanting to catch people up, catch the reader up on all these amazing things that have been discovered in recent decades, which are still mostly, we found, you know, it's only really specialists who are still aware of them and that's partly the fault of specialists for not talking to each other, let alone to anybody else. So, yeah, that doesn't quite answer your question about, I don't think we're that rude. Yeah, rude isn't the word that I would choose. Direct, quite direct. Like in a really necessary way, what would be your preferred outcome? Do you hope this will really mark, do you wish for some of those people to respond to this? Yes, yes, I mean, that would be great. Let's see what happens. I think I'm all for people responding to the arguments and the evidence. I'm not that much into sticking labels on people, which one sees a bit because David, as we know, was a very public figure and his politics were very public, but it's peculiar. It's something he observed, actually, is that for some reason this doesn't tend to happen to people who lean towards the right. You know, you don't hear about, oh, here is so-and-so's neoconservative take on human history. It doesn't, but for some reason it's still okay to call someone a Marxist or an anarchist, and that's supposed to somehow save you reading the book or something. This is a pigeonhole. We can put this in and forget about it. So I'm not really into that sort of debate. I think the point of the book is to open up conversations, and I think those kind of labels have the opposite effect. They shut down conversation. So a central theme of the work is refuting this idea that civilisation and complexity always come at the price of human freedom. Could we talk a little bit about that? That's right. Well, yeah, you've just summed up the entire book. That's right, but it's not abstract freedoms. One of the peculiar things about I think our whole kind of Western Enlightenment-based tradition is that we talk about freedom in this very abstract way. Man was born free, but everywhere we find him in chains. Half of the population were doing, but that's what happened to man according to Rousseau. But what would someone like Rousseau have known about freedom or equality? One of David's jokes was that somebody living in 18th century France in Rousseau's kind of social circle, the closest he probably ever got to a society of equals was somebody giving out equal sized pieces of cake at a dinner party or something. That's in the book, right? But the point is that this is all in their imagination, so when he describes humanity in a state of freedom and inequality, it's just kind of bizarre if you read his famous discourse from 1754, the second discourse on the origins of social inequality. He describes the original condition of humanity as this almost sort of animal-like creature living in isolation, roaming through the forest, unable to project himself into the future or the past, just kind of living in this weird, eternal present, but blissfully happy, of course. And then as human beings begin actually cooperating to grow crops or metallurgy, or eventually live in cities, they progressively lose freedom. But what kind of freedom? You know, it's never specified what are we actually talking about. As it turns out, a lot of his ideas about freedom and many other writers of that time were inspired by other societies, societies that European, particularly French colonists encountered on the other side of the ocean in the Americas, who did actually know and practised living in a society where you're not trained into obedience the way that we all are, and did actually have a very concrete idea of what that means in terms of how one raises children and how to organise a political debate. And stories of these societies found their way back to Europe through missionary relations, travellers' accounts. And around the time that Rousseau was writing, they were having an extraordinary impact on European culture. They were being read in every Enlightenment Salon. There were plays based on some of these dialogues with indigenous intellectuals, or savages, as they like to call them, why savage, which spread like wildfire. These books became bestsellers. There was a play called The Harlequin Sauvage, which ran for longer than cats. People loved this stuff, and some people were getting very excited about the possibilities, and they talked about women's rights, all these things that were still taboo in very hierarchical Europe, of the ancien régime. So, I think the first thing that we have to do is actually define what we mean by freedoms, in a concrete sense, not in a sort of abstract theoretical sense, which we try to do in the book and then explain how, you know, yes, a lot of those freedoms have been lost or compromised in severe ways, but not by the things that were always told are the problem. It wasn't the origins of farming, for example. That's a biggie, that's where we're supposed to lose all of those primordial freedoms and begin this descent into inequality. No, that's not true, there's no evidence for that. It's not populations growing and people moving into cities. No, that doesn't necessarily lead to radical inequality, actually something that archaeologists have found out in the last 20 or 30 years is, first of all, that there are just a lot more cities in the ancient world than we realised. Many of them are much earlier than the first evidence for kingdoms or states or empires or even writing systems, and some of them, actually a surprising number of them, were organised on what seemed to be very robustly egalitarian lines. So this whole idea that merely scaling up the number of people or the density of people obliges you to give up freedoms and set up managerial centres and top-down government is wrong. So all the things that we think were crucial thresholds turn out really not to be in light of the latest evidence we think of as civilisation. That's not the reason. I've lost some of those basic freedoms, it's because of other things, other factors. Yeah, there's so much in the book that I just found so exciting to be presented to me, but I think initially I was just whooping and underlining with a pencil because people that use pen on books are monsters, but that's for their conversation. This proposal or the evidence that so many of the ideas of the enlightenment that are seen as uniquely European about freedom and liberty and equality have their origins in these indigenous American intellectual traditions. That's incredible. Yeah, but it shouldn't be. I mean it shouldn't be surprising because that's what the enlightenment writers said. They said we got it from there, but there's a number of factors that have just led to this whole kind of dialogue, this whole process of borrowing and exchange of ideas. It's been kind of written out and I think it relates to a point that you've made I think in some of your writing about racism. It takes two forms or at least two different forms which seem like almost opposites. You can treat people as inherently inferior so there's no way these savage primitive people could possibly have influenced something as weighty and significant as the European enlightenment. That's one kind of prejudice, but there's also the kind of prejudice that says well these other people are just amazing. They're wonderful, everything they do is sort of angelic and magnificent. Then you end up with the accusation that if you say Europeans borrowed anything from indigenous societies you must be romanticising, you must be engaging in noble savage tropes and that's obviously ridiculous as well. Either way you end up in a situation where western thought is presented as this kind of completely bounded and sealed thing that's sort of impenetrable which is just kind of inherently unlikely. So in the book we draw on a body of scholarship which has been around for quite a while and has been largely ignored in academic circles. Some of it is by American and Canadian researchers who are themselves of indigenous descent and they went back to some of these colonial records and archives and literary works and you can actually identify some of the people. I mean we even know the names of some of the individuals who were involved in these debates and discussions and we have lots of corroborating accounts of one person in particular who in the 17th century was a very eminent and senior statesman of the Wendat nation. He went by many names, one of which was Candieroc, the French for reasons we don't really understand called him the rat. But we have lots of different accounts from different people which testify that he was just this, he was a famous warrior, he was a diplomat, he was one of the signatories of the great peace of Montreal, all in 1701, but he was also apparently just the most brilliant intellect, incredible arbiter. And the then governor of the French colonies there, a guy called Frontignac, also fancied himself as a bit of a debater. And he would invite Candieroc to what I guess were kind of like enlightenment salons before the enlightenment and somewhere around Montreal in the French fort there they would have these debates and people witnessed them. And they were debating all of the things that then become major themes of guess what, the enlightenment. You know it's all about freedom, the quality, you know why do we need money, sexual habits, women's rights. And these things were documented and written down by including French colonists who learnt native languages and vice versa. So yes, I forgot what the question was. I forgot as well what you said was fascinating. There's a point in the book where you talk about the fact that we tend to see ourselves in those European colonialists more so than we would the indigenous Americans, but actually we'd recognised a lot of the ideas from the indigenous Americans as our own more than we would those colonialists who had no kind of, who had little concept of freedom in the way that we do today. It's very challenging material because you know you're talking about Europeans, yeah, but you're talking about 17th century Europeans, you're talking about Jesuits. These people had very different notions of what a good society was. I mean the Jesuits were infuriated by what they found particularly among Iroquine and Algonquin speaking nations around what's today the Great Lakes region of Canada because they simply wouldn't obey commands, you know it's completely alien idea. I mean they had chiefs and things, but a chief, they could give commands but nobody was actually obliged to obey them. If you wanted someone to do something you had to actually persuade them. It's part of the whole principle of having a highly developed tradition of archery and debate and political engagement. But for the Jesuits this was hopeless because they're trying to convert into Christianity. So how do you teach the Ten Commandments that people just won't obey commands? So, yeah, the idea that somebody like Pinker is saying that peace and, who you referenced in the book, that peace and security are the logical outcome of living in sovereign states is completely refuted in this book and we show cultures that organize very differently to sovereign states and they are far more, you know they have a lot more cohesion or one of the things that you spoke about was the absence of kind of prisons or that type of punitive system of punishment in these societies and the people of those societies, they're kind of horror or just their recognition of the inadequacy of prisons. Could you talk a little bit about the different approaches to justice or social cohesion? Yeah, it's interesting and again it was noted by a lot of French observers who were, you know, they weren't really into this stuff. I mean they found it pretty threatening which is partly why I think you can treat these sources as quite reliable because they're actually complaining. How is it that these people who live here actually have much lower crime rates than we do back home? They don't have prisons, they don't have judges. Actually what they would do if somebody was a felon and committed a murder or any other sort of crime is quite similar to what happened in certain parts of medieval Europe where you wouldn't punish the individual. You would hold the whole extended kinship group, the whole extended family or the whole clan would be responsible and would have to pay compensation to the aggrieved victim and there are descriptions of people actually competing to outdo each other. You know how much can we say sorry and if you think about it, you know this is what keeps people in line. I mean people are in charge of their own children, their own families in that sense, govern themselves. So that seems to have been how things worked and you also get a very clear picture from that that these were not egalitarian societies in the way that we tend to think about material equality. It's clear that some people have got a lot more stuff to give away than other people. So inequality is not really the point. What seems to be more the point of difference between Europeans and let's say members of the Candirarchs society is that in their society there's no obvious way to turn that wealth into power over other people. It's just something we take for granted. You want more stuff, you've got more money, you've got a bigger house that somehow entitles you to boss people around or get them to work for you. This just seems to have been quite an alien idea to them and therefore they weren't egalitarian in that sense because it just didn't seem to matter quite so much how much stuff everyone has. So it is challenging material and as you say, you read these accounts and actually quite often it's what the indigenous American point of view is probably what you or I would be arguing whereas it's the Europeans who are going, no, it's very, very important that we have revealed faith and monarchy, lots of monarchy and you really must defer to people all the time and if somebody outranks you, it's very important that you do what they say. But some of it is kind of indefensible so there's a certain amount of shock at the fact that Europeans just didn't seem to help each other very much. You know, you'd let somebody fall into destitution. So you go to a French colonial town or actually many indigenous people visited Europe as part of delegations. It's quite likely that Candier-Onc himself was in Paris at some stage and we're just shocked at the levels of poverty and the fact that people would do this to their own people. Cities sort of littered with homeless people. You realise this isn't actually necessary. It comes as kind of a, we just take it granted. So it is very challenging material and certainly I think we would find it harder to identify with the European position in many of these debates. Yeah absolutely and I think something else just touching on what you were saying there about material wealth, often the fact that it wasn't inherited as well was really interesting. But also speaking of this exchange of ideas and movements of people exchanging both objects and ideas with each other going far further back than we are told according to the familiar narrative. That's right. Actually it was one of the things that I think excited David most about archaeology is this whole business exactly what you described because what we know from archaeology is that human history really isn't the way I think most people intuitively tend to imagine it where you're supposed to begin with little isolated groups of human beings and then gradually you get the invention of wheel transport and the sale and digital technology globalisation. You know we're all supposed to be becoming more and more connected whereas actually if you look at the evidence it kind of goes in the other direction. So human history starts out with what archaeologists used to call culture areas now they give them more scientific sounding names but basically these great coalitions of societies that span continents and seem to be based on sharing cultural habits forms of hospitality, forms of technology, forms of ritual and they're enormous and what you actually see is a process where as population numbers grow people's social worlds become smaller, they actually get more contracted and eventually you end up with us living in these very bounded kind of siloed units of which nation states are the most recent example. So it's actually kind of a strange sort of process of shrinkage and with cities it's the same you know before cities again you don't have these little fragmented pockets you have these great regional cultural confederacies that kind of you know a city is like one of those things suddenly shrunk into one spot. So it goes against this idea that you know there must have been some terrible psychological shock about living in cities because we've got these hunter-gatherer brains and we're supposed to just work in small teams and small groups so living in cities must have been terribly challenging we must immediately invent bureaucracy and police and all these kinds of things not really the case because people were already living in these greatly extended communities half of the time in their imaginations much as we imagine ourselves to have something in common with everyone who lives in England, read the same newspapers or whatever but we're not actually going to meet all of them. The rejection of that foundational idea of hunter-gatherers to agriculture to cities and industry and technology is something that again you reject in the book so that's pretty radical to reject that. How do you think that's going to shock people? It's going to be fine Emma because we do this stuff all the time I think some of my students are here and they're all reading the latest scientific articles they're up to scraps they know this stuff isn't true so we're just trying to put it in a form that's accessible The agricultural revolution, there wasn't one people actually study this stuff know this and it doesn't matter actually which part of the world you're looking at whether it's mass America or China or the fertile present of the Middle East what we know about the way that humans domesticated plants and animals is first of all very slow process like thousands of years not revolution, very long revolution and secondly that you know there's no switch from being a hunter-gatherer to being a neolithic farmer what you actually have for these very long periods of time the technical term in the literature is low level food production we just call it play farming there's people sort of dipping in and out of farming experimenting with the possibilities but keeping a whole load of other things going alongside it fishing, foresting, gathering and people do this very successfully in many parts of the world these kind of economies still exist or will practice until recent times I have a colleague here who works in Amazonia many examples in the ethnohistarical record and people seem to have done this kind of thing very successfully for many thousands of years so the idea that you sometimes get that we kind of stumbled into agriculture I think I can't remember who it was because it's the worst mistake in history you know started planting crops everything went wrong we had to invent private property and became very territorial or you get that story that people love about oh we didn't domesticate the wheat you know the wheat domesticated us it's grass so I'm not really worried about the plausibility of that it's kind of crazy that people ever accepted the other yeah yeah absolutely I feel like I've gone over time in our conversation and yeah you're nodding like yes you have so we're going to be joined in the conversation now by Aicha Chabuchu and Adaf Soif so first of all let me state that David Graeber was a dear friend and it's very difficult to be here without him although David Van Groef has kindly invited me to share some reflections on the book so to make things easier for everyone particularly myself I'll be wearing my anthropologist's hat to discuss what I think some of the major issues are in the book so what ultimately matters David Graeber and David Van Groef write when introducing the dawn of everything is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place I would like to begin reflecting on this groundbreaking book by highlighting the philosophical there I say metaphysical approach at work in this formulation the freedoms that make us human in the first place what are those freedoms that make us human how can we rediscover them what does it say about these freedoms that they need rediscovery and what does that say about us contemporary humans are we not or no longer fully human if these freedoms have not been lost as the authors repeatedly declare lost even to our imaginations these are some of the questions that I would like to raise tonight for discussion my aim is to urge us to explore carefully what Graeber and Van Groef mean by humanity to reflect on what they take humanity's basic what they call basic qualities dispositions, capacities and freedoms to be I will be addressing in other words even if in a very cursory fashion the philosophical anthropology that appears to underpin their work in this book we will not only be presenting a new history of humankind but inviting the reader into a new science of history one that resource to our ancestors their full humanity Graeber and Van Groef assert this book is trying to lay down foundations they say for a new world history in the author's version world history is the stage where numerous societies, peoples and civilisations across time and space appear as the exemplary instantiations of humanity and what they repeatedly call in the book human possibilities as creatures that are decidedly imaginative intelligent, playful, experimental, thoughtful, creative and politically self-conscious the case throughout human history unlike what many people would like us to believe the authors insist that the questions were accustomed to asking about the essence of humanity such as are we as a species inherently cooperative or competitive, kind or selfish, good or evil these questions they claim blind us to what really makes us human in the first place which is our capacity they say as moral and social beings to negotiate between such alternatives accordingly the authors people the dawn of everything with civilisations and societies that offer countless examples of such negotiations undertaken since the ice age Graeber and Wengroff state explicitly that the dawn of everything is a book mainly about freedom they currently identify three freedoms and I think this is going to cause great debate which I'll focus on they currently identify three freedoms which they say appear to have been simply assumed among our ancestors even if most people today find them barely conceivable these three freedoms are, I'm citing the freedom to abandon one's community knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures depending on the time of the year and the freedom third to disobey authorities without consequence however for me a methodological even epistemic question immediately appears how can we know what freedoms our ancestors simply assumed my point is not that our ancestors are unknowable because they are too alien ontologically different as one might say but that even if archaeology and anthropology and the social sciences more broadly may have as their purpose the reshaping of conceptions of who we are and what we might become as the authors rightly desire it remains unclear I think if the social sciences thereby have the capacity to do that without resorting to the creation and deployment of various kinds of myths including new myths about what being homo sapiens really means when articulating humanity's three freedoms Graeber and Wengro write about them as what they call first principles I quote, we have already talked about fundamental even primary forms of freedom they assert the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey orders the freedom to reorganize social relations the principal question I would like to ask is this in which sense are these forms of freedom fundamental and primary are they historical facts, empirical observations from history and or are they moral and political prescriptions about the forms of freedom being human ought to entail including what the authors call that most basic element of human freedoms the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build social relationships perhaps needless to say, I'm very sympathetic I wish we all had these freedoms Do I get to answer this? I have like, okay, I'll skip just in order to hear from everybody I'm sure there should be a response as well So that is the primary question I would like to pose including the freedom to imagine and act another form of social existence My last question is how exactly did that freedom get to be lost I found it very interesting what you described as the conversions of systems of violence and systems of care and I was wondering if you could speak a bit more about that convergence and how it affects the loss of these human freedoms that you mentioned I'll cut it at that and say my comments for the Q&A Also before you respond, could we hear from Adaf if you have anything that you want to add or question from what we've just heard So I'll just say how pleased I am to be here I would have been happier to be there in the flesh rather than on screen but still this is still good and I'm delighted to be part of an event for this book I sort of very rarely you will come across a book or a book will come out that actually does address the great questions that David was just saying that David Graeber said that these are what we're going to have to be talking about So a book that throws up the great questions is actually up-end what people used to think about something or what people used to think about a whole lot of things and becomes hugely influential because actually a lot of people find what it says intuitively true It's as if it is saying something that people recognise that people have thought in little bits but have never crystallised, articulated seen in such a holistic way Think of Edward Said's Orientalism for example as a book like that and as I was reading I was a lot thinking how very pleased he would have been with this book and what a lot he would have had to say about it and of course it's a book that I mean I can't think of a more useful contribution to the moment that we're living in as not only does it turn everything upside down but it touches on practically everything in our lives so the debates that are happening now race and racism, gender issues, empire and decolonisation the state and different ways of organising society obviously they're all there so the great thing about this book and the very few books that are like this is that they don't come with answers they come with evidence and they ask questions and they encourage questions they open paths of contemplation paths of thinking and wandering and conversation and in that they're really like works of literary art I mean they obviously have the science, the scientific underpinning the research and the evidence but in their effect and in their aim they are like works of great literary art so and also like works of literary art you're examining the past which has a validity of its own but you're examining it with an eye to how it can help us in the future and of course this is really the moment when so much is this idea of the future and will there be a future and what do we have to do to help a future come into being that is tremendously salient it is the question now so I just want to say too small I have a question but I want to say two tiny things one is I was so struck by the the kind of debates between the indigenous people and the Europeans who came into contact with them and of course one knew that there was contact and there must have been conversations but mainly for, I mean it's not my field at all but mainly of conflict with tiny bits of like you know conversation or discussion or whatever to read about the extensive indigenous critique of what was being shown to them and what was being proposed as an alternative or a better way of life is absolutely incredible and the idea that their ideas were kind of absorbed and repackaged and spun a different way and turned into the enlightenment kind of made me think of the extractive relationship that western powers continued through colonialism and maybe will even continue now through the coming green era to have with the rest of the world with the south so I'm going to come to my question and it's really a question that invites David to speculate so it's not entirely fair but it is the central one for me which is that when you show people societies thinking, discussing and acting politically which brings so true they must have done that and you also show them in some really remarkable and quite spectacular cases deciding that their society had gone on a wrong path and kind of stopping and changing actually sort of dismantling the whole thing and going a different way and it seems to me that this is what we need to do now and the question which is a question tied as well to what you say about technology which is that the idea that history is driven by technological advance is so patently untrue is it still untrue? Technological advance now is so tied into ideas of dominance and ideas of this is the only way that things can be and you know what I'm talking about artificial intelligence surveillance and so on so where is this relationship now between technology and what we actually want to do with ourselves and when people stopped and changed the way their society was going and turned it around made it do something else they were kind of they were limited they were a particular community and now it seems that the whole world has to do this and do it all in one go so I don't know what you think it's unfair I know I can't log into this so someone could come and log in that would be really helpful would you like to respond? okay well maybe if I just take a deaf question since it's fresh in everyone's minds it actually occurred to me the other day that it's quite a good time to be what's sometimes called the technological determinist right now people who believe that the form a society will take is literally determined by the mode of livelihood you choose or the kind of machines you operate or whatever it may be and traditionally I think this has been quite a a conservative position the idea that you classify all of human societies according to how they extract energy for the environment this is how we get the whole distinction between hunter-gatherers are one kind of people and then there are farmers industrial commercial civilisation and so on but actually if you take that seriously what it means is assuming we're not going to deny all the evidence of climate change and where we're headed environmentally you would actually be obliged to accept that radical social change is now inevitable that would be the logical position for a technological determinist to take it's either that or bust you know end of planet etc which so it's kind of interesting that all the technological determinists have suddenly gone really quiet you know if you're going to defend that position why not follow it right through to its logical conclusion which is that we have to change radically forms of social organisation I'm not personally a technological determinist and I think we present a lot of evidence in the book that things don't generally work that way at all but it's for that reason that I mean I think you really hit the nail on the head with the earlier part of your question so we're not arguing that other ways of life or previous ways of life were innately better or worse or that they are necessarily direct models for where humanity should go next it is precisely what Haddaf was talking about is simply the possibility of changing the possibility of change the flexibility that our ancestors and many other peoples seem to have taken for granted and managed even on an urban scale we discussed cases of really large populations of tens even hundreds of thousands of people changing course this seems to us really the key issue this is our third basic freedom if you like is the freedom to imagine and then enact other kinds of social orders other kinds of social existence and this seems to be if anything this is what we've lost what we've lost is not equality that never existed what we've lost is this apparently this capacity to do that arguably that's what the future really hinges on I don't know how we navigate this but I have a feeling you'd like to come back no thank you I mean it's these are the big questions that keep going around in one's head of course all the time and this idea that what we have is a failure of the imagination actually that we are not yet able to imagine how to go forward, how to be different is a is a dark thought but maybe we'll get inspiration from the very many changes that happen in the dawn of everything that would be nice I mean I do think there's a serious point about education and about there actually there was one very generous review review of the book that came out today which suggested that if you had an education system let's say we took this version of human history as the basis of what we teach kids and what we take for granted that a society which did that would have to be a different kind of society from the one that we're living so I think there is also a point about telling better stories in the sense of not making up myths but there's nothing wrong with myth all societies have them but better I mean in the sense of more accurate more scientifically grounded but also better in the sense that stories that don't shut down possibilities and I think those things are complementary actually I mean how did you go about enumerating these three freedoms summarizing the course of human history to the extent that they're taken from your study of human history how did you narrow down these basic freedoms they're really summaries we realize that part of the reason that very outdated notions of social evolution like the idea that societies must progress through stages and strives chiefs the reason these ideas are still lingering around are actually still quite prevalent is because they're actually quite elegant they're completely wrong but they're kind of elegant and as David put it we need buzzwords we need something that summarizes our findings and that's all the three freedoms that we are is that they are summary statements of empirical things that we observed so for example this business of prehistoric societies that switch, alternate on a seasonal basis between radically different forms of organization this is not speculation this is grounded in archaeological evidence it's grounded in a rich body of anthropological and historical literature but one needs a way of expressing that is a bit quicker and shorter similarly the first freedom to move away from one's surroundings predicated on the idea that somebody at the other end wherever you're going to is going to take you in and feed you and care about you so again that's not speculative there is no evidence for large scale systems of coercion in some of these very early periods of human history and yet people are forming extraordinary networks of societies and we see in the physical remains the way people make houses the food they cook and share the way they bury their dead that there are principles behind this it's not like ants building a nest these people so we need a way of describing that and actually the bit of the book that I would like to read out this time is exactly about what happens when those freedoms erode these norms of giving asylum hospitality and there's an internal logic to that how the loss of one kind of freedom leads to the loss of another and another which I think we can demonstrate quite empirically don't have to speculate Shall we go to the excerpt that you're going to share with us and then we'll go to questions from the audience and I have a feeling that what you're about to read might go some way in asking, answering the question that I have here from the online community Sure Somebody's got a copy of the book Right Yeah So this is this is actually from the conclusion and I chose it because I know it was one of David's favourite bits of the book If there is a particular story that we should be telling a big question we should be asking of human history instead of the origins of social inequality is it precisely this How did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalised within it Perhaps the scholar who most closely approached this question in the last century was an anthropologist and poet named Franz Steiner who died in 1952 Steiner led a fascinating if tragic life A brilliant polymath born to a Jewish family in Bohemia he later lived with an Arab family in Jerusalem before he was expelled by the British authorities he then conducted field work in the Carpathians and was twice forced by the Nazis to flee the continent ending his career ironically enough in the south of England Most of his immediate family were killed at Birkenau Legend has it that he completed 800 pages of a monumental doctoral dissertation on the comparative sociology of slavery only to have the suitcase containing his drafts and research notes stolen on a train He was friends with and a romantic rival to Elias Caneti another Jewish exile at Oxford and a successful suitor to the novelist Iris Murdoch Although two days after he had accepted Steiner's proposal he died of a heart attack He was 43 The shorter version of Steiner's doctoral work which does survive focuses on what he calls preservile institutions poignantly given his own life story it's a study of what happens in different cultural and historical situations to people who become unmoored those expelled from their clans for some debt or fault castaways, criminals runaways It can be read as a history of how refugees, such as himself were first welcomed treated almost as sacred beings and then gradually degraded and exploited again much like the women working in the Sumerian temple factories In essence the story told by Steiner appears to be precisely about the collapse of what we would term the first basic freedom to move away and relocate and how this paved the way for the loss of the second, the freedom to disobey It also leads us back to a point we made earlier about the progressive division of the human social universe into smaller and smaller units beginning with the appearance of culture areas a fascination of ethnologists in Central Europe in the tradition where Steiner first trained What happens, Steiner asked, when expectations that make freedom of movement possible the norms of hospitality and asylum civility and shelter erode Why does this so often appear to be a catalyst for situations where some people can exert arbitrary power of others Steiner worked his way in and carefully detailed through cases ranging from the Amazonian Huitoto to East African Safwa to the Tibetan Burman Lushai Along the journey he suggested one possible answer to the question but it so puzzled Robert Lowey and later Pierre Claster If stateless societies do regularly organize themselves in such a way that chiefs have no coercive power Then how did top-down forms of organization ever come into the world to begin with You'll recall how both Lowey and Claster were driven to the same conclusion They must have been the product of religious revelation Steiner provided an alternative route Perhaps he suggested it all goes back to charity Amazonian societies not only orphans but also widows mad, disabled if they had no one else to look after them were allowed to take refuge in the chief's residence where they received a share of communal meals To these were occasionally added war captives especially children taken in raiding expeditions Among the Safwa or Lushai Runaways, debtors, criminals or others needing protection or status as those he surrendered in battle All became members of the chief's retinue and the younger males often took on the role of police-like enforcers How much power the chief actually had over his retainers Steiner uses the Roman law term protestas which denotes a father's power of arbitrary command over his dependence and their property This would vary depending on how easy it was for wards to run away and find refuge elsewhere or else to maintain at least some ties with relatives, clans and outsiders willing to stand up for them How far such henchmen could be relied on to enforce the chief's will also varied but the sheer potential was important In all such cases the process of giving refuge did gradually lead to the transformation of basic domestic arrangements especially as captured women were incorporated further reinforcing the protestas of fathers It is possible to detect something of this logic in almost all historically documented royal courts which invariably attracted those considered freakish or detached There seems to have been no region of the world from China to the Andes where many societies did not host such obviously distinctive individuals and few monarchs who did not also claim to be protectors of widows and orphans One could easily imagine something on these lines was already happening in certain hunter-gatherer communities during much earlier periods of history The physically anomalous individuals accorded lavish burials in the Ice Age must also have been the focus of much caring attention while they were alive No doubt there are sequences of development linking such practices to later royal courts We've caught glimpses of them as in pre-dynastic Egypt for example Even if we're still unable to reconstruct most of the links Steiner may not have foregrounded the issue but his observations are directly relevant to debates about the origins of patriarchy Feminist anthropologists have long argued for a connection between external largely male violence and the transformation of women's status in the home In archaeological and historical terms we're only just beginning to gather together enough material to begin understanding how that process actually worked Thank you so much We are officially out of time but in the spirit of the book and personal freedom and liberation I'm going to squeeze in a couple of questions and might just be one though This might be the only question Please make it succinct and make it good No pressure I suppose the book has this sense of finality which probably wasn't really expected How would you like us to continue this project amongst all of us beyond of course reading the book students, activists, everyday people what can we do to continue the project that you've started Thank you, that's a great we're going to have one question I mean you're right we would have kept writing but actually I think this book does stand alone it stands on its own feet and the way I see it and I think the way that David understood it as well it's not a dogmatic book it's full of ideas that are really in need of further development and further exemplification and further thinking maybe the best image I can think of to answer your question is something that was suggested to me actually by a former student of David he said it's a bit like a toolkit you know it's like a mental toolbox you can dip into it to debate all of these issues whatever you know the particular we've covered a lot of ground this evening but whether it's about property relations gender relations, the nature of the state it's a book for generating debate in areas that perhaps have seen very final and closed off and beyond beyond the scope of reasonable debates and I've been completely blown away and you know this is actually I'd love to if we finish on this point and I sure will understand this knowing David as well as he did the force of energy the nature of the feedback that I've experienced since David passed away is such an extraordinary tribute of his ideas and the creativity of people who really took from him something for themselves you know there's a group of readers who are creating a website at the moment I've got no control over this whatsoever but they just want a place for people to come together reading groups whatever it may be and talk about the book the ideas so I think that is key I guess is just creating more opportunities for discussion and reasonable debate is what I would love to see come out of this so sure we will stop there yeah thank you so much