Post · bonfire.cafe

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

Strap in for another mega-thread of quotes and reflections folks. I just started reading The Dawn of Everything, by the late David Graeber, and David Wengrow.

My first reflection is that whether or not institutions support them, we need more anthropologists like Graeber. Researchers willing to question entrenched narratives and go where the evidence takes them. If you're that way inclined, I recommend Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology;

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology

The Anarchist Library

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

David Graeber Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology 2004

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@Ooze@wirejunkie.net 2 mo. ago

@strypey I love this book. I have read it five times! It is everything I wish the academy was but isn't.

@cy@fedicy.us.to 2 mo. ago

Seriously though, Graeber's greatest strength is he spent his life going out to these cultures and working with them, which satisfies the "whiteboy saves the savages" trope but he really spoke from experience, if you want to listen to a whiteboy in particular.

The fact that he questioned entrenched narratives...... less of a strength. Yeah it's great but oh my god he cannot write a single paragraph without ranting about those Fools back at the Institution.

In that sense, the collaboration really helped. Debt is a lot more adversarial than The Dawn of Everything.

I did hear a nasty rumor that Graeber and Wengrow besmirched the reputation of earlier anthropologists who they actually agreed with, just to take credit. I never managed to look up the earlier anthropologist though what's his name... Boehm so can't confirm.

https://masto.ai/users/GhostOnTheHalfShell/statuses/116443910422177108

Rather than being caught up, complaining about the ideological propaganda of hierarchy, the framework has an explanation of why it structured that way.

🙄 I'm sure Boehm wasn't ideological at all, in the slightest, nope, nosirree. He's just saying.

The page you are looking for isn't here.

Mastodon

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

@cy
> The fact that he questioned entrenched narratives...... less of a strength ... he cannot write a single paragraph without ranting about those Fools back at the Institution

To be clear, when I say;

> willing to question entrenched narratives

I mean exactly that; questioning *narratives*. You seem to have interpreted it to mean 'sniping at colleagues', which is not unusual among academics, but I see less than the average in Graeber's writing. He focuses on structures, not individuals.

@cy@fedicy.us.to 2 mo. ago

Yeah, you know, I might be full of shit. I was flipping through Debt just now and couldn't find any of the mentions of other unspecified anthropologists I remembered.

Still not sure why my mother couldn't stand to read it though. She loves anthropology. I guess the notion that one should not repay one's debts was too much to put up with.

@cy@fedicy.us.to 2 mo. ago

There was never one moment in the movie where the natives gathered around in awe as James Cameron showed them the magic of photography, or eyeglasses, or apple pie.

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

@cy
> There was never one moment in the movie where the natives gathered around in awe

There was the whole 'taming the untameable beast' bit, which is a common target of critique. But this could also be interpreted as trying to work within the worldview of the indigenous group he's trying to ally with. They'll unite behind the person who rides the Toruk? Ok...

Not to mention putting himself at huge risk; the Toruk could well have killed him as he tried to get close enough to bond with it.

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

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Oh, and as for;

@cy
> the "whiteboy saves the savages" trope

This kind of talk has become a lazy way to dismiss non-indigenous people when we take indigenous perspectives seriously, and try to convince others to do the same. It simply has nothing to do with Graeber, not in anything he believed, did, nor wrote;

https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/116780239236755426

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

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Even the way James Cameron got slammed for Avatar by non-indigenous critics was an example of this.

When I first saw the movie, I thought it painted a very sympathetic picture of an indigenous group experiencing a horrifying first contact with a colonising force. I saw the protagonist (a *disabled* protagonist BTW) not as a valourisation of the "white savour" trope, but a subversion. A model of a well-intentioned but clumsy attempt to be a good ally, after a cross-cultural exchange.

@cy@fedicy.us.to 2 mo. ago

I just get tired of every "great" academic being of European descent. Doesn't mean Graeber's wrong. I'm more complaining about the academic institution as a whole, who's hidden from me all the brilliant people who aren't honkeys.

That and the fact that I can't read Spanish, Chinese, or Hindu.

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

I was replying to disagree with you on this, and it took me a while to realise ... I don't. It's a fair complaint. But as you say;

> Doesn't mean Graeber's wrong

In fact, it seems obvious to me that Graeber would agree with you wholeheartedly. Because he's essentially making that same complaint in the book, in the quote you replied to.

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

@cy I just got onto Chapter 2, Wicked Liberty, and it starts by exploring exactly this topic; indigenous influence on 'Western' thought - particularly the Enlightenment - and the various ways the arguments that swirl around the 'noble savage' trope confuse the issue;

https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/116785339689561384

There's a lot to unpack.

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

Ironically, I'll probably end up quoting much less text than I did from Doppelganger. The full text of The Dawn of Everything in the anarchist library will make it much quicker and easier to quote. But also means that if the pullout quotes and thoughts I post get anyone interested in the book, they can go there and read it for themselves.

Which I'm convinced is what an "activist and public intellectual" like Graeber - to quote his co-author from the Forward and Dedication - would have wanted.

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"Revisiting what we will call the ‘indigenous critique’ means taking seriously contributions to social thought that come from outside the European canon, and in particular from those indigenous peoples whom Western philosophers tend to cast either in the role of history’s angels or its devils."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"Both positions preclude any real possibility of intellectual exchange, or even dialogue: it’s just as hard to debate someone who is considered diabolical as someone considered divine, as almost anything they think or say is likely to be deemed either irrelevant or deeply profound."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

Graeber and Wengrow's exploration of Hobbes and Rousseau reminds me of the argument Steven J. Gould made in Full House;

Multicellular life emerges as an edge case. Then more complex organisms emerge, as a series of further edge cases. Each one an unlikely variant on the last, emerging only because the dice is rolled anew every time a protein is folded, or a cell divides. Processes so frequent that even very unlikely outcomes happen occasionally.

What if the same is true of societies?

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

Gould's core argument is that there's no natural force or law pushing life towards more complex forms. Humans are not the end product of a series of steps from simpler to complex. We're outliers, twigs on the fringes of a vast possibility tree.

What if the same is true of industrial civilisations? What if they're outliers too? What might that mean?

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources - even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

(1/?)

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"Indigenous peoples are assumed to have lived in a completely different universe, inhabited a different reality, even; anything Europeans said about them was simply a shadow-play projection, fantasies of the 'noble savage' culled from the European tradition itself."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"Of course, such historians typically frame this position as a critique of Western arrogance (‘how can you suggest that genocidal imperialists were actually listening to those whose societies they were in the process of stamping out?’), but it could equally well be seen as a form of Western arrogance in its own right."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus."

DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"So one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them."

DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

"In fact, the terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World. "

DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

"Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist "Gregory Bateson coined the term 'schismogenesis' to describe people's tendency to define themselves against one another."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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#schismogenesis

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

"Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement bit, after an hour, they end up on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide - even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under normal circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other's points."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

"They start out as moderate social democrats of slightly different flavours; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman. We know this kind of thing can happen in arguments. Bateson suggested such processes can become institutionalized on a cultural level as well."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

Schismogenesis explains so much about why the social media era has produced such antidemocratic results. If Bateson's theory is correct, then encouraging people to get into heated debates (as DataFarming algorithms do) inevitably pushes us all towards extreme positions, which don't even reflect what we truly believe.

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#SocialMedia #PublicDeliberation #democracy

@cy@fedicy.us.to last mo.

I like to think it's a specific kind of schismogenesis called the "Whiplash Effect." Which is to say, when bullies are challenged, and when they are losing that's when they double down and bully harder and harder. An ultimately futile effort, but characteristic of all positive social change. When you tell a child "no" who's been raised without anyone doing that, they will scream like you're ripping their heart out of their chest, or like they'd wish to do so to yours. Then they'll stop, because it isn't working.

But maybe I'm too optimistic. The cynic in me says that the elites have planned their whole lives elaborate plots of how to scream like angry babies the moment there is the slightest resistance, to ensure no one ever even starts to escape their web of debt. Raging against a change they can't stop, or cold, calculating, strategic disruption?

@cy@fedicy.us.to last mo.

No, no it wasn't "The Whiplash Effect" darn it I forget what it was called...

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

Social media platforms may not have been invented to whip up angry mobs (but in hindsight that seems plausible). But like Bain in The Dark Knight Rises, their owners now realise how politically useful angry mobs can be in defending their 1%er political-economic interests. So they have no incentive to redesign them for more pro-social purposes, and most of then ideologically oppose democracy anyway.

DataFarming platforms cannot be reformed. They must be burned to the ground, and replaced.

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

"This is not, then, a book about the origins of inequality. But it aims to answer many of the same questions in a different way. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

"To understand how this situation came about, we should trace the problem back to what first made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers and judges. But we no longer have the luxury of assuming we already know in advance what the precise answers will turn out to be. Taking guidance from indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, we need to approach the evidence of the human past with fresh eyes."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

"This, [Christopher Boehm] concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

"In this sense, one could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’ – since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge."

#DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything

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Goiterzan/Amygdalai Lama

@punishmenthurts@autistics.life 2 mo. ago

@strypey
.
I have fixated and made a mountain out of what they said about an “actuarial sense.” 👍

@cy@fedicy.us.to 2 mo. ago

I just started reading The Dawn of Everything, by the late David Graeber, and David Wengrow.

oh no

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 mo. ago

@cy
> oh no

Oh yes. Quake in fear : P

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