Hi all, jumping in late here, spurred by Blair’s contributions.
The aha! for me from the book was the huge political diversity (more, less, differently, and even seasonally hierarchical/egalitarian) of pre-historic/-literate societies — discernible, with careful interpretation, from the archaeological record. Wengrow contributes much fascinating fact and detail to Graeber’s more-overt ax-grinding/politicized approach.
G&W’s claim about Boehm that Blair highlights: Humans as political animals. Key line:
“Boehm assumes…we were strictly ‘egalitarian for thousands of generations’”
This is a bad overstatement; Boehm never uses the word “strictly.” In fact he points to prehistoric societies that were more hierarchical, and discusses societal traits and material conditions that are contributive or necessary to more hierarchy.
But he does say quite explicitly in the introduction to Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior:
“I make the major assumption that humans were egalitarian for thousands of generations before hierarchical societies began to appear.”
So his hierarchical examples can be (cynically?) viewed as rare exceptions, “now, to-true-true”-isms.
So Boehm very much does participate in the widespread Rousseau-istic noble savage business that I and I think innumerable others have ingested through osmosis in our non-expert intellectual travels. And as G&W point out, that does conflict quite oddly with Boehm’s Aristotelian view of humans as The Political Animal. Were humans not political (much) before the neolithic revolution?
G&W’s claim, that according to Boehm, “for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live just one way”, is another unfortunate overstatement. But “mostly one way” would not be.
G&W forcefully make the point, with many examples, that pre-neolithic humans had hugely diverse (and sometimes large) political structures, with huge variance even in adjacent tribes — often in fact, in direct response to adjacent (hierarchical) structures that they disliked/disapproved of (see “schismogenesis”). I didn’t know that.
That was a super-interesting and useful understanding for me, and a valuable corrective to lurking simplistic Rousseau-ism that is still quite intellectually pervasive — with significant help from Boehm.
Thanks for listening…