The Dawn of Everything – Ch 11: Kandiaronk and The Indigenous Critique

Renowned anthropologist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution — from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality — and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

This is a biweekly book discussion group on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. The book is available in multiple formats and languages. We cover one chapter per meeting.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike — either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today.

Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95% of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"?

The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

[Read the critical acclaim for the book here.]

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For this meeting, please read Chapter Eleven, “Full Circle: On the historical foundations of the indigenous critique.”

You are very welcome to attend if you didn’t do the reading; discussion preference will be given to those who did.

We will discuss the entire chapter, book pages 441-492. Discussion will be of all 51 pages of this chapter. (Book page numbers refer to the first edition, Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Page numbers may vary in different editions and formats.)

You can find the book here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YXXaVEwZ-cIc37Y0Z9ujEcK3_X2Jpmnh/view?usp=sharing

Or purchase it here: https://www.amazon.ca/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/dp/0771049846/

The chapter subheads are in quotation marks below.

Part I of today’s meeting (pp. 441-473): “In which we consider James C. Scott’s arguments about the last 5,000 years and ask whether global arrangements were, in fact, inevitable” — Map: Some key archaeological sites in the Mississippi River Basin and adjacent regions — “In which we ask how much of North America came to have a single uniform clan system, and consider the role of the ‘Hopewell interaction sphere’ — In which we tell the story of Cahokia, which looks like it ought to be the first ‘state’ in America — On how the collapse of the Mississippian world and rejection of its legacy opened the way to new forms of Indigenous politics around the time of the European invasion.”)

Part II of today’s meeting (pp. 474-492): “How the Osage came to embody the principle of self-constitution, later to be celebrated in Montesquieu’s ‘The Spirit of the Laws’” — Diagrams: Arrangement of different clans (1-5) in an Osage village, and How representatives of the same clans arranged themselves inside a lodge for a major ritual — “In which we return to Iroquoia, and consider the political philosophies likely to have been familiar to Kandiaronk in his youth.”

[Note: Kandiaronk is first discussed in Chapter Two, pp. 44-77, in the section "In Which we Show..." through section "Beyond the Myth of the Stupid Savage."]