Let’s say that someone wants to implode the most established theories about the origins of this animal called human being. Two moves would be needed. The first would be in not having the slightest ceremony in trampling over and mincing characters with the philosophical stature of a Hobbes or a Rousseau. Then it would be necessary to follow with great commitment all the research that in the last 30 years may have broken with common sense in disciplines such as anthropology and archaeology.
For that is exactly what two well-known academics did, David Graeber, who taught in the United States and at the London School of Economics, and David Wengrow, an archaeologist at University College London. Both published, in 2021, “The Dawn of Everything”, a book with a very ambitious title that Companhia das Letras has just translated, “O Awakening of Everything”.
There are almost 700 pages of a project that is both iconoclastic and innovative. If the authors did not make any serious mistakes, it is likely that they will become a watershed in the social sciences, which in 30 or 40 years will remember this duo as theoretical protagonists of the recommencement of a path begun on the ruins of some centuries of bibliographies. .
The fictitious starting point —the one that should not be respected— is, for the two teachers, the period from which inequality began to exist. They argue that the question guides answers derived from the 1755 text with which the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseu ran for an open competition by the Academy of Dijon.
His “Essay on the Foundations of Inequality among Men” inaugurated a way of thinking according to which, at first, men lived in small bands that had no hierarchy (neither kings nor chiefs). This idyllic picture was compromised when the hunter-gatherer civilization discovered agriculture. Cultivating the land would have brought about property, litigation, judges, government and, in short, the institution of the state.
What Graeber and Wengrow argue — the former died weeks after the evidence was delivered — is that, strictly speaking, none of this makes sense. There is no primitive stage of ingenuity and purity, a genealogy by which the bands, when gaining hierarchical musculature, gave way to tribes and these to chieftainships before ending up in the State. Nor is it necessarily true that inequality is linked to the appearance of cities 3,500 years ago in southern Iraq.
This set of “certainties” is belied by findings from archaeologists and anthropologists who have researched the north of the current Canadian province of Quebec. And, further back in terms of academic chronology, there is something familiar to us Brazilians, with Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Nhambikwaras, with whom the Franco-Belgian anthropologist came into contact in Mato Grosso in the 1930s.
See that the pertinence is not in linking his name to structuralism, its epistemological origin. He enters the book of the two authors for having discovered that the Nhambikwara alternated, depending on whether they were in the rainy or dry season, two models of internal organization, egalitarian or hierarchical. And those who exercised some power then returned to live with the others, but on an equal footing.
The fact is that Rousseau is like a pipe that bends the mouths of anthropologists —Graeber and Wengrow don’t use such a lowly comparison—and even Francis Fukuyama is quoted in the book by his parted lips. He also believed that agriculture was the source of inequality in the late Neolithic period.
And Thomas Hobbes? He enters the story because his “Leviathan” (1651) believed that in the period before the State men freely exercised the unpunished pastime of assaulting one another. Hence, and here the authors simplify things for the sake of didacticism, Hobbes is the favorite of conservatives, while Rousseau is the favorite of progressives.
Finally, the pair of academics does not provide an answer to everything. They reacted, for example, to the discovery of rich Neolithic graves that indicate the presence of opulence of some and, therefore, of a clear hierarchy of riches.
This occurs at the Sunghir site in northern Russia or at Dolni Vestonice in the Moravian basin, with graves dating back 26,000 to 34,000 years.
In Dordogne, now France, something even more curious has emerged: it is the 16,000-year-old grave of a young woman nicknamed by archaeologists as the lady of Saint-Germain-de-la-Rivière. It features a rich array of ornaments made from deer teeth. The bizarre thing is that this animal only existed in the Basque Country. To make the shroud, those involved had to travel a distance of 300 kilometers to return with the ornamental teeth.
