Full transcript
0:05Beginnings, that’s what we
0:06want to talk about today, and I’m pleased that we were able to win over a guest who
0:12has to do with the beginnings of our institute, who was already at
0:17the Max Planck Institute for Ethnological Research 20 years ago.
0:21Thomas Widlok, now
0:23Professor of African Studies at the University of Cologne,
0:27and our acquaintance, our friendship goes back to the 1990s,
0:31to the beginnings of our own careers, when we met for the first
0:37time at the University of Cologne, at the Institute of Ethnology.
0:40Yes, thank you very much for the invitation Christoph.
0:44It’s interesting again how often our paths have crossed and continue
0:47to cross and yes, I find
0:51it interesting that this new book, which
0:53we are discussing today, also brings us together again,
0:56where we were temporarily on the road in completely different areas.
1:01So I mainly in different hunter-gatherer groups around the globe, but
1:07very small societies, all face to face
1:11and you more often in large societies -
1:15Japan, the United Nations, which is quite a different setting.
1:20And yet this book brings us both together or rather it speaks
1:26to both of us and I think many
1:29others.
1:30That’s reflected in the fact that it’s been on the bestseller lists for many
1:33weeks.
1:33Amazing, amazingly accurate for such a thick ham - 526 pages of German text
1:39alone, if you don’t read the footnotes and the bibliography, and it’s about a lot.
1:45It is about beginnings, according to the German title.
1:49The English title: “The dawn of everything”.
1:50Is it about everything, then, that the ethnologist David Graeber
1:56and the archaeologist David Wengrow have brought
2:00together, or what is it actually about?
2:04Well, it took them ten years
2:08to write the book and it was supposed to be the start
2:13of a series, which of course can’t take place now because David Graeber has passed
2:16away, but it is an
2:19attempt to write something fundamental.
2:25I think the English title is
2:29a bit more appropriate, because it
2:33reflects the dissatisfaction with initial
2:37stories – “The dawn of everything”, the dawn of this,
2:41the dawn of that - so there is an origin story for everything
2:45and that is one of the main strands in this book, is to oppose
2:51these primal stories, as one hears it perhaps most often in German,
2:57to oppose them, that is,
3:00that it is always
3:04about the origin of something,
3:09the primal society,
3:13the primal man, the primal forest, so in German we also like to have this
3:17emphasis: There is some primordial state and once
3:18you have grasped that, then the rest is actually clear,
3:20then you know how it goes and then everything is actually also fixed.That’s
3:22one of the points where they speak very strongly vehemently against it.
3:24They say that is actually the main myth.
3:27There are diametrically opposed valuations, of course.
3:29For some, the beginning is totally positive and super
3:32and then it got worse and worse or just the opposite.
3:36But the basic structure, that the most important thing always happened at
3:41the beginning and the rest is just footnotes, that’s what they’re against.
3:45Right, exactly.
3:45That is also in this case a very concrete beginning or primal story,
3:50which is told again and again, which we find with
3:56Rousseau or with Hobbes,
3:57so these are the ones, who undertake at the beginning, but also so with popular
4:02human history explanation, like Yuval Harari or Jared Diamond, just
4:06that there is a kind of primal
4:11moment of human development, which lay in what our
4:16ancestors practiced a little more than 10,000 years ago.
4:22There we were all still hunter-gatherers and the assumption is that this has
4:25taken place in small groups, relatively equal with each other living people
4:29- men and women - and when the cultivation came into the world, the agriculture
4:35and the surpluses that were to be earned by it, then they form everything else.
4:41then the history actually started properly and indeed a so to speak inevitably
4:47running off total package of social hierarchies, cities, states,
4:51monumental buildings etc., which then could no longer be stopped,
4:55which then spread everywhere as a civilization package, so to speak.
5:00So that’s actually the story that we all know,
5:03but at the same time also the myth that they take apart in the book.
5:07Exactly, and insofar the subtitle: “a new history of mankind”
5:10is already correct insofar as they try to get away from this linearity,
5:13that is, to show that it has always gone back and forth and is an open process
5:17and also want to get away
5:21even more concretely from this
5:26very strong emphasis on property relations, which is the other
5:32thing that makes up many of these origin narratives, that it is quite often
5:34that there was an origin, but the topic is perhaps wrongly
5:37about - so at least in the social sciences - when did property, so to speak,
5:40enter, step in between people and then changed everything.
5:45And here, too, they say that this is not only wrong in terms of linearity,
5:51that there was an origin, but the topic is perhaps wrongly
5:53chosen or it is chosen in a very
5:54limited way,
5:55that is, this very strong focus
6:01on property, on having, on objects, that this is something
6:06very European Eurocentric in the end and that
6:10there are much more important, or at least equally important, major
6:15topics next to it, according to which
6:19one can tell this human history.
6:22And that’s where they try to put a new
6:27accent, by recurring above all to people’s freedom to shape things,
6:32what possibilities and limitations there were again and again in the course
6:37of time, how people used them, and of course property is to some extent
6:42related to that in the sense of it limits options and so on and structures
6:48the whole thing, But they emphasize
6:51very strongly that what people actually
6:54want and what it’s really about is not having, but sharing,
7:00that is, freedom, the possibility to shape things oneself, to withdraw if it
7:06becomes too restrictive, that this is actually the most
7:10important issue, so to speak, in human history on a global level.
7:15In this respect, it really is also a new attempt
7:19to reinterpret existing sources and to provide a new narrative.
7:24Right, especially since the old narrative - that is, the two Davids against
7:29a Goliath, there’s no other way to put it – is really stuck in people’s minds.
7:36So not only now as already mentioned,
7:39Jared
7:39Diamond, but also in every ethnological textbook you can find this standard
7:43procedure and for me it was already eye-opening, I must say, so how
7:48much evidence there is actually
7:51that it was not so simple.
7:54That it has been, for example, the cultivation over millennia
7:58only a kind of sideline next to other economic forms and has not
8:04immediately set everything possible in other
8:10with in motion.
8:13That is thus large cities gave, which offer in their early phases
8:16no signs of social hierarchies of any kind, for rulers or kings and so on.
8:20So the fact that there is so much practical evidence, if one then actually
8:27takes the trouble to look at the entire archaeological inventory,
8:34so to speak, was not so clear to me personally.
8:34So, I think that many
8:36times the criticism will come, we already knew everything, may be.
8:40Every single detail, perhaps, but whether this has really been compiled
8:44in the overall view and the lessons have been drawn from it as the two
8:49do, that is the second question, I think, and I do not think that it was so.
8:56Yes, that is
8:57still
8:57widespread, so I have on the way here simply
9:01in the bookstore again looked, which stands there at the
9:03moment straight at alternative things on the on the shelf and there it is
9:07repeated quite often again that those are somehow then nevertheless firm stages.
9:13Chapter 1: Hunters and gatherers. Chapter 2: Pastoralists.
9:17Chapter 3: Farmers. Chapter 4: Industrial societies etc.
9:21So the good thing is, the specialists don’t see it that
9:28way anymore and especially don’t see it as stages,
9:30but it’s
9:30simply
9:31sedimented from
9:32the previous
9:34generations, so to speak, who operated very strongly with such schemes.
9:39Right, so this is clearly still a powerful discourse and
9:43also ethnologically, I think, in most of our textbooks there is still a variant
9:51of it and it was not that simple, that is clearly so,
9:56so that many points that you mention, that the inevitability was not there,
10:04so what is also always surprising in the stories that you
10:08tell, is that hierarchies, once they had emerged or large urban
10:16settlements might disapear, I think
10:22we have to agree with them that it doesn’t have to mean that
10:25the decline came or something like that, but that it could really have been
10:31like that, that people decided for something else and then at some point
10:35realized that there are alternatives,
10:38that we don’t have to put up with it anymore, that we have to continue
10:41to participate and that they then looked for other forms of political organization.
10:47Yes, I am curious,
10:48how that then further course, thus the book is discussed now in many
10:50conferences and this year is also again the international “hunter and collector conference”
10:57- there it will give a divided echo, I suppose times, because
11:01that is at least for hunter-gatherer specialists also a good and bad news.
11:05So, the good news is first of all to say, obviously the most important things
11:10in the history of mankind have already
11:13happened, when people were still hunters and gatherers.
11:16So they didn’t have to wait until the Neolithic Revolution, but
11:21the question of power and hierarchies already arose in the hunter-gatherer
11:25spectrum and many things already happened there, so to speak, and you
11:30can already observe how people tried to deal with these things.
11:34In this respect, the good news is that we can say that hunter-gatherers
11:37are not something from ancient times that we are no longer really interested
11:42in, but that the drama of all these social conflicts is already unfolding.
11:46The worse news, so to speak, is of course that they say, well, there is no longer
11:53the simple explanation: well, with hunter-gatherers it was easy, small
11:59groups, there
12:01it is easier
12:02to somehow organize
12:03freedom
12:04or establish equality
12:06and then everything becomes incredibly difficult and complex and so on.
12:09But that they say, no, the complexity is already there before,
12:13only we are deprived of this simple explanatory approach to look at
12:17the mode of production and then to know how
12:19it works - that is taken away from us.
12:20Right, exactly.
12:23But I’ve also looked around a bit in the reviews,
12:28and I’ve seen that there’s a lot of criticism
12:31that material constraints, for example due to ecological
12:33conditions, but also, for example, due to the fact that people have
12:36accepted a certain mode of production, play a relatively minor role in the book.
12:41Classe plays almost no role at
12:45all, and some critics wonder whether
12:48David Graeber, who
12:52is also known to have had anarchist political sympathies, i.e.
12:55to have been an activist in the Occupy movement and so on, does not
12:59perhaps overestimate the scope for political action
13:05and perhaps underestimate economic motives and dependencies.
13:08I also found a very interesting criticism that ice age hunter-gatherers
13:13well, they may have started with hierarchies and the like, but we did not
13:17emerge in the ice age, but in the African savannah and under the conditions
13:22was probably for a not so particularly fast, not
13:26particularly strong animal like
13:30us, it was very important to cooperate, to coordinate,
13:34which then precludes that individuals rise
13:35so completely above others, as it is the case in strong
13:39social hierarchies, where equality was the decisive advantage
13:44of adaptation, which made Homo Sapiens possible in the first place.
13:49Yes, basically they would probably agree that this is the case,
13:53that they put more, a greater emphasis on the ideal things, if you want
13:59to put it that way, on the social rules and less on the environmental
14:04conditions, although this is only partly true, so
14:16in fact they always point out how important it is, that many of these new
14:17developments have emerged near the coast or in river courses, where there
14:20was simply a great wealth of resources, yes,
14:25due to receding water levels and so on, but also simply due to
14:32the resources that you
14:33get near the coast and then such a scope arose to try out new things.
14:38So, the aspect is already quite strong and it is sometimes left under the table
14:42a bit, when you talk about hunter-gatherers, well then the fishermen
14:46are kind of there, but it seems to be obviously important that this takes
14:50place in these regions, insofar they have it a bit on the screen,
14:55but clearly also rhetorically a departure from the values,
14:59that we otherwise read about evolutionary history, which are very strongly
15:04materialistic, often very strongly aimed at technology or environmentally
15:08deterministic, and if I may say that now, for example, as someone
15:13who will also use this in teaching
15:16at the university, then I think it’s very good to now
15:22have a draft that you can put against it.
15:26So if it is not spelled out in an environmentally deterministic or
15:32materialistic way, but to say that one can also present the whole thing
15:38differently without having to completely ignore the environment.
15:42So in this respect, I think the aspect is clear, many people will
15:48also rub up against it in detail
15:51and find points, but for the overall
15:55discourse that we have, I think it is exactly important to
16:00also think through a counter-design up to the 600th page.
16:05Yes, so away from the Neolithic and other revolutions.
16:10So away from this idea that clicked at one point
16:16and then suddenly a completely new program was switched on.
16:21You describe very beautifully what people did between
16:22these revolutions, as if everyone just sat there twiddling their thumbs
16:25and waited for the next revolution to come along at some point.
16:28And I also find it very convincing to say that it was much more gradual at
16:31many points. That it has always been a back and forth.
16:33Exactly, an alternation of form.
16:34Right, part of the annual cycle, as you describe it - so large
16:40gatherings when resources are plentiful and then breaking apart again
16:44into smaller groups that govern themselves quite differently and so on.
16:49That’s all already, so I think also
17:02convincing, that will certainly inspire a lot of new research, I think.
17:05Another big theme, so to speak,
17:07the hook of your book is the indigenous critique of European society.
17:10Interesting, so you refer to the Baron de Lahontan, a French impoverished
17:17nobleman, who traveled in North
17:19America, stayed for a long time and had
17:24dialogues, which he then also interwove in a book
17:27about it, with a statesman,
17:31army leader and intellectual, the Wyandot,
17:35whom we called Huronnen named Kondiaronk.
17:38And this Kondiaronk,
17:40leads a kind
17:43of general criticism
17:44of the European society in the mouth.
17:47What bothers him are the hierarchies of command.
17:49For Wyandot, it would be unthinkable to simply
17:54submit to the orders of any other person.
17:56Empathy and compassion, the will to share with those who have nothing,
18:03who are in need, he finds insufficiently developed in European society.
18:09He is also disturbed by the oppression of women, and now there’s their
18:14thesis that maybe we shouldn’t take this so much as a literary invention,
18:18as it’s often been dismissed
18:20so far, but we should take it seriously, that is, actually assume
18:23that this dialogue has taken place in this way, and that this critique
18:31by indigenous observers of European society via such authors as Lahontan has
18:37also been a major
18:39impetus for
18:41the European Enlightenment.
18:43I think it’s something that certainly can’t be dismissed out of hand, even
18:48if one can ask oneself in this particular case whether the decades that have passed
18:54between the dialogues and the writing of the book
18:58haven’t perhaps introduced one or two literary freedoms.
19:00They are not so naïve as to say that this is not a genre.
19:05They recognize that it is a common genre in Europe to act as if one
19:09were looking at one’s own society from the outside.
19:13There are also many other examples, but I think what is basically probably
19:20right and important to emphasize is that whether it is in the Enlightenment
19:27or in scientific thinking in general, this
19:30dialogical dimension plays a much stronger role.
19:34Of course, as ethnologists, this is particularly helpful to us,
19:37because we have always said that indigenous criticism is something
19:39very important, but even if we don’t go so far as to say that it has to be the
19:44indigenous people from outside Europe, it can also be marginal groups
19:48within our own society, but that the findings of the Enlightenment
19:53are ultimately based on a dialogical process
19:57and are thus further developed, I think that is the basic
20:02statement that probably also remains, if one then somehow does not know exactly
20:05in the end in the individual case, that is also their conclusion,
20:07that one can not know exactly in the end, but one can also not exclude it.
20:10Yes, what they say and then in the end
20:12perhaps take it more seriously than before, even if it was reworked
20:16and revised and if things
20:22merge and so
20:26on, nevertheless also for the future to take it seriously,
20:31that for every form of cultural achievement and cultural creation
20:35there must actually always be some kind of dialogue,
20:39that there must always be different sources that come together and I think
20:44that is something that they can definitely prove once again for the entire
20:50narrative and just as a message but also absolutely want to give.
20:55Yes, it is also written
20:58in a thoroughly popular-scientific way in the sense that they connect
21:03a call with it, how it should
21:06go on, how one should continue to handle it.
21:10Okay, we can perhaps still ask ourselves what ethnologists are
21:15now doing with it, which is clearly a huge impetus for research.
21:20I think, above all, archaeology will draw a lot of inspiration from
21:26it, will perhaps also understand it as a provocation
21:29and thus, so to speak, see the findings in a new light,
21:32but does it go beyond that, what can we as
21:36ethnologists do, what can we derive for today’s political practice?
21:40Well, I myself have been more concerned with the supranational level, i.e.
21:44with UNESCO, and I have just noticed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
21:49that the appreciation of such large supranational, global organizations
21:54as the UN, NATO, and the EU
21:58has certainly not diminished, but rather increased.
22:01Isn’t that perhaps the way to go, I ask myself, i.e.
22:06more global interdependence and not what one might deduce from the book: The
22:12disentanglement of smaller self-determined
22:14units, isn’t that perhaps in the meantime the shareholders
22:18have become too complex to take note of something like that, but
22:23perhaps not necessarily to take it as a model for political interventions?
22:29Well, I think the current
22:30situation proves them right, at least in one respect, that freedom
22:34is obviously a major motive for political upheaval, and not just ownership,
22:39but at the same time the one does not exclude the other.
22:45So in this case, we have both: We have people on the ground who
22:50take their own lives into their own hands on a small scale and here,
22:55too, when it comes to refugee aid, for example,
22:58people who do very concrete things to take people in.
23:01But at the same time, of course, we have this
23:04orchestration at a higher level and that they can also go hand in hand.
23:08So they have now of course a book often example where it runs against each
23:12other - so that the state on one side, the actor, the oppressor so to speak and
23:16there are the little
23:17people on the other side who are trying to keep their freedoms and win,
23:22but there can of course be contexts where there are state actors and non-state
23:27actors on both sides who position each other and that seems to be the case here.
23:32I would also be interested to know what you think about
23:36this from that point of view, since you yourself have dealt so intensively
23:41with sharing and have written a book about it
23:44- “Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing”.
23:49Yes, that’s interesting, because it shows
23:54that actually also, so you get a little
23:59bit who reads the book and letters and so
24:04on and also in this case it’s very broadly spread, so really people who live
24:09in this scene, where you try
24:12to find very small-scale alternatives to market
24:16exchange and how you can
24:19regulate it and then but also people who try to realize
24:25this not only for small groups, but to
24:29bring it to a higher scale.
24:33Yes, so right now of course through electronic
24:36digital platforms
24:39there are many approaches, the attempt to
24:42get such principles of sharing
24:44also on a larger scale, somehow through
24:48digital means and
24:51through the organization of participation and actually there is
24:56also a debate on both levels.
24:58So there’s a question of how do you maybe have to steer or look at something like
25:03basic income on a national and international state level and at
25:06the same time, what differences does that make in my everyday life, for example,
25:10if I fence off my property and no one can come in anymore
25:13or I don’t
25:16have to meet
25:19anyone anymore and permeability
25:23is completely abandoned
25:27in everyday contexts and here, too, I would
25:31say it’s very similar to what’s described
25:35in Graeber
25:36and Wengrow’s
25:38book,
25:39where
25:40they also have both things on the screen.
25:43They have the big state upheavals on the screen, but
25:46they also show and point again and again to the importance of just yes, what
25:51they then so Play so the ludic element, the playful “play
25:56farming” and “play politics” so that even in the carnival for example,
26:01that is from their point of view the last remnant of this nest of resistance,
26:06where you can also think about alternative social form,
26:09so that it is just not a “big
26:13men history”, but that in these small
26:16things people can cumulatively also achieve big things.
26:22Yes, both in the economic transformation
26:26and in the political transformation, and I think
26:30that will also be a
26:31bit of the message that they
26:33definitely have to and want
26:36to give to the readers.
26:38It makes perfect sense to change one’s life.
26:41So also for the individual, because you
26:43can understand that it also made a difference in history.
26:47Yes, it did matter
26:49if the women
26:53here tried something
26:56with “farming” and so to speak and it really led to a change over time.
26:59So I also think that maybe overall the attention
27:02to gregarious experimentation will get stronger again because of the book.
27:05And so much vanity must be, I also still refer to my own book: “The art of sharing
27:10-a comparative study of the survival conditions of communitarian groups,
27:14where I dealt specifically with utopian communes that share all property,
27:19have everything in common, and where it was then just
27:23also ascertainable, the political scope is enormous, you had the very hierarchical
27:28groups, that completely subordinate themselves to the will of a charismatic
27:33leader, but that worked for a long time, but also very egalitarian
27:38groups or even such anarchic groups as David Graeber probably had
27:42in mind in particular, where actually nobody can be forced
27:46to do anything, but where it still somehow works.
27:49So much more research on that is certainly desirable, I
27:53think, and it will certainly lead to that within anthropology.
28:00Yes, and
28:01all in all I have to say for
28:02the subject isn’t through yet, that there are actually
28:04us as scientists to see that such a book, which is very thick and tries to process
28:08a very large difficult matter - despite all the criticism, that’s
28:14also first of all a pretty good achievement to get that on the bestseller
28:16lists and obviously also the way it’s written, and obviously
28:18the way it’s written to convince people that, first of all,
28:23still a lot of interesting things to discuss and to bring it back
28:29into focus,
28:34so if you look at the bestseller lists, there are a lot of things
28:37on there where you think, does this have to be?
28:39But in this case, at least a light
28:43is shed on topics that
28:46are really worthwhile for many people, I
28:48think, to deal with and it is also readable.
28:51Yes, there are definitely worse books on the bestseller lists.
28:57And I would say you have to acknowledge that this is an achievement that I’m sure
29:03will keep many busy for a long time in anthropology, in archaeology and beyond.
29:10Thomas, thank you very much.
29:11I enjoyed talking with you. Yes, you are welcome Christoph.
29:14I enjoy sharing my time with you.
29:17And I very much hope you will also share your time with us and
29:21our series again.