David Graeber Is Gone, But He’s Still Changing How We See History – In These Times

Anthropologist and committed anarchist David Graeber may be best known as afounder of Occupy Wall Street (a reputation he worked hard to disavow, always instead deferring to the collective decision-making process), but his true legacy is likely his academicwork.

A star in the field of anthropology, Graeber was abruptly dismissed by Yale in 2005 after teaching for 17years (likely, Graeber suspected, because of his politics). Graeber wrote paradigm-upending works like 2011s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which took fundamental issue with Adam Smith. In recounting how cultures have cycled through credit, money and gift economies, the book calls into question the inevitabilityand iron gripof todays capitalism. Indeed, in aMay 2018 interview with In These Times associate editor Dayton Martindale about Graebers 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs, Graeber said the inanity of much of todays work suggests capitalism was rapidly transforming into something that might not even be capitalism though it might be just asbad.

That book tour would be Graebers last. He died unexpectedly, in September 2020, of pancreatitis. He was 59. Just three weeks prior, Graeber had announced to archaeologist David Wengrow that their book, which theyd been cowriting for adecade, was complete. The Dawn of Everything: ANew History of Humanity released fall 2021 and quickly hit the New York Times bestseller list. Its thesisthat freedom and democracy are not, in fact, the new and exclusive invention of European settler-colonialistsinspired such grand headlines as, What If Everything You Learned About Human History IsWrong?

In These Times spoke with Wengrow, aprofessor at the University College of Londons Institute of Archaeology, about how one backs up such claims, why it would have been rather nice to live in fourth-century Mexico and what he wants people to remember about his collaborator and friend, DavidGraeber.

Jessica Stites: The Dawn of Everything offers anew, rich, varied history of progressive ideas popping up in all sorts of societies. You talk about social housing, for example, which In These Times tends to depict as an early 20th-century innovation. How can you say, Yes, what were seeing in the year 300in Mesoamerica is socialhousing?

David Wengrow: One might assume the idea of social housinga little bit like the abolition of slaveryis an idea that took an enormous amount of time before anybody could conceive of doing it and arose from moral and ethical concerns in very recent European cultural media. But neither is true. We have examples in the book not just of social housing but of non-agricultural groups adopting and then abolishingslavery.

If you pick up astandard book about the Maya and the Aztec, youre going to see pyramids and carvings of kings doing nasty things to their enemies and their subjects. But aconsensus is now forming that this very important early city of 100,000, Teotihuacn, goes another way around the years 250300. They effectively close down what is called the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and stop erecting grand monuments. This is acomplex, multi-ethnic, polyglot settlement with communities coming into the city and founding neighborhoods, from Chiapas or the Gulf Coast or even as far as the Maya lowlands. Around that time, all of the resources and labor of the citizens gets redirected outward into the construction of these apartment blocks laid out in avery highly planned grid across the city. When archaeologists started investigating these buildings, they called them palaces because they are justbeautiful.

JS: As Iread that part Iremember thinking, I wouldnt mind living inone.

DW: It was rather nice. Theres always acentral courtyard. And then there are homes for asmall number of nuclear families. So you might end up with 150 people living privately but around this shared space, with very nice drainage facilities, plastered walls, often beautifully decorated with murals (which today end up in art galleries), and so on. And theyre just single story. Something that to our eyes looks like arather nice villa. And the whole city gets covered in these. The apartments seem to have afairly standard plan, but each one is also abit quirky. So were not talking about some kind of top-down standard. Its something much more humane, in away.

Clearly there were differences of wealth within the citysome are considerably larger and nice. But none of them match the criteria for anything like apalace or an elite dwelling. The whole thing is very, very different from that standard picture of an ancient Mesoamericantown.

And so the archaeologists either had to conclude that everyone lived in apalace or nobody lived in apalace. Either everybody was aking, or nobody was aking.

The answer must be along the lines that this community very self-consciously channeled resources to provide what today would be regarded as areally excellent standard of living on urbanscale.

It is sometimes suggested that this is awild anomaly and that the longer-term history of the region follows the more typical pattern of hierarchy, inequality, monarchy. But theres actually avery wide variety of political systems in these Mesoamerican cities: Some have awhole bunch of kings on location; some are more pyramid-like; nearly all seem to have these powerful neighborhood councils with afair degree of autonomy, which actually continue into the Spanish colonial era, as barrios.

And then theres this fascinating case of acity-state calledTlaxcala.

JS: That was my favorite section of the book! With the ritually abusedpoliticians.

DW: Yes. Tlaxcala is the city where Corts found 20,000 warrior allies to go to Tenochtitlan to overthrow Montezuma and the Aztec Triple Alliance. He couldnt possibly have succeeded without theirhelp.

The standard history tends to tell the story of guns, germs and steel, that the Europeans show up and all the natives are supposedly dazzled by the gunpowder, the metal weapons, the strange animals that they called deer because they had never seen ahorse. And they go, Will you please tell us what todo?

But there are letters from Corts to the king of Spain where he describes Tlaxcala. And hes very explicit, because hes been running around the Americas finding kings everywhere and trying to get them on his side. This is someone who knows aking when he meets one. And he explains that he cant find one in this place. And every time he tries to get them to make adecision, they kick him out for weeks at atime while they deliberate. He says its more like one of these Mediterranean republics, like Venice orPisa.

Then David Graeber and Istumbled upon areally remarkable source, written in the 16th century by aSpanish scholar, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar. He was funded by the colonial government in Mexico, shortly after the conquest, to interview what would have been the children or the grandchildren of the leading figures in Tlaxcala. It contains actual records of the debates in the council about whether to get into cahoots with the Spaniards. Some of its very funnyobservations about Europeans being dirty and unhygienic, obsessed with gold. Theyve got these dreadful animals that are going to eat everything if we let them in. These people were way ahead of anyone in Spain at the time in terms of things we regard as progressive politics today. They had afully functional, developed system of politicalrepresentation.

And they had ways of ensuring politicians did not vaunt their own egos. Another source, Friar Toribio of Benavente, describes the process of joining the Tlaxcala council. You go through this really quite horrific period of self-starvation and bloodletting and torture, all these very trying rituals. It begins with being abused in the town square. Everyone comes out and abuses you. The whole thing is designed to flatten the ego, so that you become acivil servant in the true sense of somebody in service of the population. Its exactly the opposite of what we expect politicians to benow.

JS: That part gave me fantasies of putting Donald Trump in thesquare.

DW: Its like agovernment where everybody was Tony Benn. Can youimagine?

JS: Another big theme of the book is how much Indigenous North America influenced the European Enlightenmentanother fact written out ofhistory.

DW: There was avery developed tradition of participatory democracy and debate that is widely remarked upon by European observers. The Jesuit missionaries, for example, were horrified by the Iroquois and Algonquian peoples they encountered. These are people who dont give or take orders, and that was adeep problem for the Jesuits. Because if youre trying to Christianize people, you traditionally begin with the Ten Commandments. Now, how do you explain the Ten Commandments to people who dont takeorders?

Europeans described these societies as free which wasnt acompliment, but was meant as rather awful, almost animalistic. Another thing that scandalized the Jesuits is that they had no courts of law, no prisons. But the Europeans admitted their crime rates were significantlylower.

JS: The book is abig sweeping history of the type that people love to try to poke holes in. What reception is it getting in thefield?

DW: The book will be scrutinized. And were often way outside our comfort zones. But interestingly, at Davids insistence, we published some of the core arguments in very well-respected, international, peer-reviewed journals. Weve been out there giving talks, getting feedback, getting criticism, responding to criticism. Some of its verygratifying.

A piece came out in the Journal of Human Evolution in 2019 subtitled, Foragers do not live in small-scale societies. And it references our firstpiece.

Im seeing areceptivity to not only our work, but awhole body of research. Ithink that is going to produce something of aparadigm shift in the next few decades. There is going to be more attentiveness to the sophistication of Indigenous political systems, which will also mean going back to literature thats been sidelined over the past 20 or 30years, including by researchers who are themselves of Indigenous descent, which we draw attention to in thebook.

At the very least Ihope the book can make it abit harder for people to keep repeating bad history, this idea that freedom and democracy only come as part of apackage with colonialism andgenocide.

JS: What do you think of the popular reception so far? Do you think David would have beenpleased?

DW: Ithink he would have been quite gratified that the reception is, on the whole, very positive. Isense some reviewers might have been expecting amore political or politicized tract, something we deliberately stepped away fromand actually David was the one pulling back. Reviewers want to talk about Occupy and about Davids politics, and you can find those things in the book, but thats not the kind of book it is. Its abook for everybody. Its not abook for aparticular constituency.

JS: You have abeautiful introduction about how your voice and Davids voice sort of melded in the course of this 10-year collaboration. Is there anything you want to share abouthim?

DW: Iwas out for acoffee with Astra Taylor this morning, talking about David, and one thing came to my mind that was very unusual about him. Im not an activist, but if Ifeel strongly, Ill join amarch occasionally. Ithink David was exceptional in the sense that, in all the years that Iknew him, he was involved in so many different causes and movementsExtinction Rebellion, global justice, the Labour Party at some stage and never once do Irecall him even trying to hold me to his standards or being critical that Iwasnt joining some action. Ithink thats an exceptional character trait, which is lacking in many people who are politically active. Theres amoral judgment, you must, you should. David wasnt really likethat.

And Ithink thats one of the reasons why he was able to talk to such abroad constituency of people. And it was part of this underlying commitment to socialfreedoms.

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David Graeber Is Gone, But He's Still Changing How We See History - In These Times