In Collections Management, we did our annual washing and waxing of the statue of Eurydice by Bojan Konaver that sits in front of Yager Hall. We also talked about standards and methods of care of metal objects and textiles.
I spent a lot of time working on our reconstituted Indigenous and Archaeology exhibit plan.
On Sunday, we picked up my wife from the airport after her two week-long research trip in Mexico. It’s a joy to have her back home!
I keep meaning to write a booknotes for David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” which I finished some weeks ago, but for a whole host of reasons, I just can’t bring myself to sit down and write something systematic. So what follows here is some scattered notes:
What I liked about it:
It’s a “big” history, with a broad and synthetic reach, and for a wide variety of reasons, people don’t write those much anymore. I like big histories (e.g. this), even as I recognize that such a broad treatment of any subject can be fraught with ethical perils. I’m sympathetic to critics who make such a case about DOE as marginalizing and provincializing already marginalized people by speaking for them and abstracting the particulars of their historical circumstances into a broad global schema. At the same time, it is delightful and unusual to see a big, global, historical book that presents an emancipatory and interconnected vision of humanity and freedom, as opposed to the usual treatments that see us as hopefully mired in either technological or behavioral fatalism.
It really does a wonderful job of provincializing capitalism and our current historical moment of “modernity” as actually somewhat aberrant and unusual forms of social organization. The way we live right now is not only kind of unusual, but actually somewhat weird and stiff compared to the vibrant, dynamic, and mobile forms of sociality that most people of the world would find familiar even a few hundred years ago.
I learned a lot about new research in archaeology, particularly regarding the frankly wild and unruly worlds of paleolithic peoples, usually portrayed as rather simple and sophisticated in their lifeways.
What I didn’t like about it:
The tone of the book is both arrogant and narrow. Repeatedly, the Davids write about how they are turning our ideas upside down or requiring us to completely rethink our priors. That’s a rhetorical position, and certainly they have the expertise on anthropology and archaeology to write from a place of authority. But their audience seems to be middle-class liberals who are already conversant with the ideas they’re challenging, and this is pretty small window of people. It’s not clear to me just how widespread the commonsense framework of human history and possibility at which they take aim actually is. Do the ancient aliens fans really think of themselves as somewhere on a dialectical continuum between Hobbes and Rousseau? Do followers of QANON or other anti-semitic conspiracy theories relate their historical understanding to innate visions of human behavior and social life? It feels a little like they’re tilting at windmills while the hurricane sweeps in on the horizon.
This is a bit pithy and personal for me, but I think their discussion of the problem of “modes of production” in chapter 5 mischaracterizes the concept and mixes an analytical category with a descriptive one. I’ve made good use of the concept of the mode of production in my own scholarship, and have found it to be a useful framework for thinking about the complicated ways that social surplus circulates through different historical and cultural moments. The Davids rightly criticize categorizing societies typologically based solely on how they grow food–it’s silly and kind of meaningless to say that societies as wildly different as the Onondaga of the 14th century CE and the Egyptians of the 2nd millennium BCE are somehow “the same” because they both rely on cereal crops. At the same time, the whole point of a mode-of-production analysis is separates work (the individual and historical process of wresting energy from the environment) from labour (the social organization by which surplus is extracted, circulated, and consumed) and allows you to think through the relations between surplus, power, and social organization. And this gets me to another issue with the book…
The Davids replace the question of equality and inequality with a question of freedom, which they argue is a better framework for evaluating and understanding human history. They identify three basic freedoms that have been truisms for much of human history: the freedom of movement, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to change and transform social organization. But I think that side-lining questions of equality (who has what) in favor of questions of freedom (who can do what) risks marginalizing the ways in which freedom and equality are ultimately intertwined. I don’t have a clear critique (the Davids hedge their rhetoric enough that it’s not a clear-cut disavowal of questions of equality), but it strikes me that the three freedoms they identify could easily be re-grafted onto hierarchical or oppressive projects. “Freedom” in the United States has a particularly White, patriarchal and capitalist valance. Abstracted from their historical analysis, the three freedoms would be easily cognizant as inherent rights to most American White middle class men. Absent an analysis that identifies equality and inequality and explores how such rights were grafted onto power and surplus distribution (something a mode of production analysis ironically does), such freedoms can be grafted just as easily onto emancipatory or oppressive visions of projects.
So I liked the book, and will think more about its implications, even as I found it to have some problematic or oddly-focused rhetoric.
About Me
Museum Professional, cleaning up those ghastly charnel houses of murdered evidence
