The Dawn of Everything - Seasonal Variations

Do seasonal variations put an end to social evolution theory?

So far, my approach to discussing The Dawn of Everything has been to pull out various core ideas and concepts which I think are important and examine them in isolation from the book's main thesis.

Today, let's take a look at seasonal variations.

Graeber and Wengrow devote a lot of chapter four, Unfreezing the Ice Age, to this concept. As they describe it, anthropologists have documented many cultures around the world which have different social arrangements during different times of the year. In many of these cultures, not only does the subsistence mode change, but so do social and political institutions like clan membership and leadership structure, as well as religious and cultural practices. The Davids see these as the result of self-conscious political choices, as well as evidence of social flexibility and a desire to experiment, all of which they claim have atrophied in modern “state” societies today.

Dual Modes

Some of the most interesting parts of The Dawn of Everything are the descriptions of various cultures which alternated between different social systems and political institutions at different times of the year.

In the dry season, the Nambikwara of South America lived in small hunting bands following chiefs who led in an "authoritarian manner." In the rainy season, the Nambikwara switched to gardening in villages of several hundred people where chiefs led by example and persuasion, their reputations having been established by their exploits during the dry season. The chiefs also distributed goods and provided welfare for the poor in village settings.

The most extensive and well-known anthropological treatment of this "dual mode" system comes from the eminent French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, entitled Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo, with Henri Beuchat. In the summer, Mauss and Beuchat explained, the Inuit people would live in small kin groups exhibiting a high degree of patriarchal authority. During the winter months, by contrast, people would gather together in large communal villages where they freely shared everything, including spouses.

Another example comes from farther south along the Pacific Northwest coast of North America. Each winter, the Kwakiutl (Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw), and neighboring tribes, built wooden plank structures where "fisher kings" ruled over commoners and slaves and held lavish banquets where food and goods were distributed according to social rank. In summers, these aristocratic courts disbanded, and clans with less formal ranks fished and foraged along the coast. People even assumed different social identities at different times of the year.

Their final example comes from still further south, among the Native American tribes of the Great Plains. According to the American anthropologist Robert Henry Lowie, these tribes alternated between authoritarian and "anarchic" political structures at different times of the year. During the great buffalo hunt, people congregated in large numbers and strict discipline was enforced by clans and warrior clubs who were given the authority to maintain order using force. These duties rotated such that no group wielded this authority for more than a single season. During the remainder of the year, these "buffalo police" were nowhere to be found, allowing people to mostly do as they pleased without fear of punishment or reprisal.

Curiously, the Davids don't mention one of the best-known anthropological studies of dual social modes, Edmund Leach's studies of the Shan and Kachin peoples of the highlands of central Burma, published in 1954. In these societies, villages would alternate between an egalitarian social arrangement known as gumlau and a more hierarchical arrangement known gumsa. These arrangements would alternate frequently, providing a prime example of cycling between egalitarian and hierarchical social forms (which is why its omission is so puzzling). This phenomenon was described by anthropologists Flannery and Marcus in their wide-ranging study of inequality, The Creation of Inequality:

Naga and Kachin are generic terms for diverse groups of societies, some of which had hereditary rank and some of which did not. To complicate matters further, some Kachin societies had a history of shifting back and forth between hereditary privilege and equality. Archaeologists refer to such repeated shifts as “cycling.”

The world first learned of Kachin cycling from anthropologist Edmund Leach, who spent time in the northern Burmese district of Hpalang during the early 1940s. The Kachin themselves used the term gumlao to refer to societies in which all social units were considered equal. When such units became ranked relative to one another, they used the term gumsa.

The contrast between gumlao and gumsa leaders was great. Under gumlao, each village was autonomous. Some gumsa chiefs, on the other hand, oversaw more than 60 villages at a time. They could ill afford to forget, however, that it was the chief’s entire lineage that enjoyed high rank, not the chief alone. This led to a complex dynamic among brothers...(pp. 193-196)

Another example Flannery and Marcus give is the Konyak people of Nagaland in Northern India:

Like the Kachin, the Konyak had two different modes of social organization. They used the term thenkoh for villages where... “one could live for a considerable time without being conscious of distinctions of rank.” They used the term thendu for villages where hereditarily ranked clans were clearly evident...Such was the nature of cycling that some Konyak villages had a mixture of institutions from achievement-based and rank society. A visit to such a village was like seeing a snapshot taken during the transition from one social system to another. (pp. 202-203)

As they describe it, this evidence shows that human cultures were regularly "moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies and then dismantling them again" (p. 112) in a neverending series of "bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms" (p. 4). Previous human cultures, they say, realized that they could simply "make and unmake" the social worlds they lived in at any moment because this social flexibility supposedly allowed them "the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any political structure and reflect; to both make and unmake...political worlds." (p. 111). As they write, seasonal variations “reveal that from the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities…all, it would seem, on the understanding that no social structure was ever fixed or immutable" (p. 111).

Unlike the vast majority of anthropologists, however, the Davids don't attribute these seasonal changes and their corresponding sociopolitical transformations to differing environmental conditions, or as the result of alternative foraging strategies—i.e. behavioral ecology. Instead, they argue, people were simply "choosing" to live in certain ways because that's how they felt their societies should operate. Material conditions played a subsidiary role in these choices, if any:

[Marcel] Mauss thought the Inuit were an ideal case study because, living in the Arctic, they were facing some of the most extreme environmental constraints to was possible to endure. Yet even in sub-Arctic conditions, Mauss calculated, physical considerations—availability of game, building materials and the like—explained at best 40 percent of the picture. (Other circumpolar peoples, he noted, including close neighbors of the Inuit facing near-identical physical conditions, organized themselves quite differently.) To a large extent, he concluded, Inuit lived the way they did because they felt that's how humans ought to live. (pp. 107-108)

Some small remnant of this social flexibility, they say, persisted in the various "world turned upside down" role reversals that occurred during yearly festivals in agrarian societies such as Saturnalia or Carnival in Europe. According to them, these festivals were reminders that the social order was provisonal and not fixed, even if in diluted form. Based on all of this, they conclude that inequality “has always existed,” it’s just that earlier cultures saw it as a matter of expedience or theatrics rather than some sort of permanent feature of their society. They conclude that the sheer diversity of social forms and lack of a consistent pattern across cultures indicates that dual modes can only be explained as the result of political choices made collectively by the members of those particular societies, rather than an outcome of their material or environmental circumstances:

The societies of the Great Plains created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving them as they dispersed into smaller groups. But those of central Brazil dispersed into foraging bands as a way of asserting political authority that was ineffectual in village settings. Among the Inuit, fathers ruled in the summertime; but in winter gatherings patriarchal authority and even norms of sexual propriety were challenged, subverted or simply melted away.

The Kwakiutl were hierarchical at both times of the year, but nonetheless maintained different forms of hierarchy, giving effective police powers to performers in the Midwinter Ceremonial that could be exercised only during the actual performance of the ritual. At other times, aristocrats commanded great wealth but couldn't give their followers direct orders. Many central African forager societies are egalitarian all year round, but appear to alternate monthly between a ritual order dominated by men and another dominated by women.

In other words, there is no single pattern. The only constant phenomenon is the very fact of alternation, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for 'the origins of social inequality' really is asking the wrong question... (pp. 114 -115)

The Davids contend that this earlier tradition of anthropological scholarship was forgotten due to the discovery of the Kalahari Bushmen of southern Africa in the 1960s, who were erroneously seen as embodying some kind of "primordial" human lifestyle.

As a result of this, they say, scholars developed a framework which ranked all human societies along an evolutionary trajectory, with each structure associated with a particular mode of subsistence inevitably culminating with inequality, bureaucracy, and states. This, in their estimation, was merely an updated version of Turgot's thesis, which they see as a tragic regression of scholarship.

The Davids argue that seasonal variations also make any attempt to develop firm taxonomies invalid, since many societies could, and did, move seamlessly between different social arrangements and political structures at different times of the year. They describe seasonal variation as a "wild card" that anthropologists have neglected in their supposed desire to assign all human societies to particular subsistence methods and discrete stages of development:

[T]he neo-evolutionists of the 1950s and 1960s...were arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organization—successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states—and held that the states of political development mapped, or at least very roughly, on to similar stage of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilization.

It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between economic categories. The Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine or Lakota would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to another. They were a kind of band/state amalgam. In other words, they threw everything askew...(pp. 109-110)

Since in this new, evolutionist narrative 'states' were defined above all by their monopoly on the 'legitimate use of coercive force', the nineteenth century Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen as evolving from the 'band' level to the 'state' level roughly every November, and devolving back again come spring. Obviously this is silly. No one would seriously suggest such a thing...You can't speak of an evolution from band to tribe to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos...efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either 'simple' or 'complex' types, since what have been identified as the diagnostic features of 'complexity'—territorialism, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display—appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population. (pp. 110-111)

This neo-evolutionary framework, they say, stripped non-state peoples of their freedom and agency, their myriad and diverse lifeways simplified into "drab abstractions of evolutionary theory," (p. 4) and, "their place in history defined by their mode of subsistence, and their role blindly to enact some abstract law of development which we understand but they do not. Instead of this approach, they say we ought to “ask what sort of worlds they *thought* they were trying to create." (p. 96)

Furthermore, they argue that early states may have had their nucleus in these sorts of seasonal assemblies. Seasonality meant that these early states were temporary and ephemeral constructions which were hastily assembled and disassembled every year. Power and authority were merely temporary expedients or elaborate forms of theater; a kind of "play" in both senses of the word. There was no particular direction towards inequality or hierarchy.

Then, according to them, somewhere along the line (it's unspecified where or when) we all just somehow "forgot we were playing" and began to take the existing social order as a given rather than something we could make and unmake at any time. What started out as a kind of “fairy-tale or costume drama” turned deadly serious:

It's not clear to what degree many of these 'early states' were themselves largely seasonal phenomena (recall that, at least as far back as the Ice Age, seasonal gatherings could be stages for the performance of something that looks to us a bit like kingship; rulers held court only during certain periods of the year; and some clans or warrior societies were given state-like police powers only during the winter months.)

Like warfare, the business of government tended to concentrate strongly upon certain times of the year; there were months full of building projects, pageants, festivals, census-taking, oaths of allegiance, trials and spectacular executions; and other times when a king's subjects (and sometimes even the king himself) scattered to attend to the more urgent needs of planting, harvesting or pasturage. This doesn't mean that those kingdoms weren't real...It just means that their reality was, in effect, sporadic. They appeared and then dissolved away.

Could it be that, in the same way that play farming—our term for those loose and flexible methods of cultivation which leave people free to pursue any number of other seasonal activities—turned into more serious agriculture, play kingdoms began to take on more substance as well? (p. 429, italics in original)

Thus, they say, systemic inequality is not progressive or irreversible, nor is it caused by material conditions, meaning that inquiring after its origins is both fruitless and counterproductive. So, too, is inquiring after the origins of the “state,” both of which "have no origin." All of this means that the story allegedly peddled by the authors of Big History is wrong and forecloses possibilities that are still open to us even now, in the twenty-first century, if only we could overcome our collective apathy and inertia and stretch our imaginations: “The real question is not ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’, but, having lived so much of our history moving back and forth between different political systems, ‘how did we get so stuck?’”

Conclusion

I wanted to talk about seasonal variations because I do think it's important for understanding how people lived in prehistory. I think that many cultures around the world lived in such dual modes for thousands of years. We have plenty of archaeological evidence for this from places like Paleolithic Europe, Siberia, Western Asia, and North America, among other places.

I also think that these dual modes acted as a preventative check on runaway inequality for a long time. I agree that the nucleus of what would eventually become “states” (and cities) grew out of these sorts of temporary gatherings, their origins lost in the mists of time. Social structures were fluid and flexible, with people frequently congregating and dispersing because we are inherently a fission-fusion species, just like our closest primate relatives.

But where I disagree is their dismissal of material conditions as the underlying cause of all this. I think that behavioral ecology is still mostly correct. I think that dual modes were caused primarily by environmental factors—particularly the availability of food resources. I also think that material conditions shaped people's social institutions and customs, and this has more explanatory power than attributing all of these things to "self-conscious political choices" or "bold social experimentation," whatever that means. People tend to view their social arrangements as more than mere “expedience” or "theater," both now and in the past. There is a theatrical element to power, which scholars have long recognized, but viewing it as simply theatrics is a gross oversimplification.

I also don't think much of their explanation for hierarchy’s persistence as some sort of mass delusion or collective amnesia. I don't think that holds up to scrutiny. I think changing conditions which unfolded over thousands of years played the primary role here. Furthermore, I think classification schema are valuable in helping us understand how societies evolve over time, which doesn't necessitate either inevitability or directionality.

I don't think that putting social variation down to simply "choice," regardless of the circumstances people are living in, is very helpful. We can't simply “choose” to live like hunter-gatherers in the twenty-first century United States, nor do hunter-gatherers "choose" to live as second-class citizens in societies when their traditional lifeways have been destroyed. These are social processes, and we need to understand how they unfold if we are ever to understand the roots of hierarchy and inequality. My reservations about these ideas are well-articulated by the Fight Like an Animal podcast:

[13:18] [Graeber and Wengrow] do this thing where they're positing that the fundamental motivation for all this variation in social form is this sort of wanton human playfulness—this desire to frivolously experiment with different social conditions for the sake of experimentation itself...It's like, 'People were cheerfully assembling thrones for play monarchs in spring only to disassemble them just as whimsically in fall.' It's page after page of people mirthfully frolicking between hierarchy and egalitarianism, between sedentism and nomadism, and all the rest.

It’s not at all remotely familiar to me as the human experience as I've even known it personally or observed it. People care about the kinds of societies that they live in and the conditions of their lives. Usually major reconfigurations of society and shifts in power aren't just mirthful, inconsequential affairs that people giddily undertake for the sake of novelty itself....Social change is usually kind of serious...

I, too, am assuming that there was a much greater terrain for social experimentation historically throughout the broad sweep of human history, and that we have entered a particularly hierarchical phase. But I don't think it was necessarily because we were whimsically experimenting with every conceivable social form for no particular reason for a long time, and then everything just got too serious. I really don't think that's true.

In the process of supposedly humanizing historical actors, I feel like David Graeber and David Wengrow render them just as alien as previous social scientists. It's just that instead of having no conscious agency in shaping social systems, they now have TONS of it. They have so much that they just use it all the time for no reason. And they end up seeming just as foreign to me as people in the social scientists' accounts where they're just timeless archetypes moving through the phases of history towards the next abrupt threshold.

Next time we'll take a look at some of the problems with their thesis, the value of classification schema, and why materialist explanations still make the most sense.