What Seasonal Variations Really Mean

A changing climate meant the loss of freedom for many

I think seasonal variation is crucial for understanding human social evolution, and so do most anthropologists. I think it also provides a clue to how we got stuck, but not how the Davids think it does.

Let's take a look at this passage (my emphasis):

...the proliferation of separate social and cultural universes—confined in space and relatively bounded—must have contributed in various ways to the emergence of more durable and intransigent forms of domination.

The mixed composition of so many foraging societies clearly indicates that individuals were routinely on the move for a plethora of reasons, including taking the first available exit route if one's personal freedoms were threatened at home.

Cultural porosity is also necessary for the kind of seasonal demographic pulses that made it possible for societies to alternate periodically between different political arrangements, forming massive congregations at one time of the year, then dispersing into a multitude of smaller units for the remainder.

That is one reason why the majestic threatre of Paleolithic 'princely' burials—or even Stonehenge—never seems to have gone too far beyond theatric. Simply put, it's difficult to exercise arbitrary power in, say, January over someone you will be facing on equal terms again come July. The hardening and multiplication of cultural boundaries can only have reduced such possibilities. (pp. 124-125)

I think that's exactly right. That's precisely why hierarchical and authoritarian social structures were so difficult to impose and maintain during the conditions that prevailed during the long Paleolithic era, as I've been saying all along. It’s also why hierarchy—when it did arise—was only ever ephemeral and expedient. It was difficult to impose arbitrary authority when people could simply walk away from that authority come springtime, for example; or when they could freely move between different groups. When power circulates throughout the society, it's difficult for any single individual or faction to gain hegemony and impose their will on others.

That social equilibrium persisted for countless generations. The question is, what disrupted that equilibrium to give some people advantages over others? Why there was a "hardening of cultural boundaries" after the Ice Age? Why did we stop walking away from authority? I don't think it was because of some sort of voluntary collective choice or a frivolous desire to experiment with different social possibilities as the Davids are implying. Rather, a better explanation is that the material circumstances changed over time such that certain groups were eventually able to wield power on a permanent basis, and understanding why those circumstances changed is critical to understanding how we "got stuck" in dominance hierarchies. The Davids pose the exact same question:

How did some human societies begin to move away from the flexible, shifting arrangements that appear to have characterized our earliest ancestors, in such a way that certain individuals or groups were able to claim permanent power over others: men over women; elders over youth; and eventually, priestly castes, warrior aristocracies and rulers who actually ruled? (p. 121)

How, indeed?

The main reason seasonal variations were so common during the last Ice Age was because the Ice Age had more extreme seasonal variations! This chart tells the story:

A warm and stable climate made growing food possible in a way it simply was not during the Paleolithic. It also transformed the ecosystem, replacing tundra with mixed forest and rendering many large migratory animals extinct. This happened simultaneously all over the world. This entailed a loss of mobility, which entailed a loss of flexibility, which opened up the space for cultural differentiation—and hence greater inequality—as the Davids themselves describe in the passage above. It also caused population growth, which made seasonal dispersals more difficult. But ultimately all of those things were brought about because of changing material conditions rather than forgetting that the social order wasn’t fixed or taking “play kings” way too seriously.

Just because domestication was a granular process which unfolded tentatively and unevenly over very long time spans with no purposeful direction (which the Davids describe very well in subsequent chapters) doesn't mean that it didn't have real, demonstrable consequences for human social organization all over the world.

I don't think earlier cultures alternated between sedentism and nomadism simply out of a desire for novelty, or to change things up, or because leadership was more effective in nomadic groups, or anything like that. In fact, the Davids seem to undermine this notion in their own text. For example, when arguing for presence of seasonal variation in the Paleolithic, they write:

...archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow...(111)

I think that’s probably correct. But what does it matter whether or not the Ice Age was “highly seasonal” if your main argument is that dual-mode political structures were not caused by material conditions but by people freely choosing how “humans ought to live” (as with the Inuit)? It's logically inconsistent.

There's also a bit of inconsistency with their depiction of Ice Age burials. They cite such burials as evidence that Ice Age people regularly "shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of the year then dismantling them…" (p. 111)

But they themselves told us that these burials had all sorts of anomalies associated with them such as physical deformities, making their role ambiguous. How can you cite them as evidence of political variability if we don't know what their role was? For example, in some cultures where human sacrifice was practiced, the more important the victim, the more valuable the sacrifice. Perhaps these people were elevated specifically for this purpose, and they were actually less regarded in regular life? Perhaps these burials were intermittent simply because people who survived with physical deformities weren't all that common back then. We simply don't know.

And why were dual modes always correlated with specific seasons and foraging strategies, as shown by the highlighted portions of the passage below describing the Inuit:

In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin.

But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea. (p. 107)

This indicates to me there must be at least some sort of connection between social structures, the seasons, and food procurement strategies. Doesn't it make sense to assume that this played a bigger role than "self-conscious deliberation" (which seems to imply a degree of rational planning more associated with bureaucratic states)? Just because materialist explanations aren't immediately apparent doesn't mean they don't exist.

Moreover, why did these societies always cycle between the same two social forms (which the term 'dual modes' implies) if there were theoretically an infinite variety from which to choose? And why only two? Why not three, or four, or seven, or eleven? And why did they always correspond with particular seasons and the availability of key food resources? If people were supposedly making "self conscious" choices about their society, then why were these choices so predictably driven by the calendar?

It seems to me like these cultures were just as "stuck" as larger, more sedentary cultures, only between two different social modes as opposed to just one. To me, this implies a lack of collective will rather than an assertion of it.

Strawmanthropology

What about the idea that dual modes invalidate any attempts to classify human societies? I myself used those same categories of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and so on, in my first series of posts on this site. After reading this, I wondered, was I making a big mistake? Were such categories doing a disservice to those cultures?

One of the books I drew on for that series of posts is a classic text in anthropological theory called The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State by Allen W. Johnson and Timothy Earle. The book utilizes an evolutionary framework to understand social evolution just like the one the Davids are rejecting. But despite the claim that anthropologists consider seasonal variations and dual modes “confusing” or a “wild card” (p. 114), Johnson and Earle discuss seasonal variations extensively. For example:

Foragers follow a cyclical pattern of aggregation and dispersal that is responsive to the availability of food. When resources are uniformly distributed, the costs of exploiting them are uniform, and maximum efficiency is gained with a dispersed population that minimizes competition among individual foragers.

When resources are concentrated in one or two areas, the costs of exploiting them increase with the exploiter's distance from those areas; in such cases efficiently is gained by groups coming together.

Or, as we shall see in the Shoshone and !Kung cases, resource availability may change throughout the year, with the population coming together at one season to exploit the concentrated resources of that season, such as the pine nuts of the Shoshone, only to break up again when food resources become more generally available. (p. 56)

Many of their exemplary case studies do, in fact, feature dual mode social structures and seasonal variations. For example, there are sections devoted to the Great Basin Shoshone (case 1), the Eskimos of the North Slope of Alaska (case 6), the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest (case 9), and the Ngansan of northern Siberia (case 4), of whom they write:

The Ngansan's movements reflect the whereabouts of their quarry. For most of the year, reindeer, fowl, and other game are widely scattered, and the Ngansan follow them in groups of one or two families. At other times, when reindeer or geese are locally available in large quantities, families congregate to exploit that opportunity. Periods of stable settlement—in summer near favorite fishing spots, in winter near ice-fishing spots and (more important) near pasture for domestic reindeer—alternate with periods of movement in pursuit of migrating reindeer. (p. 115)

The Davids assert that most anthropologists today have turned their back on "that earlier tradition running from Marcel Mauss through to Robert Lowie...which treated 'primitive' societies as inherently flexible, and typically characterized by multiple forms of organization." (p. 113). But it doesn't seem like that to me, at least not based on this text. When I was writing my post on band societies, for example, I kept running across passages like this one from a classic text in anthropology called The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum by Robert L. Kelly:

In the 1970s, archaeologists became interested in the seasonal rounds of hunter-gatherers, those movements that foragers make from one place to another as resources come and go with the seasons.

The Great Basin Shoshone, for example, spent the winter in villages in the piñon and juniper forests of the mountains. As spring came, they moved down to the valley floors and gathered tubers, bulbs, and the first seeds of spring; later, they moved upslope as seeds ripened there.

In the summer, they might move to a river where trout were running, or to a marsh where they could hunt waterfowl and gather bulrush seeds. In the early fall, they would move back into the mountains, establish winter camps, and collect piñon nuts while hunting deer and bighorn sheep.

According to Kelly, anthropologists were becoming more interested in seasonal variations at exactly the same time the Davids tell us that anthropologists were rejecting them. What gives? In reality, seasonal variations aren't denied or dismissed by anthropologists, either now or in the past. Rather, they are studied by anthropologists in order to help them better understand societal evolution.

In fact, the gradual erosion of seasonal variation and the move toward permanent settlement was probably a major factor in the evolution of many societies around the globe after the Ice Age. To use the few societies which still practiced it into more recent times as evidence for the invalidity of categories is a deliberate misunderstanding of what those categories are used for.

I don't think it's the case that dual modes and seasonal variations would shake the foundations of mainstream anthropological thought if they were to be rediscovered. Anthropology has long since recognized the fluidity and diversity of human social forms. As Ian Morris succinctly states in his review of the book, “Graeber and Wengrow are right that prehistorians have neglected seasonality, but wrong that seasonality is inconsistent with evolutionism.”

It's true that classification terms like "simple" and "complex" are problematic for a number of reasons as they rightly point out, but it's important to keep in mind that these are terms of art. Anthropologists have long been aware of their drawbacks and limitations, as this passage from a collection of papers entitled Resource Managers: North American And Australian Hunter-Gatherers, demonstrates (my emphasis):

Hunter-gatherer societies have frequently been characterized by what they lack. Is the absence of agriculture and animal husbandry a sufficient motive for defining a universal societal type? Is the absence of domesticated resources symptomatic of a string correlated syndrome of economic, social, and ideological patterns which invite the anthropologist's immediate recognition? Or does the term hunting-gathering throw together indiscriminately a welter of life ways?

Does the aggrandizing Indian of the Northwest Coast of North America resemble the Pintupi man of Australia's Western Desert less than the New Guinea Highlands swidden cultivator, for example, or the Bedouin pastoralist?...these authors lend support to the view that hunting-gathering exists only by virtue of the arbitrary imposition of a boundary where none exists in reality, a view widely held today by scholars concerned to explain the development of human society and economy...

Designations such as "simple" and "complex," and "immediate return" versus "delayed return," help us to make cross-cultural comparisons which are useful in understanding how societies develop and function. For example, cultures where wealth is stored in the form of cattle are going to be quite different than ones which keep no domesticated animals at all. And those cultures will share certain underlying similarities, despite their surface differences. Part of the reason for these terms is simply to have a common frame of reference, without which scholarship would be incoherent, if not impossible.

It's important to recognize that these categories were developed to help us understand the evolution of human societies (as stated in Johnson and Earle’s title), and not to pigeonhole every conceivable human society to a discrete, predictable category or rank them according to some universal, objective criteria of better or worse. What Is Politics? characterizes this depiction as "Strawmanthropology":

[19:00] “The reason that we create subsistence categories in anthropology—like foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, immediate return versus delayed return foragers—is because those subsistence practices tend to create conditions which have importance and specific consequences on culture and political structure and ideology and religion and all sorts of other things. For example, immediate-return foragers are almost always hyperegalitarian, while hunter-gatherers who focus primarily on fishing are usually very hierarchical.”

“And crucially to the authors' thesis questions about how we did we get stuck in hierarchy, having these kinds of categories helps you isolate the causes and patterns and similarities that you will find within those categories. What is it about nomadic pastoralism that always results in male dominance and cultures that have a lot of blood feuds and honor codes? Why are people in horticultural societies often so obsessed with accusing each other of witchcraft? Why is it that immediate return foragers never seem to care very much about witchcraft and they don't frequently get caught up in blood feuds?”

“We have a lot of very good answers to these types of questions. But you'll never learn anything about any of them from The Dawn of Everything.”

We know that the societies we live in today evolved out of earlier forms, just like we know that animals evolved out of earlier forms. This is beyond dispute. Categories help us to understand this process. We know that states exist, because most of us live in them today. But they did not spring into existence fully-formed—they clearly evolved out prior social relations and social forms, just like animal species don't spring into existence out of nowhere. Categories are tools which help us understand where they came from and how they developed over time. We now know that humans didn't evolve out a single, unitary species. But that doesn't mean that "humans have no origin," or that it's pointless to assign taxonomic categories to earlier hominids.

For example, we know that medieval France (an example of an ‘agrarian state’ in Earle and Johnson) developed out of earlier cultures which organized themselves tribally, as documented by the Romans. And we know that the Greeks and Romans themselves were once arranged into tribal confederations, as shown by cultural artifacts like the Roman gens and the Greek phyle. Many religious and cultural practices that had their roots in tribal organization persisted in these cultures for a long time after people no longer lived in anything resembling a tribal society.

Evolutionary stages were indeed a fixture of the earliest days of anthropology. The quintessential example is Lewis Henry Morgan's categorization of societies progressively evolving into more sophisticated forms: from "savagery" to "barbarism" to "civilization" (with various intermediate stages like "upper savagery" and "lower barbarism," etc.). This was a common nineteenth-century trope that was also adopted by Marxists trying to understand the history of economic development, both of whom were heavily influenced by the relatively new science of Darwinism.

But Darwinism today emphasizes adaptations to different conditions rather than any sort of end point or direction. "Fitness" simply means how well a given organism is able to exploit its surroundings, rather than any notion of better or worse, or superior and inferior. Similarly, the "ladder of progress" model has long been abandoned by anthropologists. No longer do anthropologists and historians write as if human societies were like holometabolous insects, starting out as eggs and metamorphosing into larvae and pupae, finally unfolding in the glorious imago of civilization; or that “primitive” cultures represent examples of arrested development. Similarly, anthropology has long since abandoned the notion that Western civilization represents any kind of "pinnacle" of social development, preferring to describe instead how diverse human cultures adapt to different circumstances, as What Is Politics? describes:

[25:08] “Modern social evolution theory is not about stages of progress from worse to better, or from simple to complex. It's about adaptation to conditions—a lot like biological evolution theory. And people don't talk about this anymore, but it's always been a staple of anthropology that the whole reason [why] humans have such extensive cultures in the first place is precisely to adapt to our environment and to our circumstances.”

“So cultural evolution could mean going from a simple social structure to a more complex one...but it could also mean becoming more simple, like going from a stratified agricultural society with hierarchy and specialization to a more egalitarian hunting and gathering society, which various societies have done...”

“Any lingering ideas of social complexity equating with progress fell apart when we realized, especially in the late 1970s, that moving from hunting and gathering to agriculture almost always resulted in going down the ladder in terms of quality of life. Mark Nathan Cohen found that most societies that adopted agriculture for the first time did so out of desperation. He was looking at archaeological evidence from the societies that first transitioned to agriculture, and [he found that] people's health measures decreased drastically after the transition. And Marvin Harris...found that every major increase in technological and social complexity was actually adopted out of desperation.”

Neither is there a claim in any of these anthropology texts of a direction for social evolution nor any kind of historical inevitability. The Davids seem to be arguing primarily with Big History authors here who are, by their own admission, offering a Cliffs Notes version of history for the casual reader, compressing thousands of years of evolution into a single, overarching narrative. That certainly makes it seem like there's an inevitable telos for human history (we do all live at least nominally under some sort of nation-state, after all), but it's not at all an accurate portrayal of current anthropological thought or social evolution theory.

Social Variation

What about the fact that social structures, as well as political institutions and religious practices, alternated in these societies as well? Doesn't the lack of any clear pattern imply that these must have been the result of self-conscious political decisions, i.e. choices? If they were caused by material conditions, then why do they look so different across cultures? Why were the Kwakiutl hierarchical during the winter, but the Inuit shared everything in their villages? Why were Inuit patriarchal in the summertime, whereas the Kwakiutl were more laid back with flattened hierarchies and less male dominance? Why did the Lakota "police" exist only during one part of the year and not at other times, not even to enforce punishment for murderers? How do we explain these wildly divergent patterns, if not though collective preference?

First, the obvious point: centralized authority is easier to impose when people are gathered together in one place than when people are dispersed. This explains why there was more centralized authority in Kwakiutl villages and during the Great Plains buffalo hunts than at other times. And, as we saw before, collective hunting requires a high degree of coordination in order to succeed, which is why certain groups in Great Plains tribes were empowered to impose discipline and punish offenders: if the hunt failed it might lead to catastrophe. It's also logical that social relations would be different when people are gathered together in one spot compared to when they are solitary. And it makes sense that religious practices would be different as well, since in traditional societies religion is primarily a tool for social cohesion and not a matter of individual belief.

During the long Arctic winter, it makes sense to huddle together in order to survive, hence the communitarian, sharing ethos in Inuit villages, which we also see in European peasant communities and Arctic communities to this day. Among the Pacific Northwest communities, by contrast, the climate is much more bountiful, opening up many more opportunities for status differentiation and aggrandizing behavior.

In the Pacific Northwest, fishing rocks could be owned by various families or clans. Some fishing rocks were more prolific than others, meaning that certain clans could become wealthier than others over time. Archaeologists know, for instance, that Kwakiutl society used to much more egalitarian in the past and that inequality in coastal societies increased over time.

More importantly, the milder climate and extensive trade networks of the Pacific Northwest produced much higher surpluses than the barren Arctic. Feasting is one avenue for aggrandizing men to attain power, which is a lot easier to do in societies with large surpluses, whereas this route is less available to men in the circumpolar regions or the big game hunters of the Great Plains. In the Arctic, anyone trying to hoard anything—especially food—would have been severely punished by the group. The Inuit also practiced a very different food procurement strategy than the Kwakiutl utilizing tools such as kayaks and harpoons owned and handled exclusively by men, which is why summer hunting bands were so highly patriarchal. And since the summer was spent exclusively with close family members among the Inuit, it's pretty easy to see why there was less extramarital sex going on.

All of which is to say that there are perfectly good materialist explanations as to why seasonal social structures looked so different between these various cultures. In other words, the reason they look so different is precisely because of material conditions, not in spite of them. The Davids never tell us exactly why their theories of "self-conscious political choices" and "bold experimentation" are a better explanation for these phenomena than the conventional explanations offered by mainstream anthropology.

As for the 40 percent figure cited previously (p. 108), it seems rather out of place in a book that mostly rejects quantitative methods for nearly 700 pages. It also seems awfully precise. Where does it come from? According to What Is Politics?, who read the whole of Mauss's text, the number appears to be made up. He also points out that the Nambikwara appear not to have lived in two different social modes after all. Two separate anthropologists who lived with the Nambikwara confirm that they do not live in different modes during the wet and dry seasons, nor did they in Claude Lévi-Strauss's time. Lévi-Strauss just happened to visit during an extended hunting expedition and never even visited a Nambikwara village:

…the ethnographic model developed on vacation trips among the Nambikwara by Claude Lévi-Strauss is taken as accurate. He in fact confessed in a footnote that he could not speak the Nambikwara language, nor could he secure the services of an interpreter. Instead, he was mainly reporting conclusions from conversations conducted in mime and a mixture of indigenous words with French and Portuguese terms. In fact, Lévi-Strauss’ field work has been shown to be shoddy and much of his description a projection of his own theories in separate research by Aspelin and Price near fifty years ago.

A False Dawn? A Review of The Dawn of Everything (Not Even Past)

In fact, contrary to the Davids' depiction of their work, both Mauss and Lowie attribute the different political structures seen in these societies to their material conditions!

I also question whether groups like the Lakota and the Cheyenne truly were moving back and forth between bands and states every single year. It relies on a simplistic Weberian definition of states as having a "monopoly on violence," and ignores a whole lot of other criteria about what actually constitutes a "state," which is a massive topic that has been discussed and debated by political scientists over the years. Peter Turchin raises the same objection:

To equate late summer congregations of the Cheyenne or the Lakota to complex stratified states does as much violence to data as equating a mammoth hut to a great pyramid. The social scale of such seasonal congregations of hunter-gatherers was a few thousand people. Complex large-scale societies organized as states, such as we find in Ancient Egypt, have populations counted in millions, tens of millions, and more. That’s a difference of 3-4 orders of magnitude.

States are also organized in a centralized fashion. There is a supreme ruler (a king, an emperor, or a president) at the top of deep vertical hierarchy with 4, 5, 6 and more levels of control. Even more importantly, states are characterized by a internally specialized governance. This means that we have people who specialize as administrators (the bureaucrats), others as military leaders (officers), yet other [sic] as ideological leaders (priests).

There was nothing like that in the Cheyenne society. Of all American Indian societies on the Great Plains, it was the Comanche who approached a politically centralized society the closest, but even they did not have a supreme leader (read the great book The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen for this fascinating story).

A monopoly on legitimate use of coercive force is also a huge stretch. Tribal police of the Plains Indians was a community-based force whose purpose was to control non-cooperators. In fact, small-scale societies can control the behavior of their members much more effectively (and oppressively) than the state’s police, as anybody who lived in a small village can attest.

An Anarchist View of Human Social Evolution (Cliodynamica)

Material conditions don't dictate absolutely everything about how any given society operates. Rather, they merely set the boundaries of what's possible and provide certain incentives. Within those boundaries, there is still a considerable degree of freedom for various social actors. However, material conditions often do tend to empower certain actors relative to others, and that explains a lot of the trends we see across cultures. In addition, people's thoughts and attitudes are shaped by their material circumstances, but they are not determined by them. The relationship is complex and multifaceted, but it's there.

By rejecting the materialist approach and attributing social structures to voluntary choices, randomness and collective deliberation, we eliminate some of the best tools we have which help us understand why hierarchy emerged in the first place. This makes it harder to effectively mitigate—or even reverse—existing dominance hierarchies. Similarly, rejecting the very concept of taxonomic classification of societies makes it harder to understand how societies develop and how they have transformed over time, all of which makes it harder to answer the very questions the Davids posed above.

It's true that there wasn't any overall direction towards inequality during the Ice Age as the paucity and intermittency of "royal" burials and built structures attests, and seasonal variation was probably a big reason for that. But there has been a trend for roughly the last five thousand years. So why do they ignore that and focus instead only on earlier periods of history? Why are all their examples either drawn from early or pre-neolithic archaeological sites or non-literate cultures? Entire swaths of the planet—the Near East, Europe, India, and China—are neglected after around 1800 BCE.

And the more recent examples they do cite for the rapid simplification of complex, hierarchical societies in the Americas can already be explained by the vast literature on collapse, including the effects of climate change, without positing some sort of mass political awakening or intellectual preference for egalitarianism. Did the people of Teotihaucan really choose to "walk away" from kings and hierarchy, or were the rulers simply not able to hold power anymore because of changing circumstances like droughts and crop failures? Were these social changes adaptations to practical conditions as much as the result of self-conscious deliberation?

Humans are indeed culturally flexible and “moral and social beings,” able to “negotiate between…alternatives,” (p. 118) and we always have been. But the Davids seem to think that just because material changes unfolded at a glacial pace and unevenly across cultures means that somehow they don't matter—in other words, that we have total freedom in all instances. I just don't think that's true. Nor do I think that people in the past continuously upended their social structures all the time for no apparent reason other than the desire to experiment stemming from the belief that "no social structure was fixed or immutable."

From everything I’ve read, traditional cultures tend to more conservative, in the original meaning of that term, than modern, secular, industrial societies. Since the late eighteenth century, there has been a huge shift in the perception of how societies ought to run, including the elimination of aristocracy, the establishment of democracy, written constitutions, the abolition of slavery, the decline of universal religions, and the enshrinement of commercial values above all others. I’m not aware of any such radical shifts in any of the societies the Davids describe in the book like the Inuit, Crow, Kwakiutl, Montagnais, or Nambikwara. Usually it is an existential threat from outside which causes rapid shifts in the social structure in traditional societies, as has been well-documented with Native American cultures such as the Comanche, for example.

And, starting in the nineteenth century, there were all sorts of radical experiments with alternative ways of living all over the world. Marx, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Fourier, Cabet, Owen, Morris, Bellamy—as well as a multitude of religious movements—envisioned, influenced, and sometimes even put into practice, alternative social arrangements, some of which exist to this day. Most of these attempts failed, and some were actively suppressed (such as the Paris Commune). Really, it’s really more of modern conceit to think of the social structure as malleable and something that we can alter according to our will, rather than something that’s been handed down to us for generations from our forefathers as it is in traditional societies. In fact, traditional cultures often have much less room for frivolous experimentation because their very survival is at stake.

So, based on this information, I don’t think our problems are down to a lack of ability to envision different social arrangements or an inexplicable “loss of political self-consciousness” (p. 115) as the Davids are describing. In reality, we've been more willing to experiment with our political and social structures over the last several centuries compared with most traditional societies around the world (even dual-mode ones), some of which have remained relatively unchanged since the Stone Age. If anything, we’ve altered our societies too quickly and too radically for many of us to keep up leading to anger, confusion and strife.

Conclusion

As I write this, many people where I live in Wisconsin are going to throw off the authoritarian corporate structures which normally govern their lives and head up north to hunt deer in men's clubs with flattened social hierarchies and governed by the values of friendship and camaraderie (also involving lots of beer drinking). During that time, the business of ordinary life will cease for several weeks. A month later, values will change once again to open-handed generosity as people freely exchange gifts with one another without expectation of return. People will spend time feasting together in extended family units during the fall and winter, self-consciously debating alternative social possibilities around the dinner table much in the manner of Iroquois statesmen or eighteenth century French philosophers.

In other words, we still live in a kind of "dual mode" system today, and we still have seasonal variations (as the Davids themselves acknowledge on page 115). But none of this means that we don't live under hierarchical state structures and industrial civilization. We don't transform into hunter-gatherers every November and back to states in December or January. To think so would be fundamental misunderstanding of how social evolution works, and I see shades of that in Graeber and Wengrow's analysis.

What bothers me most about all this is that I see a lot of giddy reviewers simply parroting the ideas in this book without any sort of criticism or pushback. For example, Cory Doctorow echoed the book's main themes in his enthusiastic review, but, being a science fiction writer, he doesn't have the relevant experience or background to question these ideas, and neither do a lot of other reviewers—for example, this one from Mashable.

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr @doctorow

What makes *Dawn* so powerful is that it rejects social inevitability, the fatalistic insistence that this is as good as it can get because of "human nature." *Dawn* shows that human nature is a matter of choice, and that we can - and have - chosen all manner of relations. 23/

I see lots of people online simply assuming that the Davids have proven, beyond any doubt, that social conditions are only ever a matter of "choice," and that material conditions, subsistence modes, climate, ecology, population size, population density, technology, intensification, resource use, economic arrangements, interdependence, cultural inertia, and all the rest, have no bearing on these things. That it's all been thoroughly and conclusively "debunked" once and for all. But, despite its other merits, the book does no such thing!

I think a lot of people got excited about about the book because of its message that other social and political arrangements are possible than the ones we have now. And that's absolutely true! During the past several decades of globalization and neoliberalism, there has indeed been a drastic and deliberate atrophying of our ability to envision alternative social arrangements due to the hegemony of economic thinking and the influence of economists, who act as high priests for the current order and insist that our existing economic and social arrangements are both natural and inevitable. If this book helps put an end to that way of thinking, then it has performed a valuable service.

But the problem with The Dawn of Everything is that it gives us the false hope that we can simply imagine our way to a better future, regardless of what material and economic circumstances we encounter, and I don't think that approach does us any favors. I feel like the book is popular not just for the breadth of its scholarship—which is outstanding—but because it's telling at least some of us what we want to hear. But sometimes being told what you want to hear is actually the worst thing for you, because in order to make positive changes you first have to live in reality, not fantasy.