“Laying the foundations for a new history of the world. This is the ambitious task — mad, their conservative opponents will say — that the American anthropologist and economist David Graeber (1961-2020) set themselves before the untimely death of this figure of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the British archaeologist David Wengrow (born in 1972). Nothing less than Native American, Quebec, feminine and libertarian bases!
Graeber and Wengrow point out, in their monumental work In the beginning was…, translated from English by Élise Roy, that they not only aim to “present a revisited version of history”, but also “a new historical science”. They wonder why “the problem of ‘inequalities’” in our societies “has acquired such importance”.
Since prehistoric times, human beings have, the authors recall, “lived 95% of their evolutionary past organized in very small groups of hunter-gatherers”. Graeber and Wengrow examine “whether the invention of agriculture and the birth of cities”, with, they add, “the emergence of the ‘state'”, did not “mark a plunge into a world of hierarchies and domination.
Our essayists are aware that in the XVIIIand century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau put forward the hypothesis that human progress would, in fact, be a regression in relation to the “state of nature”, an original anthropological situation, conducive to equality and freedom. But they judge that Rousseauism, too abstract and too idyllic, must be rectified by recent research in archeology and the history of textual sources.
They look to those who inspired Rousseau and other European philosophers to question Western socio-political ideas, those they dare to call “indigenous thinkers”. The authors are aware that the “vast majority” of historians doubt the authenticity of the words put on the lips of Aboriginal people by Western authors of the 17and and XVIIIand centuries.
The latter would have had, at best, according to the skeptical experts, a “tendency to project” on the Native people “pre-existing European ideas” and considered subversive on the Old Continent. But, as Graeber and Wengrow relate, “Kandiaronk, Wendat philosopher and political leader”, for example, influenced “the European salons of the Enlightenment” after having attended a salon that heralded this intellectual movement in “Montreal in the 1690s”.
Our essayists consider as authentic the words of Kandiaronk reported in 1703 by the French observer Louis-Armand de Lahontan. In his Memoirs of America northern (also 1703), Lahontan summarizes the ideas of Kandiaronk and other Amerindians on social equality, revolutionary remarks for Westerners: “They find it strange that some have more goods than others, and that those who have the least more are esteemed more than those who have less. »
Graeber and Wengrow make it clear that the social equality, self-evident in Kandiaronk’s mind and among his nation, extends to women, who even enjoy enviable matriarchal privileges. This differentiates the “Wendat and other Iroquoian-speaking peoples” from the European societies of that time. It is not surprising that our researchers salute the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994), who feminized the profession, which was too masculine in its object.
This scientist insisted on the autonomy of prehistoric women in the Neolithic societies of the Middle East and Europe. Cautious in their judgments, Graeber and Wengrow declare that “there was a lot of truth in Gimbutas’ work, even if she sometimes indulged in generalizations bordering on caricature”.
Following the example of this archaeologist, they rely on the rich material remains of a remote period, that of the indigenous civilization that lived around the disappeared city of Cahokia, which flourished between 1050 and 1350 AD, in the area where Saint Louis (Missouri) is now located. In the XVIIIand century, this area was part of New France, and a limited number of ancestors of Quebecers maintained socioeconomic relations there with the Amerindians, different from an occupation.
Graeber and Wengrow believe that in Cahokia, “the ideals expressed by a philosopher like Kandiaronk”, libertarian subjects, such as “the independence of women, had never ceased to be debated”, and “the general direction” of the society, “at any rate during the last three centuries before the European invasion, was explicitly anti-authoritarian”.
Libertarian archaeologists who prefer the trowel to politics will retort to skeptical conservatives that history sometimes has the right to be beautiful!
Excerpt from “In the Beginning Was…”