Books like ‘Sapiens’ mislead, says archaeologist – 06/02/2023 – Illustrious

[RESUMO] Author of ‘O Despertar de Tudo’, a sensational book about the history of mankind, British archaeologist David Wengrow says in an interview that other bestsellers on the same subject, such as “Sapiens”, by Yuval Noah Harari, are outdated and full of errors. He also argues that studies in the Amazon will play a fundamental role in understanding the origin of civilizations. Wengrow will give lectures in São Paulo and Porto Alegre in October, as part of the Fronteiras do Pensamento program.

British archaeologist David Wengrow, 50, had a fright when he was preparing to write his most recent book, “The Awakening of Everything”, an ambitious history of human societies produced in partnership with the American anthropologist David Graeber (who died in 2020, before before the work is released).

To see how the subject was being treated in works for the lay public, the two began to leaf through best-sellers such as “Sapiens”, by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, and did not like what they saw.

“What we noticed, to our horror, was that these books simply ignore what has been discovered in our fields of study, archeology and anthropology, over several generations,” he says.

With iconoclastic enthusiasm, “O Despertar de Tudo” seeks to demolish many of the premises of “Sapiens” and its predecessors.

According to the book, even before the invention of agriculture, there was already a lot of sociopolitical complexity and diversity among human beings; the first agricultural societies and the oldest cities had a relatively egalitarian and democratic organization, without the need for monarchs and high priests; and the European Enlightenment itself would have been inspired by the skepticism and egalitarianism of indigenous peoples in its criticism of the Old Regime.

Wengrow, who is coming to Brazil in October to participate in the Fronteiras do Pensamento conference cycle, told Sheet that recent archaeological studies in the Amazon will play a fundamental role in creating this new and more reliable picture of the origin of civilizations.

His book makes very strong criticisms of bestsellers that address similar themes, especially works such as “Sapiens”, by Yuval Harari, and “Guns, Germs and Steel”, by Jared Diamond. Mr. Do you think these books do a disservice to the reader who is beginning to learn about humanity’s deep past? The foundations upon which these books were written must be thrown away. So, so to speak, a kind of filtering exercise needs to happen, in which we are going to allow, for the first time, all this data, all this scientific information that has accumulated over the last few decades, finally to be used.

I mean, when David [Graeber] and I decided to write “The Awakening of Everything”, one of the things that motivated us was to look at the type of book you mentioned, which, for a long time, was the first stop for everyone who wanted to absorb a quick picture of history human.

And what we noticed, to our horror, was that these books simply ignore what has been discovered in our fields of study, archeology and anthropology, over several generations. That is, whatever you think of the general arguments of these works, the statistical methods or whatever, their approach is not a wonder. Not a good thing.

Nor is it necessarily their fault, because these authors are all excellent writers, but they come from other fields. [Steven] Pinker is, of course, a psychologist. I believe Harari specialized in medieval history. Diamond has a Ph.D. in physiology and is an ornithologist…

So it’s our fault. I mean, our job is to do archeology and anthropology. It’s our rice and beans, and it’s the fault of our disciplines that we’ve been so bad at explaining to people what we’ve been discovering, since it’s all locked away in these pay-access scientific journals or academic little conferences.

So we, in part, on a very simple level, just wanted to write something that would help people catch up, but that process, of course, also strips the foundations of some very old and familiar narratives about the course of human history.

And I think there’s no turning back. I mean, the rabbit is out of the hat. I could be wrong, but I can’t imagine we’ll ever see another bestseller in human history that begins by saying, “Once upon a time there was a world where we all lived in small, egalitarian bands. Then the Agricultural Revolution happened and everything went terribly wrong, and then cities and hierarchies appeared”. If we can get this over with, I’ll be pretty happy with the result.

I mean, we have other goals in the book, but I’m happy if we can get away with that. Based on the fact that, first, it’s not something the evidence supports, and, second, it’s boring, it’s something we’ve heard a million times already, and it has a number of interesting and quite serious policy implications, the which continue to be repeated but are essentially myths.

In the book, Messrs. criticize the comparison between great apes, such as chimpanzees, and early humans. Is there nothing valuable to learn from this comparison, in your opinion? Yeah, I remember the phrase you’re referring to. Maybe it’s not a case of taking it too seriously. We were just having a little fun with the reference. I think it’s in Harari’s book that there’s a description of possible types of hunter-gatherer societies, and he says something like “They could be as gentle as bonobos [espécie de chimpanzé considerada muito pacífica] or as aggressive as gorillas”.

It’s not just Harari who writes this sort of thing, of course, but one wonders why, when these authors tackle very ancient human societies, they end up talking about them in such a strange way, as if they weren’t real people.

I think there’s a lot to learn from comparing different species of primates and animals, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about in this passage. Our criticism concerns a lazy approach that, essentially, uses a kind of simplification to talk about primitive human societies, and that, in the end, ends up portraying them as if they were stupid.

The book discusses how native populations of the Amazon, such as the Nambikwara, were able to alternate between more mobile and more sedentary social organizations, more and less hierarchical, according to the time of year, and points out that this process may have very ancient roots. . At the same time, the work points out that the last decades of research have revealed evidence of extensive settlements, with a large population and monuments in the pre-Columbian Amazon. Was there any contradiction between the two things? Couldn’t the more flexible way of life of the Nambikwara and other groups be something “post-apocalyptic”, appearing only after the slaughter caused by the arrival of the Europeans? What we are discovering is that there is a history in this region. And it can be a story of contradictions and paradoxes. In the same way, this is what we see in the indigenous societies of North America, which, at some point over 600 years ago in the Mississippi River basin, were highly centered around this great ancient city known as Cahokia.

But, as we try to describe in the book, what Europeans discovered when they started to arrive in those areas, from the 16th century onwards, were completely different forms of society, which had left all that behind and perhaps defined itself by opposition or rejection to the that had existed before.

In the 1960s, a famous anthropologist named Pierre Clastres asked precisely this question about the Amazon: why is it that so many of these societies seem to be constituted in a way that almost anticipates the possibility of the State, or some kind of centralized authority, and this anticipation is something so vivid that they are capable of projecting their own society as a kind of negative image of the state. So where does this image come from?

In the 1960s, of course, people knew virtually nothing about all this new evidence that we’re getting lately, from remote sensing and all the work done in the Xingu River basin, among other things. But clearly there is a history of big cities there.

Personally, I don’t think we know enough yet to say how these centers were organized. But I don’t see this as a contradiction, but as evidence that there is a deep story there, which as yet we understand very little.

In any case, one thing we can say for sure is that this is something completely different from the way these societies have traditionally been imagined—as societies that have always done the same thing, living in a sort of natural state unchanged since the dawn of time.

And one of the reasons I’m so excited to visit Brazil this year is that I think it is perhaps one of the countries in the world where, despite all the political and economic upheavals, more progress is being made in fitting the evidence on the deep human past with the most recent anthropological and ethnohistorical studies, so that they begin to dialogue with each other.

This has the potential to transform not only our understanding of history, but also our understanding of the region’s ecology itself. There is, for example, the question of the so-called terra preta de Índio, which is this dark soil from the Amazon, very fertile, being understood as a soil produced by human beings.

This rewrites not only the social history of the region, but also that of environments that were considered simply natural, and are not. I believe that Brazil, in many ways, is leading the way in this type of research.

Does all this mean that, overall, perhaps conditions in the Americas made it easier for populations to resist the processes of control and hierarchy that spawned states and empires than in Eurasia, for example? I think a lot depends on the specific place you look at. We don’t try to romanticize the Americas. This applies not only to the great empires, such as the Aztecs and Incas, but also to smaller societies that practiced enslavement and lived through endemic wars, among other ills.

What you mention fits better, for example, with certain groups encountered by French settlers and Jesuit missionaries in what anthropologists call the Eastern Forests of North America. These societies, in fact, seem to have had a system of rights for women and forms of participatory democracy that impressed many European observers.

What we argue is that these characteristics are not present because these peoples lived in the Americas, but because they went through a history of hierarchies against which they turned and then produced something different. So it’s a matter of specific groups, specific histories and a specific point in time at which these civilizations collided.

To what extent does this make it futile to try to find factors that explain why European states ended up acting as a steamroller against native populations in the Americas, Oceania and elsewhere? Victims of these lawsuits had no problem identifying how this lawsuit happened. In part, of course, it had something to do with the spread of infectious disease, but what played an equally or even more important role was organized violence and, in many cases, calculated genocide.

I think part of the problem with narratives like the one that made Jared Diamond famous in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is that they sublimate a good deal of that violence.

When books like his tell us that the historical processes of the last 500 years are really just the natural culmination of the last 5,000 years, the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution in the Middle East 10,000 years ago, you end up creating what, to us, , is a false perspective on human history—one that has the unfortunate effect of naturalizing much of this much more modern violence.