(Bill Anderson's selected underlinings)
Or why this is not a book about the origins of inequality
Page 9:
Framing human history in this way -- which necessarily means assuming humanity once existed in an idyllic state, and that a specific point can be identified at which everything started to go wrong -- made it almost impossible to ask any of the questions we felt were genuinely interesting.
Page 21:
One of the most pernicious aspects of standard world-historical narratives is precisely that they dry everything up, reduce people to cardboard stereotypes, simplify the issues (are we inherently selfish and violent, or innately kind and co-operative?) in ways that themselves undermine, possible even destroy, or sense of human possibility. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the disocovery has been made, people continue to simplify.
One of the most pernicious aspects of standard world-historical narratives is precisely that they dry everything up, reduce people to cardboard stereotypes, simplify the issues (are we inherently selfish and violent, or innately kind and co-operative?) in ways that themselves undermine, possible even destroy, or sense of human possibility.
One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the disocovery has been made, people continue to simplify.
Page 22: from a section describing how precious objects moved long distances, for example, shells from the Gulf of Mexico transported to Ohio, narratives often take those facts to infer that "markets are universal" ...
All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about.
Page 23:
But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time.
The indigenous critique and the myth of progress
Page 47:
... at first neither -- not the colonists of New France, or their indigenous interlocutors -- had much to say about 'equality.' Rather, the argument was about liberty and mutual aid, or what might even be better called freedom and communism. ... There's a certain minimal, 'baseline' communism which applies to all societies; a feeling that if another person's needs are great enough ..., and the cost of meeting them is modest enough ..., then any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one's bitter enemies who would not be treated this way.
... at first neither -- not the colonists of New France, or their indigenous interlocutors -- had much to say about 'equality.' Rather, the argument was about liberty and mutual aid, or what might even be better called freedom and communism.
... There's a certain minimal, 'baseline' communism which applies to all societies; a feeling that if another person's needs are great enough ..., and the cost of meeting them is modest enough ..., then any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one's bitter enemies who would not be treated this way.
Page 50:
... a chapter on the subject of law, where Kandiaronk takes the position that European-style punitive law, like the religious doctrine of eternal damnation, is not necessitated by any inherent corruption of human nature, but rather by a form of social organization that encourages selfish and acquisitive behaviour.
Page 51:
In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, propery rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest.
Pages 60-61:
(A.R.J.) Turgot ... had been arguing ... for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. ... he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization. In this way, theories of social evolution -- now so familiar that we rarely dwell on their origins -- first came to be articulated in Europe as a direct response to the power of indigeneous critique. ... most indigeneous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values -- organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another ....
(A.R.J.) Turgot ... had been arguing ... for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. ... he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization.
In this way, theories of social evolution -- now so familiar that we rarely dwell on their origins -- first came to be articulated in Europe as a direct response to the power of indigeneous critique.
... most indigeneous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values -- organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another ....
Page 62:
Turgot's case reveals just how much those particular notions of civilization, evolution and progress -- which we've come to think of as the very core of Enlightenment thought -- are, in fact, relative latecomers to that critical tradtion.
Pages 66-67:
... the constant indigeneous exclamations of dismay to be found in those books: that Europeans just don't seem to care about each other; that they are 'neither generous nor kind'. In the (indigeneous) American view, the freedom of the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of 'baseline communism', since, after all, people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything, other than whatever it takes to stay alive. The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property. ... What's more, there was strong emphasis in ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one's direct control). Rousseau ... insisted, any ongoing human relationship, even one of mutual aid, is itself a restraint on liberty.
... the constant indigeneous exclamations of dismay to be found in those books: that Europeans just don't seem to care about each other; that they are 'neither generous nor kind'.
In the (indigeneous) American view, the freedom of the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of 'baseline communism', since, after all, people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything, other than whatever it takes to stay alive.
The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property. ... What's more, there was strong emphasis in ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one's direct control).
Rousseau ... insisted, any ongoing human relationship, even one of mutual aid, is itself a restraint on liberty.
Page 73:
What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they're actually more imaginative than we are?
In and out of chains: the protean possibilities of human politics
Page 81:
Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans.
Page 86:
... (Christopher Boehm) argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behavior, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way. This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one's society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another. In this sense, once could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as 'political animaals' -- since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge.
... (Christopher Boehm) argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behavior, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way.
This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one's society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another. In this sense, once could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as 'political animaals' -- since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge.
Page 111:
... it's worth pointing out .... the much deeper sillinessof the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with. You can't speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.
Pages 118-119:
Let us bid farewell to the 'childhood of Man' and acknowledge (as Levi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. ... They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.
(Not necessarily in that order)
Page 126:
So, as a first approximation, we can speak of an eglitarian society if (1) most people in a given society feel they really ought to be the same in some specific way, or ways, that are agreed to be particularly important; and (2) that ideal can be said to be largely achieved in practice.
Page 139 (Sahlins is Marshall Sahlins, author of 'The Original Affluent Society'):
It's not that Sahlins is suggesting that his own phrase 'original affluent society' is incorrect. Rather, he acknowledges that, just as there might have been many ways for free people to be free, there might have been more than just one way for (original) affluent societies to be affluent.
Page 143:
If anything was being stockpiled at Poverty Point, it may well have been knowledge: the intellectual propperty of rituals, vision quests, songs, dances and images.
Page 159:
To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that -- quite unlike free societies -- we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms. This is what the political scientist C.B. Macpherson meant by 'possessive individualism'.
Page 160:
... what the anthropologist Robert Lowie termed 'sacra' when he pointed out long ago that many of the most important forms of indigenous property were immaterial or incorporeal: magic formulae, stories, medical knowledge, the right to perform a certain dance, or stitch a certain pattern on one's mantle.