Two anthropologists, David Graeber and David Wengrow, offer an invitation to an intellectual feast: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, N.Y.). Unfortunately, David Graeber dies in 2020, shortly before publication.
The menu follows a semitic textual structure. In greek textual structure, a topic is covered systematically. Opinions are raised, examined then discarded. One possible explanation is left standing. In semitic textual structure, all sorts of literary tricks are used in order to raise awareness of possibilities that were hitherto neglected. Among these is the possibility that Thomas Hobbes and Jacques Rousseau, foundational thinkers for the modern era, were responding to indigenous critiques of late medieval and early modern European civilization. The people of the Eastern Woodlands of North America were losing everything and they were not impressed by the character of their conquerers.
But, did the indigeneous North Americans consciously manifest the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity? Or did these ideals somehow get explicitly abstracted for a European audience, who were obviously fascinated by these unfamiliar peoples?
These disturbing possibilities appear in the first layer, A:A', of a complicated semitic structure, which I identify as A:B:C:C':B':A'. Each layer is more perplexing than the previous layer. The second component of the top layer, C', corresponds to an unsettling possibility, at least for political scientists. Chapter 10 is titled, "Why the state has no origin."
These comments add value to Graeber and Wengrow's discussion by offering what these two anthropologists do not know. The masterworks, The Human Niche, An Archaeology of the Fall and How To Define the Word "Religion", touch base with many of the themes that these authors raise. But, they currently stand outside the scientific community. Why? They come from the strange discipline of semiotics, in the tradition of Charles S. Peirce. They use the category-based nested form in a synthetic technique, coupling association and implication. They re-articulate human evolution as adaptation into the niche of triadic relations. They propose that our current Lebenswelt is not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in. They propose that we project meaning, presence and message into our spoken words...
... including the word, "state".
... including the word, "domination".
Graeber and Wengrow invite the reader to an intellectual feast. These comments add meat to the menu.
