The Foundations of Primitive Thought (original) (raw)
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The Evolution and Development of Societies: The West and the Third World
Human history may be described and understood as the story of the change, evolution, development, and disappearance of human societies. Human societies across the vast expanse of human history go by different and various names: tribes, clans, chiefdoms, fiefdoms, kingdoms, empires and, currently, nation-states, which combine two disparate ideas: a cultural unit distinguished especially by a common language, and a territorial unit where sovereignty is exercised through power and coercion. Two issues appear: why is there such a diversity of 2 societies across the face of the earth, and why do societies diverge from each other as they develop over time.
Anthropology of Development (ANTH 212)
In this course, we divide the long history of development into 3 sections. First, we look to how the center of the world trade system shifted from Asia and the Mideast to Europe. It was not until the 16th century that it became clear that European powers were gaining the upper hand in the control of energy and resources around the world. This shift was accompanied by a flourishing of social sciences that explained European hegemony in terms of evolution and progress, as well as by a peculiar ethos that celebrated the accumulation of wealth. Second, an internationalist system was set in place after World War II that structured the flow of money and credit with the expressed purpose of encouraging economic growth in targeted countries. Finally, during the 1980s, development became characterized, on one hand, by a proliferation of networks of non-governmental organizations, and on the other, by concerns over humanitarian aid, local autonomy, the environment, health and security.
N.N. Kradin, A.V. Korotayev, D.M. Bondarenko, V. de Munck, and P.K. Wason (eds.). Alternatives of Social Evolution. Vladivostok: FEB RAS., 2000
It is often said that research on the formation of complex political organization is currently in a state of methodological deadlock. I cannot but agree with this opinion. But it seems to me, that it is possible to find a way out if we recognize that the state is not the universal form of political organization of post-primitive society. The "reverse effect" of such a step would also be theoretically significant. Primitiveness turns out not to be characterized by the absence of the state but by the local character of both social and political organization, of the human "picture of the Universe" and, indeed, of all of culture in the broadest sense. The end of the primitive framework is connected with the overcoming of a local orientation in all the subsystems of the socio-cultural organism, i.e. of the society. In the sphere of socio-political organization, this is marked by the appearance of supra-communal structures and institutions.
This book promises nothing less than to revolutionize our understanding of human history. Maybe more than a revolution, however, it is a revival of the quest for political alternatives that greatly concerned earlier generations of anthropologists but significantly lost thrust in recent decades. In this vein, the book revitalizes a once constitutive interest in the Other as a potential source of dissidence against taken-for-granted pillars of our political constitution and social life. The loss of interest in the Other as an inspiration for socio-political otherness occurred in at least temporal correlation with the rise of neoliberal dogma and, even if somewhat paradoxically, reinforced its core mantra: there is no alternative. This book is full of alternatives, and maybe it is no coincidence that its protagonist is a Native American called Kandiaronk-and thus a member of the community that inspired the visions of the hippie generation. In their book, the archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber are mainly concerned with alternative endings and twists to dominant narrations of human history. Popular elements of such narrations are agriculture and its presumed consequence in generating social hierarchies, the city as a hotbed of 'social complexity' to be tamed by means of bureaucracy, and the state as an inevitable outcome of agriculture and city life. The authors refute these popular assumptions with numerous examples from ancient history and relatively recent 'egalitarian' societies. With regard to agriculture, the authors convincingly show that not only did its practice not necessarily lead to sedentary life forms, but that it was sometimes abandoned altogether by societies that returned to more mobile forms of economy-all this in a context in which agriculture was often just one economic activity among others, and often not even the most articulate one. This leads the authors to conclude that classic classifications of societies along lines of 'hunter-gatherers', 'horticulturalists', 'pastoral nomads' etc. are anything but useful, because most societies are most of these for most of the time-often varying with the seasons. This prompts the authors to another highly important conclusion, namely that seasonality allows for political experimentation. This conclusion is developed in accordance with Marcel Mauss (1979 [1904-5]), who had already observed at the beginning of the twentieth century that the circumpolar Inuits had two political structures-a hierarchical one during the hunting season in summer, and a relatively egalitarian one