ENGL 3860: Full Circle

The dawn of everything
Full
Circle
ENGL 3860 | Nathaniel A. Rivers | saint Louis university | fall 2023

Portraying history as a story of material progress, that framework
recast indigenous critics as innocent children of nature, whose
views on freedom were a mere side effect of their uncultivated
way of life and could not possibly offer a serious challenge to
contemporary social thought (which came increasingly to mean just
European thought).
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 441

What evolution does not look like.

What evolution might look like.

Blinded by the ‘just so’ story of how human societies evolved, they
can’t even see half of what’s now before their eyes.
As a result, the same portrayers of world history who profess
themselves believers in freedom, democracy and women’s rights
continue to treat historical epochs of relative freedom, democracy
and women’s rights as so many ‘dark ages’. Similarly, as we’ve
seen, the concept of ‘civilization’ is still largely reserved for societies
whose defining characteristics include high-handed autocrats,
imperial conquests and the use of slave labour.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 442

The reason why these ways of thinking remain in place, no
matter how many times people point out their
incoherence, is precisely because we find it so difficult to
imagine history that isn’t teleological—that is, to
organize history in a way which does not imply that
current arrangements were somehow inevitable.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 449

Cahokia’s population peaked at something in the order of 15,000
people; then it abruptly dissolved. Whatever Cahokia represented in
the eyes of those under its sway, it seems to have ended up being
overwhelmingly and resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of
its people. For centuries after its demise the site where the city once
stood, and hundreds of miles of river valleys around it, lay entirely
devoid of human habitation
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 450

[W]hat we can say with some confidence is that the societies
encountered by European invaders from the sixteenth
century onwards were the product of centuries of political
conflict and self-conscious debate. They were, in many cases,
societies in which the ability to engage in self-conscious
political debate was itself considered one of the highest human
values.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 450

In Cahokia and its hinterland we can chart the
rise of social hierarchies through the lens of
chunkey, as the game became increasingly
monopolized by an exclusive elite. One sign
of this is how stone chunkey discs disappear
from ordinary burials, just as beautifully crafted
versions of them start to appear in the richest
graves. Chunkey was becoming a spectator
sport, and Cahokia the sponsor of a new
Illinois State Museum
regional, Mississippian elite.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 465

Whatever happened in
Cahokia, it appears to
have left extremely
The “Vacant Quarter,” Circa 1450
unpleasant memories.
The Vacant Quarter
implies a self-conscious
rejection of everything
the city of Cahokia stood
for.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 468-69

What we would now call social movements often
took the form of quite literal physical movements.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 469

[T]he Osage, who ascribed key roles to sacred
knowledge in their political affairs, in no sense saw
their social structure as something given from on high
but rather as a series of legal and intellectual
discoveries—even breakthroughs.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 480

What [t]his example demonstrates, we suggest, is that even within
indigenous society, the political question was never definitively
settled. Certainly, the overall direction, in the wake of Cahokia, was
a broad movement away from overlords of any sort and towards
constitutional structures carefully worked out to distribute power in
such a way that they would never return. But the possibility that
they might always lurked in the background. Other paradigms of
governance existed, and ambitious men—or women—could, if
occasion allowed, appeal to them.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 491

In other words, not only did indigenous North Americans
manage almost entirely to sidestep the evolutionary trap that
we assume must always lead, eventually, from agriculture to
the rise of some all-powerful state or empire; but in doing so
they developed political sensibilities that were ultimately to
have a deep influence on Enlightenment thinkers and,
through them, are still with us today.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 492