Cultures at the Dawn of Everything Ft. Andrew

finally finally finished Don't Have Everything by gradually. It took it took a while, you know, there was some points in time, some weeks it just went by way. I didn't even like make a dent um. You know, life got in the way and stuff. But I finally finally finished it and I get to talk voted and say, you know, with some authority that I've read dont of Everything. You know, yeah, it's a very dense book, but it was with it. I mean, there are some critiques that

I've been taking into by some authors in the field. UM, and so I highly recommend people look for critiques as well, not just you know, taking it to and consuming who will seal, but in addition to those critiques, like armed with those critiques, UM, such as by people like um, what is politics on YouTube? And also a couple of academic writers as well. I think you could get a lot out of the book, and I certainly have. Yeah,

this is it. This is a this is a very good book, and I'm excited to talk about it because I read it like it was a while ago. Now like it's like five months ago or something. Wow, talk about it. I've been like waiting for I've been trying. I've been I've been picking bits and pieces of it, but unfortunately my book list to get through is way too long at the moment, so I've not been able to actually dive fully into the text itself. Um, but it is definitely on my list after I get through

my twenty other books I need to read for my job. Yeah, it's a lot, it's a lot. Um. At least we got to read books for a living. It was something adjacent to that. Um. And I mean it is a difficult book. I would say to like discussing its entirety, and I didn't. I don't intend to not to read any preat or anything, Chris, but I don't tend to talk about the entire book, you know, because that's like several hundred pages, you know, and each chapter covers like

so so much UM. But I actually wanted to talk about chapter four in particular, UM, where the authors explore the concept and the origins in a sense of cultures UM in one particular set month. I mean, a lot of mysteries of the Upper Pelilithic that we don't know, right, I mean, that's why the mysteries UM. But you know, we've come to learn, you know, through the course of the book that this assumption that everything was just these small, tight knit bands, UM, and that was just the entirety

of the human social arrangement into the states. You know, at least it's new to the layman to realize that this is not necessarily the case, you know, UM, that there is a lot more political structural diversity in that time period. We don't know at that point in time, you know, what languages PEO who were speaking. You know. Of course, linguists have been able to like reconstruct like proto languages and stuff. And I mean, I'm just a

hobby Linquist, just like I'm a hobby everything else. But I think it's been really cool to see how I think was just able to do that, Like can we just take a second and to realize that, like linguist able to take scraps of existing languages and just kind of piece them together to get a sense of like

how they're related. Like how do you all do that? Um, there's a lots we don't know, right, We don't know about their language, don't know about their myths, you know, um, their conceptions of the soul, what their favorite foods were. You know, they ate, but we don't know what like

Joe Skeleton thoughts about his breakfast that morning. But what we do know is that you know, from the Swiss Alps to out Mongolia in the Upper Piolithic people were using a lot of the same tools, um, playing a lot of similar musical instruments, carving similar rather interesting female figurines, um,

wearing similar ornaments, and conducting similar funeral rites. And there's also reason to believe that people actually traveled a lot more than we would expect them to do, and tra actually traveled a lot good distances then we would expect for that time period. I mean, we don't have they didn't have rather you know, like cause or or chariots

or trains or plans or anything like that. So to think that these long distance um journeys were occurring, you know, places like Australia or in like North America is just

really interesting to think about. Yeah, I was one of your friend talked about Like one of the things I thought was really interesting about this is the way that they talk about culture areas where you have these like yeah, yeah, you have these like very large I mean like almost like like half continent sized areas where people are speaking similar languages, like the same language, and you have these like you have like these clan structures that are like

you know, you you you can go from like and go from like Missouri, and you can end up in like Mississippi, and you'll be in a place where they still have like you know, the sort of like four basic like plan lodges are still the same. You'll beat

people who are like from your clan. And he has this really interesting line about how like sort of kind of intuitively like the world's gotten like the world like even even when there was like people spread over geographic distance, like the world sort of got larger as technology progress and not sort of like smaller in the way that people sort of think about it, because like I don't know instead of there being these sort of like mega

like culture areas. You can go from one place to another and you'll there'll the people who speak the same language, and you can sort of slot into the like systems that are there. You suddenly have this incredible diversity of stuff right right, So I mean specific to like North America.

You know, Um, we had all these different clan structures we usually tend to think of, um, you know, these groups says and you know, especially like your immediate relations with people that you know, it's like close skin family, that kind of thing. Um. But there's actually, at least in some studies of un together as, there's some suggestion that their composition can be quite cosmopolitan. So you know, you have these these groups and biological relations might only

make up a small percentage of like total membership. They're actually drawn from a wide pool of individuals of a larger stretch of area. You know, not all of them

even speak necessarily the same first language. Um. This is YouTuber Indigenous sonics YouTuber named twin Rabbit, and he had this excellent, excellent video I need to rewatch it on planes Sign language, which is this um method of communication that Indigenous Americans um used across you know, the planes to conduct trade and diplomacy and discussions, even if they

didn't share the same language. UM. In Aboriginal Australia, people were able to travel halfway across the continent, moving across people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find you know, camps that had people of you know, their same to atomic mighty you know, and those people were we treated like their brothers and sisters, you know, so like no hanky panky, but you know they had this this you

know cross continental bond of like hospitality. From the Great Lakes, you know, the Louisiana Bayous, you can find settlements of people speaking entirely, entirely separate languages, unrelated to their own. And yet still you will find you know, bear clans or elk clans or beaver clans that were obliged to host and feed them, you know. UM. And we could only really guess as to like what kind of systems were like and how those systems might have worked for

years ago, you know, in the Upper Pyoithic. But what we do see with the you know, similarities and material um uniformities and stuff of these different tools and musical instruments and stuff suggests that there might be a bit of a similar system in place at that time. Roughly around like twelve, we see we start seeing like new pottery,

you know, getting dropped. We started to see the outlines of more specific cultures in specific areas, new stone grinding tools, new ways of preparing and eating wild grains and roots and other vegetables, um, Different ways of chopping, slicing, creating, grinding, super can train in boiling and store and smoking and

preserving meats, plant foods, and fish. And so when we start to see something that really brings people together, and that is cuisine and cuisine you know, being the birth of cuisine, being the booth of like really more specific cultures, um, you know, the kinds of soups and porridges and stews

and broths. And basically what they were talking about was the way that people who like wake up and eat fish stews every morning tend to you know, develop a different center themselves relation to their world compared people who might wake up in the morning and eat some porridge with like berries and wild oats, you know, and then from there they start to develop different tastes and in clothing you know, in in dancing and drugs and here styles.

I remember laster on the book um the David's points out that some addigenous um Nat American groups who are

actually known for specific hair styles. And I kind of knew that based on the fact that, you know, we tend to associate morehawks with people, you know, morehawkey air style, morehawk people, but I didn't realize that, you know, other groups also had their own kind of like culturally specific hair styles, right, And there's also like courtship rituals and forms of kinship and styles of rhetoric, and so of course you still have these large cultural areas in the Mesolithic,

larger than some nation states. But he's starting to see a bit more specificity, in a bit more diversity in shorter um spans of area. If we look at now, for example, where you know, we have in the Amazon all these different languages and cultures that co exist merely kilometers from each other. I think the overall trend um of human cultures, you know, over the past tens of

thousands of years, has been the opposite of marginalization. And it makes me think a bit about the whole concept of the nation states and how it tries to like bring people together to this like one narrow conception of what it means to be you know, X, y Z, and how humanity naturally seems to like resist that and

naturally seems to like split all from that. Like, even when you have situations with the forceful spread of English in you know, the Caribbean colonies, you still see like a diversity springing up with a bunch of different unique

creoles and dialects making the language something different. You know what, if not for the enforcement of language satinization through the school system, I think you would actually see an even more rapid um explosion of you know, linguistic diversity developing out of these creoles and dialects, you know, like a couple of centuries. So now you know, Patua and in Creole and British English maybe entirely incompatible. Even in Britain itself.

You know, you might have a case where London English and I don't know, Sussex English or whatever starts to sound like entirely different. And we already have that with accents. But just to see how, you know, even in short spaces of time, a short as a century or two, because for example, Trinidad, Um was not always an English

speaking colony. Um. We actually spoke French Creole for the most of our history, and only in the nineteenth century did we have that period of Anglicization where English was you know, brought in Um. And to see that in that short space of time, in that handful of centuries that you know not already has its own unique English

based creole, you know, it's just fascinating to see. Um. There's something real interesting to me about the way this process plays out because it's it's it's almost like because you have this sort of like like you have this period and it's the Mesolithic. All the period names are blinking out of my head. But like like what you say, yeah, like you have this period where you have kind of like you have a lot of cultural standardization, like spread across a long period, like a bunch of places, and

it's used sort of as a mutual aid thing. It allows people to travel because you can go to a place and know that like there will be people who are like you there and they will take care of you. And it's interesting to me. It's like, Okay, so this breaks apart as sort of like these these new cultures like a people develop local cultures around like food and around just like Graver has this thing that he loves

talking about. These were talking about for ages called scisspo genesis, which is like you have two people, you know, was like I think, I think there. His position apples like a few people who are arguing with each other and they like disagree minor ly over like one thing, and then by the end of the argument, like they're they've they've taken like completely mutually opposed identities to each other

based on like an incredibly minor disagreement. And you get this with yeah, like you get cultures to sort of like define themselves against each other and like they have things that they like and things that they don't like. It's interesting to me that that you see you see the state trying to sort of like reimpose the kind of like like forty year old cultural homogey on all of these places that are like incredibly not homogeous. But

they're doing it for like the opposite reason. They're doing it because they need senatorization in order to sort of like make their make their bureaucratic like systems work better and make their sort of like seeing like a stage. Yeah. Yeah, and also like like I mean, this is a huge thing.

Everyone in the in the like the early the late nineties and early two thousands thought that like the extent of capitalism on the around the globe was going to make everything exactly the same, there's only to be one culture,

and that like kind of really didn't happen. But there was this real sort of I don't know, like that there was this real sort of fear that that it wasn't just gonna be the nation state spreading like comoganization, but like capitalism was going to sort of like spread emoganization.

And I guess I guess the thing that they wound up doing aga instead was like figuring out that you could just sell everyone into their individual cultural niche, which to some extent, yeah, because like we see McDonald's in the US and McDonald's in Bangladesh and McDonald's in Japan, and they sell all of the same McDonald's stuff, but they've also like sort of specified to the you know, specific country. Yeah, we have the worst version. The US

is the worst version of it. By the day. The the the like Taiwan has one that has like they have like rice sticky rice, patties. It's it's so much better than Yeah. I mean, I will say that if I did end up traveling to Taiwan, McDonald's probably be the last place I would want to go. Yeah, we wanted beating there, and we we were we had to catch a plane, so we wound up eating like Taiwanese Donalds airport food because we had like five minutes. It was a you know they say about airplane food. Um,

but yeah, that's exactly us about to get into. Actually the whole idea of cultural differentiation, you know, um, and this this tendency of humans have to subdivide and to distinguish themselves from their neighbors. And I mean it's natural to assume that, you know, this differentiation comes from like differences and like language, you know, with you know, language splitting off over the centuries and people associating with the

native language and ethnicity. But I already tell the full story, you know, Like, for example, in northern California in the early century, the ethern linguistic map had really a jumble of languages that drew from entirely different language families. You know, it's distant from one another, as like Arabic and Tamil and Portuguese. And yet these groups still shared you know,

broad similarities. You know, how they went to board gathering and processing food, you know, their most important religious rituals, how they organized their political life. Um. And they also managed to keep themselves distinct. You know, you had the Iuroque and the Hoop and the Karak and so forth.

And I mean to some extent, these identities did map on to linguistic differences, but their neighbors who spoke different languages still had more in common with them than people who came from their same language family in another part of North America. Of course, you know, European colonization had like a severe impact on like how neat Americans were distributed. Um. But we still tend to see this trend of how like these modern nation states they went around at the

time to you know, or the population. And since these neat ethno linguistic groups. You know, this idea that the world should be divided into these like homogeneous units with their own history and everyone has a claim to like a certain territory and all that. It's mean, it's really a concept that is going onto this mythology of the nation state and you know, of course, we have to be real careful before we project those kind of uniformity is back in time. Yeah, it's definitely really like two

years old, like it's it's pretty young. Yeah, exactly exactly. But um, there are some concerns, you know, with the concept of culture areas, because that whole notion of culture areas came out of North American museums who wanted to arrange their stolen artifacts to illustrate their theories of the different stages of human adaptation, you know, like Colover's lower savagery and upper savagery and Lober lower barbarism and so on.

And so they had in whether they're in organize these artifacts based on like language, family, or regional clusters um or some sort of like traced history of of of regional of ancient migrations. Right. Eventually they realized that, you know, this way of organizing into regional clusters seem to work best.

The art and technology of different Eastern Woodlands tribes had some very similar um things in common compared to like trying to group people based on like say the Athabaskan language or all the people who relied on fishing, or all people cultivate to me is um and they were able to find similar patterns in the neolithic villages of Central Europe, you know, finding these regional clusters of domestic life and art and ritual and so like this whole

cultural area concept is kind of a way of pushing back against this way have you know, talking about humanistry

that like ranked populations into higher or lower anything. You know, this this idea of of claiming that you know, people were of a certain superior genetic stock and vicious sign ad fance level of technological evolution and so rather this, there's been there was a shift in anthropological focus to look at the diffusion of more cultural traits like ceramics and sweat lodges and you know, the treatment of young

men or certain sports um as. They wanted to try to understand how these different tribes of certain region came

to share this mesh of culture traits. So one of the people who were thinking on this you know, whole culture traits cluster idea um it was guy named bous Right, and he wanted to figure out why is that, Like geography seemed to define the circulation of ideas, you know, with like mountains and deserts from these natural barriers, and how basically the diffusion within those regions was basically historical accident, a legal hypothesizing that there was some sort of like

way to eventually develop a kind of a natural science developing how and even predicting the ebb and flow of styles, habits, and social forms, and eventually muscle Mouse pulls up, you know, and he's basically taught he basically, like right, a bunch of essays on nationalism and civilization, and he says, it's basically, this whole idea of cultural diffusion is nonsense because it's

based on a false assumption. And the false assumption is that the movement of people, technologies, and ideas is some sort of rarity, something unusual. Instead, Mouse argues that like, people in past times traveled even more than people do today, and it's just that when these people interact with people of other cultures and they see their cultural traits, they reflect on that and find a way to relate that

to their own cultures. Right, so that people who are traveling back then, obviously all of them, you know, we're aware of basketry, you know, or or or feather works or whatever the case may be that other people were using a couple of miles away seem to be said for like certain drum rhythms or certain you know, games, or like For example, he spent some time focusing on the distribution of the ball games around the Pacific Ocean, around the Pacific Rim from Japan's New Zealand to California,

and what he realized is that while the people pick up certain ideas certain traits from other cultures, comes down to how they'd want to be defined against their neighbors, against their closest neighbors. The question becomes less about why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn't. Because if you were aware of all the things that your neighbors and stuff are doing, all these foreign customs

and arts and technologies. I mean, we know that the Silk Road, for example, when we talk about the Silk Road, you know, we had a Silk roup growing from China all the way into Europe and all across the Silk Root, all across Central Asia and West Asia. And despite that constant you know, sharing of ideas, not every idea that you know came from China or came from Pussia, or I don't know if Pussia was around during the Silk Rude.

But you know what I'm saying, like, not every idea that was along the Silk roud everyone necessarily picked up on, even if it was a technology that might have benefited them, because cultures effectively structures of refusal. So for example, um,

there's this guy on YouTube Religion for Breakfast. He did a video recently on the pork taboo in certain cultures and certain religions, right, And one of the things he pointed out was that the taboo tends to be strengthened in times of like repression so for example, or in times of cultural um definition. So for example, he was pointing out that in the period of Roman conquest, the Jewish people were more inclined to define themselves as you know,

against the consumption of pork, compared to the Romans. You know, for example, the Chinese are the people who use chopsticks. You know, they don't use knives in four so you're the tie of people who use spoons and so on. You know, it could just you say it said that. You know, it's like aesthetics, like styles of art or music or TV man and of course those things won't differ, but even like technologies that have like an adaptive or utilitarian benefits might still be might it might still be

refused by people who might even benefit from them. For for for example, the Athabaskans in Alaska refused to use Inuit kayaks despite the fact that there are a lot better suited for the environment and their own boots, and the Inuit, for example, don't use Athabaskan snow shoes um at least in the time that Marster Mouse is writing. And then, of course this is a self conscious process, you know, this is a process where a debate and discussion of

all these different customs would have been occurring. You know, for example, pull in the Chinese courts, when different foreign styles and customs would you come into the lands, There will be debates and arguments put forward by you know, the kings and the advisors and their vassals, you know, discussing, you know, whether they would ride the horses or drive chariots, or adopt like the man chew dress codes and customs. And so society's mouth said lived by boring from each other.

But they define themselves by the refusal of boring than by its acceptance. The question of how culture areas form and how cultures split off is definitely a political one. The decision to adopt a certain form of agriculture, or to cultivate a certain crop more specifically, or to adopt

a certain style of dress. It's not just like a matter of like mere utility of maya or caloric advantage or material efficiency, or it's also a reflection and questioning of the values that that group of people holds or purport to hold, who they consider themselves to be. I like to think about the development of cultures, you know, I like to think about how our ancestors are, distant

ancestors even consider themselves. You know, it's easy to just fall into this trap because it's a very common cultural troop that you know, once you go before the invention of writing or whatever, all of all answers, tos are just like booga boogle cave men kind of thing. But to think of them as self conscious and politically um conscious, politically considerate, thoughtful actors, not you know, static or passive props um. It's just I think it's it's I think

it's just very cool. I think it's very cool, and I think we should keep you know, these developments, these this recognition in mind as we you know, in the modern time look to try to transform the cultures we live under and to try to develop new values, new values of like anti authority, nism and anti capitalism and of you know, agreed to priority on mutual aid and

on egalitarian and social relations. Yeah. I think there's a lot of very interesting political consequences of of thinking about this, because like I think that there there's sort of like two tendencies that that we sort of get stuck in when we think about like our social structures, which is there's there's there's one which is the sort of like I guess it's called capitalist realism, which is the assumption that like nothing else could possibly like this is the

only system that works, nothing else can possibly exist, and that's unproductive. And you know, you go back and you look at like any other culture or society and it's like, well, no, like there's there's like an unbelievable, like nearly infinite number

of ways you can organize your society. But then I think, I think the second one is that like, yeah, if you look at this sort of cultural fusion and culture refusal stuff, you see a lot of examples of people doing stuff that like under sort of like classical economic or like sociological laws, they shouldn't be doing right, Like, there there's no reason why you shouldn't using more efficient canoe if you're in a place of the part of

the world that's like extremely hard to surviving, right. And I think that there's this tendency to sort of like reduced culture, reduced just all of the ways that our social and political systems function to these sort of like oh, the the product of these like abstract historical forces and like it's all like tech, it's all determined by technology,

and like how you farm and stuff. It's just not true. Yeah, I mean, not to say, the material conditions on you know, very important in understanding UM, you know, how these cultures develop, and that's one part of UM. I don't have everything that I found was a bit lacking. I think that not all the time those thoughts were clearly connected. Oh,

i'd see. But I do think people put too much stock in solely material materialist um explanations and that kind of ends up precluding or leaving out the more messy human round of explanation. Yeah, And I think I think part of why this happens is that, like, it's much if you assume everyone is like behaving a quality to historical forces or like the thing that they're trying to do is like maximize um, they're trying to maximize their utility and they're trying to like maximize the amount of

calories they have. It that that's a very easy thing to like you like think about numerically, right, Like it's a very easy thing to refuse the numbers. It's extremely difficult to refuse the numbers, like to reduce to like reduce two numbers. A society that is like I'm going to I'm going to intentionally make my life harder for myself because this is the way we do things, and we've decided we don't want to do things like other people.

We've decided that we have some kind of political value that we have that makes it such that we're going to like induce difficulty into our lives and like that,

I don't know, like that that kind of stuff. The the fact that culture is not just a sort of like superstructure that gets that's like a product of like some kind of economic base like that that is very important and something that gets ignored or downplayed constantly that I think I don't know, and like I think, like, yeah, I think I think you can argue that everything like

maybe goes too far in the other direction. But I'm I'm sort of okay with that, just because we've been so far on the side of like everything is historical forces for so long that you need something to remind people that, like, societies make conscious political choices, and not only have they made conscious political choices for like tiens of thousands of years, like we also can make conscious political choices that are not just sort of like pure

reflections of like how are many tons of iron have been extracted? And like what percentage of like workers are currently working in hospitals versus like making cookies or something. Right, Thank you for that, oh analysis, Chris, I agree that that's a joke, Like twelve people will get I I love you if you if you understand that joke. Also, I'm sorry, yes, so you can wrap it up, Carson. Um,

all of this has been very fascinating. What what I've learned the most is that I need to finished reading all my books so that I can read the Dawn of Everything. Um, I know, I like, I like got it from my dad for Christmas, because um, because I knew that it would be uh, at least I think I did. My memory could be I could actually be wrong. I could have only intended to get it for my

dad for Christmas and forgotten to actually get it. But I've been reading it to have been meeting to both buy it for myself and get it for other people because I've heard a lot of interesting things about the book. So it is definitely on my list. It's been a pleasure listening to. Uh, you'll discuss it, um Andrew. Where can If people want to check out more of your

your work? Where could where could they go about that? Right? So, you can still find me on Twitter and underscore see and Drew when I'm not um hiding, And you could also find me on YouTube andrewism, YouTube dot com, slash andreism, where I post videos about all sort of stuff, random stuff. You know that I'm thinking about politics, history, Well that Jazz A few days ago, as the time of recording, UM Andrew put out a wonderful video on the solar

punk stuff. Um. I have no idea what this episode will air, so that it's probably been like a month or two or something, but definitely check out the Anderism channel. It's one of my favorite spots too. Uh watch something. When I feel like I can't put a new words on the page, I go watch your things because it's very helpful. M Yeah, so that doesn't for us today. You can find us that Twitter and on Twitter and

Instagram at Happened here pod Calls out Media. You can find me posting about hyper objects and liminal spaces at Hungry bow Tie And I heard that you have a Twitter, Chris. Yeah, it's at mc HR three. You can find me mostly complaining about other people who are doing communism wrong. I guess that most of what I post about. Love that for you. You two will be able to differentiate between the sixteen different for ecceitly, which there's not even sixteen.

There used to be long ago in a galaxy far far away, and made a decision, and that was that I was going to sacrifice my brain to understand the different kinds of Maoism and if too want to understand why it still exists in all twenty varieties of them, Yeah, go there. If you don't want to do that, do not. You'll be happier. Well, what a ringing endorsement. Uh, goodbye, everyone go. I don't know, should should we should we plug up? Pull at the other shows? Yeah, I guess

everyone's tune out at this point. I hope they've all stopped the podcast player. I think. I think, uh yes, go outside and be free there, I can you can you can edit that into something that is more concise. Sorry, Daniel Slash, I don't care. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. Well more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com Slash sources. Thanks for listening.