“Recognition of a past without people yielded a centuries-long ‘obsession’ with trying to find the essence of humanity in its supposed origins. More often than not this has taken the form of Western intellectuals projecting their own biases onto the deep past, usually to justify the violence and hierarchies of a world from which they benefit. Eighteenth-century political economy told the story of the progressively efficient use of resources: man ascended from hunter to shepherd to farmer, before realising his true potential as the self-interested merchant of commercial society. Today’s narratives flatter the aspiring coders and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley. For Yuval Noah Harari, the ‘march of civilisation’ has always been driven by the innovations of visionary technocratic elites.
“In the early 20th century Neanderthals were thought to be ancestors of humans: they ‘served as metonyms for colonial subjects, for Europeans of a past that had been overcome’. Today, the racial logic has been reversed. Some now view Neanderthals as a species of indigenous Europeans that was, in the words of the anthropologist Fred Smith, ‘demographically and genetically swamped by the African biological race of homo sapiens’ – an argument that fuels right-wing fears about migration and ‘white replacement’. The familiar lesson that Geroulanos draws from this and countless other examples is that speculations on the origins of humanity and the deep past always reveal more about their authors than their objects.
“The Invention of Prehistory is something of a departure: it deals with the past two centuries, not just postwar France, and is written for a general audience. But in other respects it might be thought of as the final instalment of an anti-humanist trilogy. Taking inspiration from the protagonists of his first two books, Geroulanos insists that our flawed ideas about prehistory both rely on and reproduce essentialist concepts of the human that prevent us from taking responsibility for the present, or from thinking about alternative futures.
“James Scott, in Against the Grain, questioned ‘the social will to sedentism’ – the idea that Neolithic nomads couldn’t wait to settle down, cultivate grain, obey laws and pay taxes – while David Graeber and David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything, recovered evidence that humanity has experimented with forms of collective life beyond the modern state or the primitive tribe. But for Geroulanos these authors all make the same mistake as Rousseau, conscripting early humans into a thoroughly modern debate: anarchism good, capitalist state bad. We should stop looking to people from the deep past for answers; we cannot know them and they are not ‘worthy of our love’. Better to accept that we live inescapably in our historical present, as ‘compound beings, webs of meaning, and cyborgs’.”
A review of The Invention of Prehistory
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