A    - Graeber, David and David Wengrow The dawn of everything (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, Conclusion). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Peculiar to man is the great variability of behavior in
regard to his relations to nature and to his fellow men.
.... Furthermore, so far as we can understand the actions of animals, there is no retrospective reasoning in regard to their actions. ... but the whole problem of causality and the question why certain things happen, are foreign to the animals and common to all mankind. In other words, human culture is differentiated from animal life by the power of reasoning, and, connected with it, by the use of language. Peculiar to man is also the evaluation of actions from ethical and aesthetic viewpoints.
(Boas 1938 [1911]: 163)

Choosing to describe history ... as a series of abrupt technological revolutions, each followed by long periods when we were prisoners of our own creations, has consequences. Ultimately it is a way of representing our species as decidely less thoughtful, less creative, less free than we actually turn out to have been.
(Graeber & Wengrow 2021: 501)

“[culture] does not unite people. On the contrary it is the arbitrariness of [culture]that makes them try to [produce something new] by forcing them to translate [while] also putting them in a community of intelligence (a paraphrase of Rancière [1991] 1999: 58).

1. From Boas to Graeber & Wengrow: using documented human achievements as arguments in an ongoing conversation about humanity, its past and possible futures.
2. Boas:
   1. Against evolutionism and for particularity
      1. the argument against is much easier to make than the argument for particularity which would lead, over the next century, to all sorts of difficulties that, almost caricaturely, lead to schools teachers attempting to teach
   2. Chapter 10: The interpretationS of culture (not the interpretation of cultureS)
      1. a challenge to reading Geertz.
   3. Chapter 12: The emotional associations of primitives

      (Dangerous! Do not use for exam purposes, particularly if assessed by anthropologists of my generation)

      Translating Boas and Benedict into Garfinkel (and back): A totally anachronistic account tracing some of the matters Boas uses for his demonstration (note that most of them are matters of "us" in the life of "others"):

      1. breaches of social etiquette (quotes from pp. 228ff).
         1. "The most cursory review of the history of costume shows that what was considered modest at one time has been immodest at other times."

         2. By the beginning of the 21st century many men do wear hats indoor--though the hats have changed from fedoras to baseball caps)

            To see a man wear a hat in company indoors nettles us: it is considered rude. To wear a hat in church or at a funeral would cause more vigorous resentment, on account of the greater emotional value of the feelings concerned."
         3. "most of our table manners are purely traditional, and cannot be given any adequate explanation. To smack one's lips is considered bad style, and may excite feelings of disgust; while among some Indian tribes it would be considered bad taste not to smack one's lips when invited to dinner, because it would suggest that the guest does not enjoy his meal."
         4. "our failure to use certain animals for food might easily appear as [a taboo] to an outsider. Supposing an individual accustomed to eating dogs should inquire among us for the reason why we do not eat dogs,"
         5. "Other examples [of taboos] are the numerous customs that had originally a religious or semi-religious aspect, and which are continued and explained by more or less certain utilitarian theories. Such are the customs relating to marriages in the incest group. While the extent of the incest group has undergone material changes,"

       

   4. and such matters as
      1. mourning (see Benedict (1932) on displays appropriate in funerals)

   5. Compare and contrast with Mauss on Techniques of the body ([1936])

      While Boas talks about emotions and "reaction to stimuli," the actual analyses are fundamentally interactional as he moves from writing about

      1. a setting for certain types of behaviors (streetcars, churches, formal dinners, cooking, marrying)
      2. a behavior in this setting ([not-]wearing certain clothes, [not-]smacking one's lips,[not-]serving certain foods,[not-]marrying)
      3. an assessment of this behavior that can consist another behavior
         1. various ways of noticing, sanctioning, explaining the behavior as NOT what it should have been
         2. nothing (that allows an observer that has observed the participants noticing to argue for a pattern or a habit]

      Culture may be defined as the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relation to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself and of each individual to himself. It also includes the products of these activities and their role in the life of the groups. . (Boas 1938 [1911]: 149)

      And while Boas insist, particularly at the beginning of the paper, that "all of us ... react ... without being able to express the reasons for our actions," much of the paper is about expressions of reactions, including "wrong" explanations given by "us" about behaviors that are not sanctioned here or there. That is the paper is an instance of meta-cultural discourse about other meta-cultural discourses. Thus, Boas is also writing about meta-cultural matters and about "consciousness," "re-cognition" and perhaps indeed about "collective consciousness" as expressed in assessments with consequences.

3. a century later: Graeber and Wengrow challenge to about everyone using general statements about humanity with little attention to actual evidence (scientific facts?) about what human beings have actually done as reported by historical or ethnographic research.
   1. against Rousseau for imagining humans to make a political point
   2. and of course against Marx and all those looking for "root causes" and thereby falling for determinism
   3. and thus the emphasis on
      1. multiplicity of solutions given any environment, technology, of history-so-far
      2. differentiation among related populations
         1. for example: challenging narratives of early agriculture (against Wittfogel 1957)
      3. meta-discourses (conversations, dialogue) about local futures ("intellectual")
         1. for example: quoting Lévi-Strauss on the local politics of the Nambikwara (p. 98ff)
         2. expansions: Varenne on the culturing that produced Corona as many epochs for various populations (July 22, 2020)