Things Fall Apart

I’m attracted to ancient civilizations and archaeology, but from armchair’s length. My latest reading combines archaeology, ecology, history, and politics. It has a curious and evocative title, Against the Grain. The writer, James C. Scott, claims his story is a “trespasser’s reconnaissance report” – perhaps all truly interdisciplinary work has this in common. Scott’s excuses for venturing far afield? Naivete and being surprised can yield insights when you correct your own misconceptions, and I daresay his broad interests come to fruition in this provocative little book. In Scott’s own words, it “creates no new knowledge of its own but aims, at its most ambitious, to ‘connect the dots’ of existing knowledge in ways that may be illuminating or suggestive.”

 

But first we need to know the old story. The commonly held view is that early ‘civilizations’ (and there’s a reason to question this term in Scott’s book) followed this sequence: “domestication of plants and animals led directly to sedentism… fixed-field agriculture…  villages… towns… formation of states.” As a political science, Scott’s expertise is in the changing nature of statehood, be they nation-states, city-states, town-states, horseback states; and the blurring of distinctions between these categories as they come together and fall apart. But perhaps ‘falling apart’ and the notion of civilization ‘collapse’ is a highly biased view of us urbanists, comfortable in our milieu.

 

Scott turns the story on its head. His interpretation of the archaeological and ecological evidence suggests that “sedentism long preceded evidence of domestication” and millennia pass before we see towns, walled cities, nation-states. Perhaps these are dynamically forced together and drift apart as conditions change: ecologically, socially, politically. Scott writes: “State and nonstate peoples, agriculturalists and foragers, ‘barbarians’ and ‘civilized’ are twins, both in reality and semiotically. Each member of the pair conjures up its partner… born together as twins.”

 

Where does the grain come in? Wild cereal grains were present and utilized by hunter-gatherers especially in wetland areas. Climate and ecological forces may have played a role in the conversion of the wild type to the domesticated type, but the latter is more fragile and requires constant care and supervision to yield its harvest. Scott cheekily suggests that domestication may be a two-way street. Human sedentism and self-domestication come together. (In a time of Covid, it’s hard not to see the effects of sedentism in large scale.) Provocatively, Scott also suggests that the domestication of mass produced cereal grains allows for the stratification of society and a basis for tax-collection! How else could a city-state or nation-state survive or even thrive? Scott’s agro-ecological story is very interesting, and I recommend reading his book for the full story.

 

There are many other interesting threads in his book: the role of fire (à la Wrangham), the drudgery of the lower classes (à la Industrial Revolution), zoonotic plagues (à la Covid), and why raiding and piracy quite naturally arise with urban-ish centers that concentrate resources. While most of the examples come from Scott’s focus on Mesopotamia, he shows analogies to early civilizations across the globe. I found chapter six, “Fragility of the Early State: Collapse as Disassembly” the most interesting, and plays to Scott’s strengths. The factors are myriad. The dynamics are interesting. I think there are lessons to be learned about climate change, ecocide, war, slavery, trade, and trying to avoid taxes. I find his take on ‘collapse’ intriguing. I’ll explain in a moment, but first some quotes from the chapter.

 

“Why deplore ‘collapse’ when the situation it depicts is most often the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments? One simple and not entirely superficial reason why collapse is deplored is that it deprives all those scholars and professionals… There are fewer important digs for archaeologists, fewer records and texts for historians, and fewer trinkets… to fill museum exhibits… one will search in vain for a portrayal of the obscure periods that followed them… Yet there is a strong case to be made that such ‘vacant’ periods represented a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare… The irregular cycles of aggregation and dispersal hark back to patterns of subsistence that predate the first appearance of states.”

 

As I study complexity and the origin of life, and therefore death, a similar dynamic comes into play. Things come together, things fall apart. Or in more neutral tones, assembly and dissembly – part and parcel of life and death. Over the years I’ve become more sympathetic to some version of Gaia hypotheses, that one can think of larger systems and structures as being organism-like. What we think of as life and biology, away from the constraints of reductionism, might teach us some new things as scientists exploring the ‘natural’ world. Or perhaps complexity and catastrophe are two sides of the same coin.

 

As I prepare for a semester discussing thermodynamics and equilibrium, and that strange concept called entropy that might arise because of our closed thermodynamic models, perhaps my students and I will be illuminated with some new ideas, maybe even ones that go against the grain and supplant some old ideas. Things fall apart. And they come together again.

 

P.S. Reading this book also made me want to play Origins again!