Displacing the State of Nature: A

Disagreement with Graeber and Wengrow

Desplazamiento del Estado de Naturaleza:
Un desacuerdo con Graeber y Wengrow

Graham Harman
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
Southern California Institute of Architecture
graham_harman@ [Link]

DOI: [Link]
Bajo Palabra. II Época. Nº32. Pgs: 109-122
Recibido: 18/11/2021
Aprobado: 20/06/2022

Abstract Resumen

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s El amanecer de todo, de David Grae-

The Dawn of Everything offers a salutary ber y David Wengrow, ofrece un saluda-
corrective to modern political theory, ble correctivo a la teoría política moder-
with its choice between two forms of na, con su elección entre dos formas del
the “state of nature”: Hobbes’s negative “estado de naturaleza”: La visión negativa
vision of bloodthirsty humans held in de Hobbes de seres humanos sedientos de
check only by the violent power of the sangre mantenidos a raya sólo por el poder
sovereign, and Rousseau’s apparently violento del soberano, y la visión aparente-
more positive vision of naturally equal mente más positiva de Rousseau de seres
humans corrupted by the introduction humanos naturalmente iguales corrompi-
of agriculture and metallurgy. However, dos por la introducción de la agricultura y
the alternative Graeber and Wengrow la metalurgia. Sin embargo, la alternativa
offer –a world of imaginative and experi- que ofrecen -un mundo de humanos ima-
mental humans freely choosing different ginativos y experimentales que eligen libre-
forms of society– excessively downplays mente diferentes formas de sociedad- resta
the political mediating role of non-hu- excesiva importancia al papel político me-
man things. This move, in turn, is overly diador de las cosas no humanas. Este mo-
dependent on a modernist ontology that vimiento, a su vez, depende excesivamente
opposes free human thought to mecha- de una ontología modernista que opone
nically deterministic things. Drawing on el pensamiento humano libre a las cosas
the insights of Actor-Network Theory mecánicamente deterministas. Basándose
in particular, this article argues for the en las ideas de la teoría del actor-red, este
central role of inanimate objects in the artículo defiende el papel central de los ob-
political sphere. jetos inanimados en la esfera política.
Keywords: David Graeber; David Palabras clave: David Graeber; David
Wengrow; Shirley Strum; Bruno Latour; Wengrow; Shirley Strum; Bruno Latour;
Peer Schouten; state of nature Peer Schouten; estado de naturaleza.

110 —
D
avid Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything was already
one of the most anticipated books of recent years, and public interest only
increased with Graeber’s unexpected death in 2020. 1 The subtitle of the
book, A New History of Humanity, rings with the sort of ambition that the reading
public loves, even in an era that likes to imagine that heroic aspirations are some-
how outdated. Although rich in examples and specific claims, the argument of this
526-page work is nonetheless fairly simple. Namely, the authors want us to con-
sider alternatives to the pillar of modern political theory: the notion that humans
in the so-called state of nature are either good or evil, with vastly different con-
ceptions of the role of government resulting from the choice one makes between
these competing narratives. (2 ff.) The “good” version of the state of the nature is
the one promulgated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and through him the work of Karl
Marx, Friedrich Engels, and most other figures on the modern Left. 2 As Graeber
and Wengrow summarize this view: “Once upon a time, the story goes, we were
hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands.”
(2) Through the intervention of agriculture and metallurgy, motivated in part by
excessive population growth, this primitive idyll was destroyed. What followed was
a process of urbanization and specialization that led in turn to “almost everything
bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bu-
reaucrats demanding that we spend much of our life filling in forms.” (2) As Grae-
ber and Wengrow note, popular writing is saturated with this Rousseauian outlook,
as in the frequently encountered proclamations that pre-civilized humans lived in
small groups of hunter-gatherers, or that everything was ruined by agriculture.
Unfortunately, those who oppose this outlook too often assert the opposite error,
the “evil” vision of the state of nature: “if not Rousseau, then Thomas Hobbes.” (2)
In the Hobbesian vision, humans are wild and bloody beasts: murderers, thieves, and
rapists to the core. 3 The only reason we have been able to surpass this awful human
nature is “largely due to exactly those repressive mechanisms that Rousseau was com-
plaining about: governments, courts, bureaucrats, police.” (3) In one respect Hobbes

1
 Graeber, David and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. (New York: Farrar,
Straus, & Giroux, 2021.) In the present article all page numbers in parentheses refer to this book.
2
 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality trans. D. Cress. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992);
Marx, Karl & Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. Tucker. (New York: Norton, 1978.)
3
 Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.)

— 111
can actually be viewed as the founder of liberalism, given that he seeks to depoliticize
the interior of society and reserve to the sovereign the right to combat other nations
in an international version of the state of nature. But his vision of human nature can
be linked with the modern Right just as easily as Rousseau can be associated with
the Left. If humans are naturally vicious and licentious predators, this might suggest
that we need to be fierce with our enemies, ruthless in our treatment of criminals,
cohesive in our patriotic and religious ceremonies, and strict in our sexual mores.
Along with Hobbes we might also add such thinkers as Niccolò Machiavelli and
Carl Schmitt. 4 In Schmitt’s words, for instance: “One could test all theories of state
and political ideas according to their anthropology and thereby classify these as to
whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose man to be by nature evil or
by nature good [… by their] answer to the question whether man is a dangerous
being or not, a risky or a harmless creature.” 5 The typical right-wing decision on this
issue is obviously the former. Humans are inherently dangerous for other humans,
and must be held in line by strict, even violent means.
Graeber and Wengrow reject both alternatives, on the grounds that the theories
of Rousseau and Hobbes “1. simply aren’t true; 2. have dire political implications; 3.
make the past needlessly dull.” (3) Initially, the first two of these reasons might seem
the most serious and hence the most worthy of our attention: after all, what could
be more important than truth and politics? But in many ways the third point is the
key to Graeber and Wengrow’s book: they are bored with the standard narratives
of modern political theory, and offer enough surprises to provide the reader with
as much entertainment as enlightenment. What reader could forget their hilarious
idea that precious shells spread over vast distances in North America were moved
not due to some sort of proto-market economy, but in part due to female gambling
habits? (22-24) In part, their book is an effort to capitalize on “evidence that has
accumulated in archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines; evidence that
points towards a completely new account of how human societies developed over
roughly the last 30,000 years.” (3-4) Those readers who –like me– are not profes-
sional archaeologists, anthropologists, or prehistorians will surely find much that is
new in these pages. In the wake of reading this volume, politics feels less like a tense
life-or-death exercise and more like a playground for various brainstorming forays.
There should be one sentence beginning “But what sort of new political theory
do Graeber and Wengrow intend. What sort of new political theory do Graeber
and Wengrow intend with their attempt at a new history of humanity? This is the
4
 Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, Second Edition, trans. R. Adams. (New York: Norton, 1992); Schmitt, Carl,
The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.)
5
 Schmitt, op. cit., p. 58.

112 —
question that drive the present article. As mentioned, the authors dismiss the usual
Left and Right political theories, each of them based on a different conception of
humans in the state of nature. Graeber and Wengrow replace such theories with a
model of humans as natural experimenters, able to try out and play with different
forms of culture and governance. A second key human feature for them, the abil-
ity to amass surplus goods that go beyond immediate needs, receives less detailed
treatment; they seem to regard it mostly as a springboard for tyrannical elites able
to control such surplus. (128) Yet their new variant on the homo ludens theme does
provide them with significant leeway for speculation in considering different mod-
els for how prehistory might have unfolded. 6
But by the same stroke, I will claim, they render themslves unable to escape the
same Hobbes/Rousseau dualism that they otherwise criticize. For even if we replace
the notion of good or evil humans with that of imaginative and playful ones, it is still
humans who remain at the center of the picture, and this still gives us just another
variant of modern political theory. The only way to escape the modern deadlock is
to give non-human entities a far greater role in political theory. Motivated by New
Materialism, Actor-Network Theory, and Object-Oriented Ontology, some efforts in
the directions of a politics of things have already been made: I am thinking for exam-
ple of contributions by S.S. Strum and Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Noortje Marres,
Peer Schouten, as well as in my own book on Latour’s political theory. 7 Graeber and
Wengrow, by constrant, are suspicious of granting any political role to things. They
treat such discussion warily, as if it were a matter of caving in to mechanisms that
channel or condition choice and experimentation, countering their wish to stress the
political imagination as the human feature par excellence.

The Creative Animal

Graeber and Wengrow are not the first on the contemporary Left to emphasize
the mostly unlocked powers of the human political imagination. For some years,

6
 Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, trans. R.F.C. Hull. (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1949.)
7
 See Strum, S.S. & Bruno Latour, “Redefining the Social Link: From Baboons to Humans,” Social Science Infor-
mation, 26.4 (1987), pp. 783-802; Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010); Harman, Graham, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political. (London: Pluto,
2014); Marres, Noortje, Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Schouten, Peer, “The Materiality of State Failure: Social Contract Theory, Infras-
tructure and Governmental Power in Congo,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41.3 (June 2013),
pp. 553-574.

— 113
the usual refrain that capitalism is evil has been accompanied by the complaint that
capitalism is a bore. This is easy to understand, given the way in which “capital-
ism plus liberal democracy” has assumed a near-monopoly state in public political
reflection. Given this atmosphere, Slavoj Žižek has become fond of quoting Fre-
dric Jameson’s words: “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of
the world than the end of capitalism.” 8 Matthew Beaumont has traced the initial
inspiration for this remark to some comments by H. Bruce Franklin about Jean
Baudrillard; in any case, Žižek repeats the phrase so frequently that he is often
wrongly identified as its author. 9 The late Mark Fisher took it as the premise for his
widely read Capitalist Realism. 10 This call for imagination feeds, in turn, into the
notion that all political transformation takes is the will to do so. As Peter Hallward
puts it: “By ‘will of the people’ I mean a deliberate, emancipatory and inclusive
process of collective self-determination.” 11 Even Catherine Malabou, whose work
generally emphasizes the reality of brain structure against untrammelled claims to
free will, has taken a sharp turn towards political voluntarism unconstrained by
outside forces. 12
This recent stress on the naked political imagination, unconstrained by non-hu-
man forces, is also the keynote sounded by Graeber and Wengrow. As mentioned,
they see both sides of the political spectrum as stuck in the same rut: “At the time
of the American Revolution, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ themselves did not yet
exist. A product of the decade immediately following, they originally referred to
the respective seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French
National Assembly of 1789.” (69) Viewed in this context, “Rousseau did in fact
write the founding document of the left as an intellectual project.” (69) While they
find Rousseau innocent of promulgating the myth of the “noble savage,” they find
him guilty in the case of the “stupid savage,” joining Pierre Clastres in arguing that
so-called simple peoples are “actually more imaginative than we are.” 13 (73) They
8
 Jameson, Fredric, The Seeds of Time, p. xii. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.)
9
 Beaumont, Matthew, “Imagining the End Times: Ideology, the Contemporary Disaster Movie, Contagion,” in
M. Flisfeder & L.P. Willis, L.P., eds., Žižek and Media Studies, pp. 79-89. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014); Franklin, H. Bruce. “What Are we to Make of Jean Baudrillard’s Apocalypse?”, Adventure Thru Inner
Space: Essays and Articles, 1979.
10
 Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009.)
11
 Hallward, Peter, “The Will of the People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism,” Radical Philosophy 155
(May/June 2009), pp. 17-29.
12
 Malabou, Catherine, “Le vide politique du réalisme contemporain,” in L’écho du réel, C. Crignon, W. Laforge,
& P. Nadrigny, eds., pp. 485-498. (Sesto San Giovanni, Italy: Mimesis, 2021.) For a critique of Malabou’s
position see Harman, Graham, “Malabou’s Political Critique of Speculative Realism,” Open Philosophy 4.1
(2021), pp. 94-105.
13
 Clastres, Pierre, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. (New York: Zone, 1987.)

114 —
soon cite another authority as their ally: “As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem
doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between ‘Hobbesian hawks
and Rousseauian doves’: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or
innately egalitarian.” 14 (85-86) The truth lies elsewhere, they hold. For in fact, “the
very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political
actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements
[…]” (86) Humans are imaginative and interesting. By contrast, Graeber and Wen-
grow claim in an eye-opening lament: “Social science has been largely a study of the
ways in which human beings are not free: the way that our actions might be said
to be determined by forces beyond our control.” (498) As a result, “these days we
can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from
smaller to larger cages.” (514)
Graeber and Wengrow do not fall into the trap of romanticizing non-Western
peoples. They dutifully record instances of slavery, mass executions, and raids de-
voted to kidnapping and rape among various prehistoric and even historic units.
But what they admire in such societies is a flexibility that we today can scarcely
imagine. They give several examples of large cities that were either used only inter-
mittently, or which seem to have been voluntarily abandoned after centuries of use.
One of their go-to examples is the now well-known phenomenon of “seasonality,”
in which a given society is able to flip between authoritarian and democratic struc-
tures at different times of year. There is also the topsy-turvy experience of inverted
social order known from many festivals: “Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of
older patterns of seasonal variation— but, for the last few thousand years of human
history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political
self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility. The first kings may well
have been play kings.” (117) But somehow, we got stuck with real kings. (115, 519)
Their vision of this transition is grisly enough: “Play kings cease to be play kings
precisely when they start killing people: which perhaps also helps to explain the
excesses of ritually sanctioned violence that so often ensued during transitions from
one state to the other.” (505)
Another token of the human political imagination can be seen in the contrar-
ian political force known as “schismogenesis,” (56-58) a term borowed by Grae-
ber and Wengrow from Gregory Bateson. 15 This refers to a process of conscious
cultural differentiation from one’s neighbors: “after the end of the last Ice Age,
the archaeological record is increasingly characterized by ‘culture areas’: that is,
14
 Boehm, Christopher, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999.)
15
 Bateson, Gregory, “Cultural Contact and Schismogenesis,” Man 35, pp. 178-183.

— 115
localized populations with their own characteristic styles of clothing, cooking and
architecture; and no doubt also their own stories about the origin of the universe,
rules for the marriage of cousins, and so forth.” (166) This fits well with the idea
of Marcel Mauss that “[c]ultures [are], effectively, structures of refusal. Chinese
are people who use chopsticks, but not knives and forks; Thai are people who use
spoons, but not chopsticks…” 16 (174) Along with the classic example of Athens
and Sparta (180) –one might also think of the United States and Soviet Union dur-
ing the Cold War– Graeber and Wengrow enter at length into the striking cultural
differences between the natives of northern California (characterized by an almost
Protestant spirit of self-discipline and the accrual of wealth) and their neighbors
in the Pacific Northwest (a militaristic slave-culture devoted to boastful speeches,
human sacrifice, and extravagant displays of wealth). (504) There is also the more
general example of how urban grain states and pastoral barbarian hordes remained
“dark twins” for thousands of years, as exemplified in the history of China. (445)
By showing a negative dependence of cultures on each other, the authors verge on
a theory of politics as trapped in a human echo chamber, much like the anti-realist
meditations of René Girard. 17 They extend this idea into an interesting meditation
on the strange ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan, which they interpret as having
reversed direction from an expansionist centralized state into a conscious utopian
political experiment around the year 300 A.D., marked by lavish public housing
provided to all residents. (332)
The intellectual jackpot that Graeber and Wengrow think they have struck
by stressing both individual imagination and cultural schismogenesis is to have
freed themselves from what they see as a perilous use of environment to explain
all cultural and political history. They happily report the findings of Mauss that
only about forty percent of Inuit culture could be explained by environmen-
tal factors; other nearby peoples had very different forms of social organization.
(108) They reject Clark Wissler’s early attempt to trace Pacific Northwest slavery
to their fish-based diet, by contrast with the acorn-gathering norms of northern
California. 18 (177) They even go so far as to say that “the idea of classifying hu-
man societies by ‘modes of subsistence’ looks decidely naïve.” (188-189) Instead,
“the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always,
at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way
to live.” (203) Yuval Harari’s argument that wheat domesticated humans, rather
16
 See Graeber, David, “Culture as Creative Refusal,” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 31.2 (Autumn 2013),
pp. 1-19.
17
 Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.)
18
 Wissler, Clark, The American Indian. (New York: Douglas C. McMurtrie, 1922.)

116 —
than the reverse, would fit nicely in an Actor-Network Theory context, given the
ANT proclivity for seeing the human-object relation as symmetrical. 19 But Grae-
ber and Wengrow dismiss this effort at symmetry as just another Rousseauian
tale, as just another version of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden: a strange
claim, given Harari’s reversal of the anthropocentrism found in both. (231) They
insist that rather than agriculture being encouraged by environmental or demo-
graphic concerns, it was a consciously “playful” process. (241) If we do not leave
everything in the hands of inventive and politically self-conscious humans, they
worry, we will be trapped in such deterministic discourses as optimal pathway
theory (204) or even a structuralism or post-structuralism in which “language
speaks us.” (205)
I am generally opposed to calling those with whom one disagrees “naïve.” But
since Graeber and Wengrow have already used that term for their opponents, it
seems fitting here to say that they have what looks like a “naïve” commitment to
modernist ontology. On one side we have creative human beings, limited by noth-
ing but their own imaginative horizons. On the other we have “the world,” working
according to deterministic clockwork and therefore totally incompatible with the
basic conditions of political life. It is not specified where animals fall in this duality,
but modern philosophy generally assigns them to the “world” side of the divide,
making humans a more or less miraculous singularity in an otherwise cold uni-
verse of unreakable mechanical law. This makes human decisions, especially polit-
ical decisions made after considered collective debate, a source of utter ontological
novelty. That is the background ontology of Graeber and Wengrow’s book. It is the
sort of unreflective modernism attacked by Latour, and which I have re-christened
with the term “onto-taxonomy,” referring to the notion that the universe contains
only two basic kinds of things: (1) human beings, and (2) everything else. 20 This
comes through in their rather Kantian worry about people and things becoming
interchangeable, which they see as lying at the basis of debt, servitude, and bureau-
cracy. (426-427) Interestingly, Graeber and Wengrow’s hostility toward the role
of things in history also makes them suspicious of the idea of sudden revolutions
that one normally associates with Left standpoints like theirs. Contra Rousseau,
the shift from foraging to agriculture was by no means sudden; for 3,000 years,
19
 Harari, Yuval, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, p. 80. (London: Harville Secker, 2014); on Actor-Ne-
twork Theory see Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013.)
20
 Harman, Graham, Dante’s Broken Hammer: The Ethics, Aesthetics, and Metaphysics of Love, p. 237. (London:
Repeater, 2016); Harman, Graham, “The Only Exit From Modern Philosophy,” Open Philosophy 3 (2020), pp.
132-146; Young, Niki, “Only Two Peas in a Pod: On the Overcoming of Ontological Taxonomies,” Symposia
Melitensia 17 (2021), pp. 27-36.

— 117
humans were “play-farming.” (248, 429) Although Rousseau famously links cereal
farming with violent war-waging aristocrats, this did not happen for some 5,000
years. (523) To focus the study of history on sudden revolutions, they worry, “is a
way of representing our species as decidedly less thoughtful, less creative, less free
than we actually turn out to have been.” (501) Against all usual patterns, Graeber
and Wengrow’s anthropocentrism also allies them with historical gradualism, or at
least with social oscillations having little in common with “progress.”

Thing Politics

The problem, we have seen, is that Graeber and Wengrow’s conception of history
empowers the human imagination at the cost of adopting something like a Sartrean
subject able to produce political reality ex nihilo using nothing but human creative
power. 21 The reason this happens is that they have a strong motivation to avoid
what they regard as the “determinism” that they see as entailed by non-human en-
tities. In this respect their argument is reminiscent of Raymond Williams’s critique
of Marshall McLuhan as a “technological determinist,” despite McLuhan making
plenty of allowance for humans to choose and change the media they inhabit. 22
Of course, this is not an all-or-nothing issue. Earlier I cited Schouten’s work on
the materiality of state failure in Congo. Are the ongoing problems really due to a
“failure of imagination” by the Congolese? Or perhaps we could blame the situa-
tion there on such abstractions as “Western colonialism” or even “neoliberalism”;
in the present intellectual climate there would be no shortage of applause for such
a maneuver, although this really just amounts to a new sort of determinism, one
aimed at the supposedly irredeemable corrupting force of Western civilization. 23
It is also worth mentioning Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, with its
powerful argument that we cannot just speak of a disembodied capitalism, since
a capitalism that traffics in oil entails very different structures than those of cot-
ton or spice. 24 Graeber and Wengrow’s reliance on “schismogenesis” as a purely
cultural differentiating force is often enlightening, but it cannot explain how the
acorn-gathering proclivities of indigenous northern Californians would differ from
an equally schismogenetic choice to rely on deer rather than acorns, both of them
21
 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. S. Richmond. New York: Washington Square Press, 2021.
22
 Williams, Raymond, Television: Technology and Cultural Form. (London: Routledge, 2004); Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.)
23
 Schouten, op. cit.
24
 Mitchell, Timothy, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. (London: Verso, 2013.)

118 —
equally opposed to the piscocentric culture of the Kwakiutl further to the north. To
choose one food source rather than another is to change one’s lifestyle, even if that
choice is at some point marked by free human innovation; in turn, that choice will
entail different infrastructural frameworks that will make the future of the culture
highly path-dependent, no matter how frequently Graeber and Wengrow say that
the record speaks of rapid shifts or “play” between one lifestyle and another. Stated
differently, to downplay the pressing and different realities that follow from fish-
based or acorn-based culture borders on the argument that “guns don’t kill people,
people do,” forgetting that a human with a gun is a different sort of creature from
a human with a bronze or (later) iron sword. 25
Whereas Graeber and Wengrow would rely on the modern conception of “free-
dom” as what distinguishes humans from other animals, Strum and Latour reach
a different conclusion. 26 It is baboons, not humans, who are constantly attentive
to shifting social conditions within their group. Human life, by contrast, is heavily
mediated by inanimate objects that stabilize identity, rather than identity emerg-
ing through the purely social form of schismogenesis. Our lives consist of fixed
residences, identification cards, wedding rings, and the various forms of private
property that Graeber and Wengrow (and not just they) convincingly link with
older forms of “the sacred.” (159) In principle, I as a resident of Los Angeles could
decide to sell my car and use public transportation instead, in an effort to reduce
the impending catastrophes of human carbon-dependence; in practice, this would
make my life nearly impossible without major changes in employment status and
standard of living. Graber and Wengrow’s account renders impossible any account
of what the archaeologist Christopher Witmore calls “anthropoiesis,” in which hu-
mans and their things can and do exchange properties, in a way not dissimilar from
that of metaphor. 27 To be a gun owner is not just to be a human who can freely
decide whether to shoot or not shoot an intruder, or to murder the employees and
customers of a supermarket: instead, the range of one’s choices is radically changed
by the human acquisition of lethal gun-qualities.

25
 Latour, Bruno, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, pp. 176-181. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999.)
26
 Strum & Latour, op. cit.
27
 Harman, Graham & Christopher Witmore, Objects Untimely: Conversations Between Archaeology and Ob-
ject-Oriented Ontology. (Cambridge, UK: Polity, forthcoming 2023.)

— 119
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