Anthropology once knew that human societies shifted between political forms by season — egalitarian bands part of the year, something close to a state the rest — and then it forgot. Claude Lévi-Strauss documented it. Marcel Mauss wrote a book about it. Robert Lowie described authority that rotated between clans. Then the bands-to-tribes-to-chiefdoms-to-states model took over and the knowledge went out of circulation. As Graeber and Wengrow put it, scholarship does not always advance (110). This is chapter 3 of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity for History of Anthropological Thought, in the Power Analysis hub.
Seasonality in Human Societies
Key Concepts
- Every society has its skeptics. Paul Radin’s point (96) is that non-conformists exist everywhere; what varies is tolerance for them. Many societies accommodated the eccentric who mumbled to himself most of the year — and might be called on to remake the society during a crisis (97–98).
- The Nambikwara shifted seasonally between foraging and farming (100) — not once, but as a rhythm. Lévi-Strauss documented it and the article was ignored, arriving just as the evolutionary-stages paradigm was hardening in the 1960s and 70s (101–102).
- The stage model ties economics to politics too tightly. Foragers to bands, pastoralists to tribes, horticulturalists to chiefdoms, agriculturalists to states — a correlation most intro textbooks still carry, and one worth resisting.
- Pastoralism often came after agriculture. Fully pastoralist societies are frequently possible only through trade with farmers, which inverts the sequence the ladder depends on.
- Two societies gave farming up. The builders of Stonehenge turned their backs on cereals and collected hazelnuts instead (105); the Crow abandoned cereal agriculture, redomesticated escaped Spanish horses, and went to buffalo. On the evolutionary account this should not happen.
- Ice Age burials were of anatomically unusual people (102–103) — which makes them poor evidence for hereditary hierarchy, since “it seems extremely unlikely that Paleolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs” (103). They are also frequently the only burials.
- The Crow ran a band/state amalgam. During the buffalo hunt certain clans held coercive police power; the rest of the year, egalitarian bands. And the authority rotated between clans season to season (109–110).
- Rotation is what limits abuse. If your boss this season answers to you next season, arbitrary orders become expensive.
- Clastres came closest and left seasonality out (115). He argued societies organized themselves against state formation — but omitting seasonality was, on this reading, the final nail in the coffin of the earlier tradition.
- The question changes. If inequality was always available and always reversible, the puzzle isn’t the origin of hierarchy. It’s how we got stuck (114) — locked into one arrangement, unable to shift back.
Radin, Beidelman, and the Tolerance for Eccentrics
Before seasonality, a prior point: people in every society think philosophically, converse, and argue. Paul Radin’s observation is that every society produces skeptics — people who don’t want to believe things, or who talk and think differently (96). What Radin found striking was how much tolerance so-called primitive societies extended to the non-conformist (97).
T.O. Beidelman pushed it further with the Nuer, and in The Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought. The anomalous individual — someone who looks a little strange, talks a little strange — might become a prophet or a leader at certain moments (97–98). Ignored most of the time, off mumbling to himself; then, during political crisis, called upon to remake society.
Modern industrial societies are not good at this. We are, as a rule, fairly mean about eccentricity — possibly improving, but not much. Hold onto the point, because it returns when we get to the burials.
Lévi-Strauss and a Mistranslated Title
Claude Lévi-Strauss may be the most famous anthropologist there has been, particularly in France. His radical claim was that people in societies Europeans called primitive or savage had equal mental capacities, could debate and converse, and that there was nothing distinctive about the modern mode of thought.
The book making that argument was translated into English as The Savage Mind (100), a title that works almost directly against what he was saying — a mistranslation of the French. A newer translation renders it Wild Thought, which is closer to the argument and simply better.
The relevant text here, though, is his article on the Nambikwara of the Brazilian Amazon. They moved seasonally — hunters and gatherers for a stretch, farmers for a stretch, and back (100). Despite Lévi-Strauss’s stature the article was largely ignored. One explanation is that he was a brilliant writer and thinker but not known for fieldwork, and had not spent long there. Graeber and Wengrow offer a better one: it appeared exactly as a new paradigm was consolidating around stages of social and political development (101–102), and a society whose chiefs could move it deliberately between forms had nowhere to sit in that scheme.
The Ladder That Won
The paradigm is still with us. Archaeology generally runs foraging, then pastoralism, then horticulture, then agriculture — and correlates each with a political form: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states. Anthropology has worked hard to strip out the language of progress, and does point out that foragers often had more leisure. But the stages persist, and so does the correlation.
Two objections are worth making. The term “tribe” carries meanings far outside anthropology and archaeology that make it a poor analytic category. And fully pastoralist societies frequently appear after agriculture, being possible only through trade with farmers — which puts a rung of the ladder out of order. Most intro textbooks still tie the economic and political columns together, and tie them too tightly. That includes the one currently in use.
This is the same construction traced at Hunters to Herders to Farmers, where the sequence turns out to have been invented to answer the Indigenous critique rather than discovered in evidence.
Who Was Buried in the Ice Age
Which brings the eccentrics back. The burials Graeber and Wengrow examine are of anatomically unusual people (102–103) — congenital dwarfism, unusual stature, various physical anomalies. In the text these include Il Principe, the Lady of Saint-Germain-de-la-Rivière, and the triple burial at Dolní Věstonice.
Archaeologists routinely read rich grave goods as evidence of heritable hierarchy, especially with a child’s burial: exotic objects imply inherited rather than achieved status. The pattern here will not carry that reading. As the book puts it, “It seems extremely unlikely that Paleolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs” (103).
There is a second problem with the hierarchy reading. This is not a case of some people buried with wealth and others buried plainly. These are frequently the only burials at all. Without a contrast class there is no stratification to observe. What there is instead is special treatment after death for anomalous individuals — perhaps, like the Nuer prophets, the eccentrics who mattered at particular moments.
Göbekli Tepe and Stonehenge: Monuments Without Farmers
The monumental architecture of the period points the same way. Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey is astonishingly old, elaborately built, and covered in remarkable animal carvings — and does not appear to have been built by farmers. It reads instead as seasonality in stone: people converging, accumulating, building, then dispersing again. (The site sits in the zone of the February 2023 earthquakes in southern Turkey and northern Syria; reports at the time indicated Göbekli Tepe itself was not damaged, though other significant archaeological sites in the area were affected.)
Graeber and Wengrow argue that the Ice Age sites with extraordinary burials or monumental architecture look like the Nambikwara — foraging much of the year, gathering into concentrated settlements at others (104). The builders were not agriculturalists. They were part-time farmers, part-time foragers, part-time residents of a settlement.
Stonehenge makes the point harder to dismiss. Its builders were not farmers, “or not in the usual sense.” They had been, and turned their backs on cultivating cereals in favor of collecting hazelnuts (105). They kept pigs and cattle and stopped planting the grain they had once planted. In the text they gather seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls. Whatever else that is, it is not regression — it is a choice, and it breaks the assumption that farming is a threshold you cross once.
The Crow, and Why Rotation Matters
Robert Lowie’s work on the Crow supplies the political version. Here too are former farmers who abandoned cereal agriculture — redomesticating escaped Spanish horses and becoming nomadic buffalo hunters. Two cases within a few pages of people who tried farming and declined it.
The organization is the striking part. During the buffalo hunt certain clans held near-absolute coercive authority, functioning as a police force with something close to a monopoly on legitimate violence. The rest of the year the same people lived in egalitarian bands. And the authority rotated between clans from season to season and year to year (109). A society that is a band most of the year and a state for part of it makes no sense on a model where bands and states sit at opposite ends of a sequence (110).
Why rotation constrains power is easiest to see close to home. Suppose that every two weeks the class changed hands — someone else became the professor, and assigned the grades, and in two weeks it would be your turn again. How would anyone behave during their fortnight in charge? Nobody hands out arbitrary orders when they know the person receiving them will be issuing the grades shortly. If your boss this season works for you next season, abuse becomes expensive. Temporary, rotating authority does not calcify.
How the Knowledge Was Lost
None of this was obscure in early twentieth-century anthropology. Marcel Mauss wrote Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo. For Lévi-Strauss and his contemporaries, seasonal variation in social structure was an assumption rather than a thesis; what he added was to extend it into political life (106–107).
Then the neo-evolutionist model arrived and the assumption went. Graeber and Wengrow’s claim is blunt: scholarship does not always advance (110). A more sophisticated understanding of political variability was traded for a simpler and more linear one. And although the bands-to-states model plainly does not fit the evidence, no alternative has been proposed (111) — which is a real difficulty. You can tell students these are points on a continuum, that groups move back and forth, that individuals cross between them and trade constantly (112–114). What you cannot do is hand them a replacement.
Part of the reason is that seasonality is confusing (114). A society that is egalitarian in summer and hierarchical in winter resists the question “what is it?” The ambiguity is uncomfortable, and a single essential form per society is easier to teach.
Clastres and the Missing Piece
Pierre Clastres came closest to recovering it. Society Against the State (115) argues that many societies were not pre-state or proto-state but actively organized to prevent anyone accumulating permanent power. Clastres was expelled from the research group around Lévi-Strauss — officially, the story goes, for unauthorized use of official stationery; actually, for being an anarchist.
He knew the seasonality literature. He knew Lowie on the Crow and Lévi-Strauss on the Nambikwara. And he left seasonality out, which Graeber and Wengrow call the final nail in the coffin of the earlier tradition. Had he kept it, his argument would have been stronger: societies that experienced Buffalo Police for one season each year knew exactly what concentrated power looked like. Their refusal to make it permanent was not innocence. It was a judgment made from experience.
What Survives: Seasonality in Our Own Lives
Traces remain (115). The Christmas season arrives and companies inform us that kinship now matters more than anything, and that we should express it through purchases. Students still experience the school year as hierarchy and summer as freedom — though that may be eroding, as summers fill with jobs more hierarchical than school, and with research, internships, and getting ahead.
The other survival is ritual (116). Some rituals impose order: at a wedding or a funeral everyone sits in an assigned place and the family hierarchy is on display. Others overturn it — the reception after the wedding, the feast after the ceremony, where things go deliberately wild.
There is a very old argument about whether such festivals are safety valves that discharge pressure so ordinary hierarchy can resume, or genuine moments when the order is actually threatened (117). Graeber and Wengrow find the debate unenlightening. What matters about king-for-a-day, Mardi Gras, and inversions of every kind is that they preserve the capacity to imagine the social order otherwise — whether or not anyone acts on it.
The Carnival Parade of Political Forms
The chapter closes on human beings’ capacity to negotiate between alternatives (118) — to see them, discuss them, and choose. Against both the claim that people are naturally good and live in small egalitarian groups and the claim that people are naturally bad and require police, Graeber and Wengrow propose that no single form is human nature. What the record shows is a “carnival parade of political forms” (119).
Which reframes the question the whole discipline has been asking. Not the origin of inequality, since inequality appears in these societies in many forms. Not the origin of hierarchy, which was always one option among several. The question is how the alternation stopped — how nearly everyone ended up in similarly hierarchical state societies, permanently.
Chapter 3 ends by putting three candidates on the table. Was it agriculture? Was it settled life in cities and towns? Was it private property — fencing off your particular land and your particular things? Chapter 4 takes them up.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does seasonality mean in anthropology?
That some societies changed their social and political organization by season, not merely what they planted or hunted. The Nambikwara moved between foraging and farming (100); the Crow ran coercive police authority during the buffalo hunt and egalitarian bands the rest of the year (109). The organization itself alternated.
Why don’t Ice Age burials prove social hierarchy?
Two reasons (102–103). The people buried were disproportionately anatomically unusual — congenital dwarfism, unusual stature, visible anomalies — and a stratified elite that happened to consist largely of “hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs” is not plausible (103). And these are frequently the only burials, so there is no plainly-buried contrast group against which stratification could be read.
Did anyone ever give up farming?
Yes, twice within a few pages of this chapter. The builders of Stonehenge abandoned cereal cultivation for hazelnuts while keeping pigs and cattle (105). The Crow abandoned cereal agriculture, took up escaped Spanish horses, and became buffalo hunters. On the evolutionary stage model this is not supposed to be possible.
Why does rotating authority limit abuse of power?
Because the person under your authority this season holds it over you next season. Nobody issues arbitrary orders on those terms. The Crow rotated coercive power between clans season to season (109), which is precisely what stopped it from hardening into permanent hierarchy.
What is the “carnival parade of political forms”?
Graeber and Wengrow’s phrase for what the record actually shows (119): no single arrangement as human nature, but societies that tried everything and moved between arrangements deliberately. It replaces the question of where inequality came from with a harder one — how we got stuck (114).
Course Navigation
This class covers chapter 3 of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, for History of Anthropological Thought. Previous: Ice Age Societies. Next: Egalitarian Societies. The invention of the stage sequence is traced at Hunters to Herders to Farmers.