What exactly is political freedom?

In their jointly written book “Beginnings.

A new history of mankind" answer the ethnologist David Graeber, who died last year, and the archaeologist David Wengrow to this great question by distinguishing three complementary basic forms: "the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey orders, and the Freedom to reorganize social relations".

With its claim to reveal an egalitarian alternative to the history of civilization in the context of hierarchical statehood, her work has what it takes to become a cult book in the global social sciences.

For this reason, the House of World Cultures in Berlin has now organized an international conference in Graeber's honor entitled "The Question of Civilization", at which central aspects of the book were discussed with the co-author present.

The focus of many lectures was the search for a way out of capitalist modernity, which was predominantly viewed as a dead end in the history of the genre that was not sustainable in the long term.

The media theorist Erhard Schüttpelz argued that essential achievements of civilization - the preparation of food, the aesthetic design of housing, jewelry and personal hygiene - had been developed in egalitarian societies long before they were used at the courts of the first rulers by a small class for the purpose of symbolic distinction were monopolized.

Abstaining from Western influence

This met with resistance early on in Africa.

Thus, as Alfredo González-Ruibal described, the inhabitants of the island of Bioko, which belongs to what is now Equatorial Guinea, were so disgusted with human trafficking that they did not participate in it.

Since iron tools were a common medium of exchange in the slave trade, they renounced them and literally remained in the Stone Age in material terms.

The archaeologist gave other examples of African communities that were resistant to the centralization and entrenchment of political rule.

At Djenne-Djeno, an urban settlement in present-day Mali, excavations for the period AD 250 to the thirteenth century have uncovered no evidence of significant social or political inequalities.

Long before the beginning of European colonialism, people of different ethnic origins fled from the growing pressure of domination in their respective home regions to the areas between today's Sudan and Ethiopia, where they founded egalitarian village communities.

On the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, the shepherd nomads, who had been involved in long-distance trade for many centuries, decided not to set up an infrastructure.

They feared that permanent trading posts would have limited their autonomy.

As with the example of the refused iron tools, a special kind of conservatism is shown here: material progress is rejected in order to defend local traditions of democratic freedom.

In many contributions to the conference, the understanding of freedom cited at the beginning was returned with great approval, which prompted the historian A. Dirk Moses to make the skeptical remark that anti-state Americans understood the possession of firearms as a freedom, which they could use with all the weapons at their disposal available means to defend.

Of course, it would be exaggerated to accuse Graeber and Wengrow of a lack of sensitivity to the ambivalence inherent in the concept of freedom.