Stefanos Geroulanos. The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins. New York: Liveright, 2024. 512 PP. $29.99 Cloth. ISBN: 9781324091455.
In November 1898, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy resettled in his native Alexandria after an anxious period in exile as a refugee from imperial wars. Home at last, he composed a short but trenchant reflection on history, processes of enemy formation, and the lies we tell one another. The curtain opens on an unnamed city in an unnamed time, with the question, “What are we waiting for?” The answer is at the ready: “The barbarians are due here today.” In restless anticipation, the emperor sits in wait at the main gate, the consuls and praetors don their finest clothes and jewels, the streets and squares are thick with spectators. But then—nothing happens. The barbarians don’t show, and the city is overwhelmed by a “sudden bewilderment” and “confusion.” The streets empty; people’s expressions grow bleak. Why? The answer is not only that the barbarians have not come, but that—according to reputable reports from the border—they don’t exist at all. The curtain closes with this: “Now what’s going to happen to us without the barbarians?/Those people were a kind of solution.”[1]
In his scintillating The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, Stefanos Geroulanos takes us on a journey from mid eighteenth century Europe to the present, investigating how concepts like “savage,” “barbarian,” “civilized,” and “prehistory” have operated as “a kind of solution” to a range of questions. These questions include: Are human beings fundamentally good and altruistic, or self-serving and mean? Is the way to build a better future by looking back at a golden past, or by disowning what came prior? Is “progress”—or simply, change for the better—possible for individuals and/or for the entire human species? And speaking of that human species: What explains the startling differences between human beings around the world, when it comes to everything from looks to music, from economic practices to social norms? And finally, a question very much on the mind of Europeans from the mid eighteenth century through the middle part of the twentieth: Do empire-building, war, and violence “improve” humanity somehow and unite it, or do they reveal our deepest, darkest secrets—“the savage beneath the thin veneer of civilization”?
Rather than answering these questions by siding with one cut-and-dry answer or another, Geroulanos lays bare the conceptual schema and historical twists and turns that made formulating the questions possible in the first place. Geroulanos is one of the world’s leading scholars of European intellectual history and the author of several field-changing books on how concepts emerge and morph over time; he is thus exquisitely well-equipped to launch this exploration. With a dazzling array of sources, and through playful and erudite prose that carefully pries open texts, images, and the straitjacket of language itself, Geroulanos shows why these particular questions have become dominant modes of engaging our deep past. He explores why our tropes—“civilized” vs. “savage,” “good” vs. “evil,” “justified violence” vs. “brutish violence”—have become so familiar, and predictable. To do so, Geroulanos circles around the standard questions asked of prehistory, the questions that have made recent authors like Yuval Noah Harari or David Graeber so beloved. Those authors—and so many from the eighteenth century onwards—have turned to these bygone times asking, “What did humans at that time think, do, and believe? And what can that teach us about who we really are?”
Geroulanos’ approach is different. He takes the wide view and asks: What work have questions about “prehistory,” “barbarians,” and “civilization” done historically? And why are we so stuck in clearly inadequate patterns of thought when we confront our beginnings? Geroulanos’ questions—and answers—are disconcerting and crucially important for us today. They draw attention to the entangled co-emergence of the ideal of “progress” among European Enlightenment thinkers and the violent expansion of European colonialism to all corners of the globe. And they show how one of the most destructive regimes of the twentieth century, the Nazi Empire, was not interested in reinventing the wheel when it came to justifying its vindictive cruelty: it was drawing on a vast repertoire of metaphors, epistemological practices, and justificatory frameworks that long preceded it, and that would, alas, long outlive it.
Geroulanos begins his account in the mid eighteenth century, with a child and a comb. The child was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the comb—when Rousseau left the room, he swears—was unbroken. Nonetheless, the comb broke somehow, and Rousseau was reprimanded for it, a minor event that he, forty years later, had trouble shaking. “I do most positively know that I was innocent,” he wrote in his Confessions, adding that this “most grave injustice” of his own deep past sparked in him a whole “revolution in his ideas”—and a new way of thinking about the deep past…of humanity (15). Childhood was not amoral and non-rational, but purity (wrapped in an adorable package). So too was the infancy of humanity. Many, many thinkers disagreed with Rousseau on his descriptors, but they accepted the premise: an individual human life was analogous to the history of humankind, and once upon a time, far, far away, the world was populated by a mass of adult-children. Sure, writers took their distances from Rousseau too, arguing that humanity’s early men and women were, on their view, hyper emotional, brutish, lacking in self-awareness, and selfish. Thank goodness “we” came along–humanity’s reputation would have been doomed otherwise.
As Geroulanos shows, both Rousseau’s view and the proverbial other side of the coin were not, in a sense, so different at all: both were used to point a path forward, and both believed in (and advertised) the possibility of “progress.” While Rousseau suggested that we needed to restore elements of “the state of nature” in our historical (European) present, others self-aggrandized the present as the best of all possible worlds, the world of “civilized” adults. Both suggested a clear distinction between “backwards” and “advanced” peoples. The primitive-as-child idea stuck: it emerged again and again, most frequently in the service of European empire-building and the suppression, massacre, and/or genocide of indigenous peoples.[2] The cat also came back in rose-tinted anarchist and socialist tracts (such as Friedrich Engels’ best-seller, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, on through to David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything), which made a case for humanity’s deep altruistic past to prove that socialism was in the natural order of things—historical and biological destiny.[3]
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the forward march of humanity was not the only motif on offer. In 1815, Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo marked a historical caesura. The key question many now pondered became: “Was history still really advancing?” (64) Progress didn’t seem guaranteed anymore. Perhaps it had evaporated when it came to political matters—Napoleon had managed to thoroughly make a mess of things and to corrupt the apparent purity of many French revolutionary ideals. But science, yes, maybe science could continue to march happily along. Thus in a reprieve of the savage man/civilized man eighteenth-century tale came the age of triads, including several long-lasting ones, such as the idea of three “ages”: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, invented in the 1830s by a Danish archaeologist, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. Darwin’s writings built on these emergent ideas. In the process, they both revolutionized and confirmed the notion that in a deep past, “we” were primitive and brutal—something Darwin believed was corroborated by his voyage to the Americas on the Beagle, where he claimed to have met a “barbarian—man in his lowest and most savage state.” (“One’s mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like this?” Darwin wondered, answering his question in the affirmative [89].) Though Darwin didn’t theorize the survival of the fittest as nature’s threat to the species, the move to eugenics and even eliminationist fantasies was swift for some of his followers.
Bestiality was soon backdated even further: From 1842, the term “dinosaurs” was coined to name newly unearthed bones chipped out of mountainsides. But like before, the novelty was tempered by the immediate overlay of old conceptual vocabularies with extraordinarily staying power. The dinosaurs, as anyone who has been around a toddler knows, are a roaring powerful rage–little else. It turns out that this vision is as old as the discovery of the dinosaurs itself, and stitched into the bigger history Geroulanos is exploring: how we talk about the “deep past” is a way to talk about ourselves. So dinosaurs are angry, violent, and primitive because that’s what primitive things are. But they were that way too because of when dinosaurs were discovered and assigned their nasty character traits. Consider: in 1830, Henry De La Beche painted a scene of brutal dino battle titled Duria Antiquior, notable mainly because of the number of things that get eaten, maimed, or murdered. It would quickly become one of the most popular depictions of these primitive beasts. But De La Beche was not putting paintbrush to paper in a studio perched on a cloud, far from the everyday world. To the contrary: The painter was enmeshed in the complex realities of his day. In fact, he owned 207 enslaved people and a plantation in Jamaica; in 1829—just a year before he painted Duria Antiquior—a rebellion had broken out on the Caribbean island nation. Warring dinos, warring slaves: for De La Beche, there may have been little difference. As Geroulanos puts it, “the Oldest world made sense of the violence of the new” (51).
In the early twentieth century, colonial wars came home to roost, shaking up the neat distinction between “those beasts” and “us.” Poison gases—which had only been used by Europeans in their wars of imperial expansion—were deployed for the first time on European soil in World War I. The war, Geroulanos argues, gave the definitive lie to progress. How could (white) Europeans kill each other, with brutal methods, over four grueling years? It was almost too much to bear. And yet: the emergent field of psychiatry tried to make sense of it. A new trope was born, though it rhymed with many older ones: “the savage beneath the thin veneer of civilization.” Within this new-old frame, some things stayed constant: there was a clear and definite thing called “the savage,” and a clear and definite thing called “civilization.” The former was bad, the latter good; the former violent, the latter full of peace. But even in adopting these words and meanings, the sentence pushed a new and disturbing idea to the fore: it was possible to be a savage and a civilized person all at once, at the very same time. The “savages” were not far away and over there—in a past time, or on a remote (colonized) island. There were here: inside us. Sigmund Freud, in an office lined with what he called “my old and dirty gods”—paintings and sculptures depicting “primitive” works of art—sorted it out, through his theory of the id, the ego, and the superego. The beast was within us, and war was operative here too, as it was in the colonies or in the trenches. But the difference was that we were in eternal war with ourselves. Modernity was the mash-up of the very old and the very new, the “savage” and the “civilized,” waging a painful internal battle.
The Nazis were displeased with this idea and replaced it with an older and simpler one: the civilized were “us,” the savages “them.” The Nazi’s understanding of race was, Geroulanos shows, a collection of hand-me-downs. From the eighteenth century came the idea of humanity as savage, barbarian, or civilized, and the concurrent “civilizing mission” inherited from European imperialism, and its contradictory desire to both “civilize” and permanently estrange “the savage.” From the eighteenth century, the Nazis also borrowed the notion of a redeemable “deep past” when innocence and truth reigned (for the Nazis, of course, this deep past was Aryan, and the preserve of heroic and virile “ancient Germans”). From the nineteenth century, the Nazis took a social Darwinist story about the survival of the fittest, to which they added the eugenicists’ imperative of speeding “natural selection” along through human-made means. In order to make Nazism’s toxic racism and antisemitism palatable, the Nazis turned to a set of language acts that long preceded them. They activated latent potentialities already present in how Europeans were talking about the past, about violence, and about one another. In the process, they encouraged and justified the brutal murder of millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and people of color before and during World War II. German soldiers “shared a web of ideas that gave metaphysical value to the killing,” as Geroulanos explains: they were “fighting both their own war and those of 5,000 years earlier […] The enemy within and without was a threat going back thousands of years” (227).
Nazi Germany functions as both a climax and an anti-climax to Geroulanos’ history. Climax, in that the Nazis brought together a tapestry of metaphors and pseudo-scientific claims about the deep past so as to marshal a never-before-seen murderous attack on the present. But anti-climax too, in the sense that the Nazis themselves were creatures of history, working in continuity with a particular way of thinking—a way of thinking that continued long after Nazism’s defeat. So it was that in the 1960s, Curtis LeMay, the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, summarized his goal for the Vietnam War, echoing the violence inherent in the “primitive” vs. “civilized” binary: “Bomb them back to the Stone Age!” he trumpeted (233). (A popular U.S. Army marching cadence repeats a version of the trope, updated for fans of The Flintstones: it encourages trainees to laugh when “Pebbles” and “Bam Bam” “go straight to hell” after having been struck—“Boom!” —by what’s euphemistically named “lightning.”[4]) Today, the far right has spun a nostalgic yarn about Neanderthals, casting their disappearance as the original instance of “white genocide.” The Neanderthals, according to this story, “helped give rise to Eurasians,” even in the face of increasing numbers of “modern immigrants” from Africa. “Neanderthals were demographically and genetically swamped by the African biological race of Homo sapiens,” notes one exponent of this view (157). Small wonder that genetic testing companies are making a killing (pun intended) in helping you figure out burning questions like, “What percentage of Neanderthal are you? Is your partner more of a Neanderthal than you? Learn with this Christmas gift!” (158) It might make us laugh, but it should make us cry: “prehistory” and its deployment to buoy certain forms of violent racial thinking seem here to stay.
In 1950, Claude Lévi-Strauss, bent on undoing these mythologies for good, wrote, “There are no peoples still in their childhood; all are adult, even those who have not kept a diary of their childhood and adolescence…No, there are no peoples without history—it’s just that most people are not aware of other people’s histories…All human societies have behind them a past of approximately equal length…For tens and even hundreds of millennia, men [and women] there loved, hated, suffered, invented, and fought as others did” (268). Terms like “savage,” “barbarian,” and “backwards” should be consigned to the dustbin of history. And yet the hard truth remains: they have not been. Thanks to Geroulanos’ extraordinary history, we now have a better understanding of why these old concepts endure. They were “a kind of solution,” to say it with Cavafy; but they were also, as Geroulanos reminds us, an enormous problem—and they frame the limits of our imagination, then and now.
[1] Constantine Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1898), accessible online at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51294/waiting-for-the-barbarians
[2] See Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) for a brilliant analysis of how early colonial historians wrote indigenous people out of modernity—and thereby justified starving, expelling, and killing them to “speed time along.”
[3] See Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884; repr. London, Electric Book Co., 2001) and David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Toronto: Signal, 2021).
[4] “Pebbles and Bam-Bam on a Friday night/Trying to get to heaven on a paper kite/Lightning struck (Boom) and down they fell (Ahhh)/Instead of getting to heaven, they went straight to hell.” Accessed on July 15, 2024, at https://www.missouriwestern.edu/rotc/wp-content/uploads/sites/71/2018/03/MARCHINGCADENCE.pdf.
Giuliana Chamedes is Mellon Morgridge Associate Professor of History at UW Madison. Her first book, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (2019), explores right-wing religious internationalism, epistemic hegemony, and the reinvention of “Europe” after World War I. It won several awards. Book two (in process), “Unpaid Debts: European Socialists, the Global South, and the Struggle for Economic Decolonization,” investigates the movement for global economic equality. She is also writing a book with Udi Greenberg, Decolonization and the Remaking of Europe (under contract with Princeton University Press) and is working with Monica Kim and a group of historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists on a multi-year project, titled “The Global History of Austerity, Then and Now.” She has written about left and right-wing internationalism and the history of the global economic order in several academic journals and edited volumes, as well as in non-academic publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and The Nation.