Reviews and Comments

This book is essentially a thorough debunking of various western misconceptions about Daoism, with ample historical detail and discussion about how Daoism changed throughout various eras.

A few of the misconceptions that it debunks:

That there is any real distinction between "philosophical" and "religious" Daoism

Thankfully at this point an idea that has been quite thoroughly debunked and largely eradicated in academic circles, but the echoes of this framing remain in popular culture.

That the Dào Dé Jīng (or Zhuāngzǐ) is the primary, oldest, or most important Daoist text

The book goes into some detail about this, particularly on the Dào Dé Jīng, but I'll let it speak for itself as a summary:

My nuanced answers to the question of how the Nei-yeh, Chuangtzu, and Tao te ching affected later Taoism are as follows:

1. All three of those texts actually played a marginal role in the lives and thoughts of most later Taoists, with a variety of important exceptions, many of which remain little known even among scholars.
2. Many later Taoists, of all periods, looked back to the Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu for concepts and models that could help them practice Taoism. Others did not, but continued to honor those texts.
3. Few later Taoists read or honored the Nei-yeh — as a text — yet its ideas and practices did become abiding elements of Taoist practice from age to age, as well as of Chinese traditional medicine, and even the cosmological theories usually termed “Neo-Confucian.”

That Daoists kept to themselves and did not interface with the imperial bureaucracy, or were meaningfully anarchist/anti-establishment in practice

While you can find some ideas in Daoist texts that appear somewhat anarchist, and Daoists have been remembered for their role in several popular revolts, they also spent a long time working with the imperial bureaucracy to try to help (and secure patronage from) various emperors throughout history.

That women were excluded from practicing Daoism, or that Daoist practices had a gendered element

This is somewhat more complicated, but the chapter that goes into detail opens:

The roles that women have played in Taoist life will vary according to one’s notion of what “Taoism” is. If by “Taoism” one means the living Cheng-i traditions of Taiwan and coastal China, then women have little or no meaningful role, and have not had for centuries. But, as we have seen, there have actually been many other forms of Taoism. Some we have just begun to recognize, as scholars continue to explore the rich diversity of texts in the Tao-tsang and later Taoist collections.

In the living Lung-men tradition, as in its Ch’üan-chen antecedents and in several earlier Taoist traditions, women have played quite meaningful roles indeed. At times, such individuals were clearly exceptions to the rule. But, at other times, Taoists clearly made sincere, and sometimes successful, efforts to provide relatively equal opportunities to any person willing to participate, regardless of gender or class. In addition, women Taoists of various periods even held positions of influence and authority, sometimes in a formally institutionalized setting.

Over the course of history, virtually all Taoist practices—from self-cultivation practices to “thunder rites”—have been fully accessible to women, and we even know of women who have practiced them. The idea that Taoist self-cultivation practices could, or should, be conceived in gender-specific terms would not arise until the nineteenth century.

That Daoists seek to have a single, coherent attitude towards death

This one is particularly pernicious, since it seems to come from deeply-held beliefs that westerners tend to have about both religion and death. From the book:

The reality is that Taoism is a tradition defined (or perhaps, more correctly, not defined) by people who never saw reason to struggle to achieve agreement about most of life’s deepest ambiguities. Taoists were never laboring to remain true to some “original message,” the way that Christians, Jews, Confucians, and, to some degree, even Buddhists often tried to do. There was no single scripture to which all Taoists through the centuries felt it necessary to tag their beliefs or actions. There was never—at least not past the third century—any Taoist hierarchy that sought to determine doctrine for all Taoists. And there was certainly no effort to achieve or maintain any “philosophical” precision, consistency, or sophistication.

Rather, those who were drawn to understand life, and to express their lives and thoughts, on Taoist terms were a range of people who did not work very hard to find ways to agree with each other. It is not that Taoists of each age “agreed to disagree,” as for instance modern Unitarians profess themselves quite happy to do. Rather, it is that the people who self-identified as Taoists in each age understood and accepted the fact that others might, with some justification, understand life on somewhat different terms. On one level, “Taoism” was, like “Hinduism,” a catch-all category for a wide range of ideas, practices, and models of and for life, which were acknowledged to belong to this loosely defined category mostly, if not exclusively, by the fact that they clearly did not belong to any of the other available categories.

Such being the case, it is not at all surprising that some Taoists over the centuries argued the possibility of obviating death, and the desirability of attaining a deathless state, and even suggested practical methods for attaining some such state. But, while none can dispute the commonness of texts describing or alluding to such ideas, it is true that Taoists also produced and preserved texts that wholly ignored such ideas, others whose perspective on life would seem to preclude such ideas and practices altogether, and even some that ridiculed them, as we shall see. And because those who self-identified as members of “the Tao-chiao ” were, at the very least, content to identify all such texts, ideas, and practices as belonging to their “Tao-chiao” all of them must be accepted as representative of the “authentic” voices of Taoism.

In general, this book does a excellent job of identifying places where western conceptions of Daoism have been more interested in projecting existing western ideas onto a exotic and ancient other, and contrasting that with actual data about what Daoism is and has been. While this book can be quite academic and slow in places, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in gaining a historically-grounded, less appropriative understanding of Daoism.

Quite mixed feelings about this book. I want very much to like it, but I think it's severely limited by its conception of "nomadism" as moving between apartments every few years.

I get the feeling that this book may have been a victim of its success — many of the designs feel like DIY IKEA furniture, which I'm sure was novel in 1973, more than a decade before IKEA reached the USA. Today, though, it just feels somewhat depressing.

A lot of the book also relies on building furniture from materials that are widely and cheaply available, the idea being that they can be discarded upon moving, and recreated at a destination. Again, this is compatible with a definition of "nomadism" that emphasizes staying put for enough time to scrounge up the cardboard, polyurethane, etc that's needed to put together this furniture. Which is fine, I guess (if a little depressing, when you think too much about it), but not really what I was hoping for.

There are a couple useful ideas for a modern reader in here, but really not much more than that, and even those ideas largely are no longer novel, having made their way from IKEA to Target and Walmart these days.

I do think there are still novel ideas to be had in the field of nomad-friendly furniture — particularly, tensegrity designs can be extremely lightweight, collapsible, and strong — but they won't be found in this book, unfortunately. I guess it's maybe a blessing, in a sense, that this book won't deprive me the joy of discovering them for myself.

I'd been waiting for years for this book to come out in English, so I was excited that it finally did.

Like many books written by anthropologists, it spends a lot more time discussing facts and histories than it does trying to argue a political point: more than halfway through the book, Graeber writes “At this point, we can finally turn to the story of Ratsimilaho, and examine it in its proper context” — a story which is mostly history, rather than the argument of a thesis I was expecting from this book.

On the one hand, I'm not especially interested in the history of 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ century Madagascar — on the other hand, going into depth on that history is the only way to avoid the exoticization that's so endemic to political texts drawing from other cultures.

The tension between the ideals that it's pleasant to image the Betsimisaraka Confederation embodying and the ideals they actually seemed to hold is palpable — Graeber explicitly acknowledges that the exclusion of women in its founding was a sort of reactionary backlash to women gaining more economic power via marriages to and alliances with pirates, but that doesn't stop him from framing it as a sort of utopian, democratic experiment.

Of pirates more generally, Graeber writes “Perhaps the best that could be said of them is that their brutality was in no way unusual by the standards of their time, but their democratic practices were almost completely unprecedented” — true, but it's important to avoid unduely romanticizing them, and it's unclear that Graeber's description of the Betsimisaraka Confederation in the conclusion succeeds at that. Luckily, he provides ample description of the historical realities, so readers who are paying attention should fairly easily be able to make up their own minds.

Much more interesting to me than the story of Ratsimilaho and the Betsimisaraka Confederation were the stories and themes of the relationships that foreigners and outsiders have to local culture.

There are two prominent examples of that in the book. First, the “Zafy Ibrahim” community — Jews who migrated (potentially from present-day Yemen) to Madagascar in antiquity, who despite being widely seen as outsiders, had a monopoly on the ritual sacrifice of cattle. Second, the arrival of pirates in the 16ᵗʰ century, who were greeted by Malagasy women, seeking to join up with newly-arrived pirates to help them trade with locals, in order to gain economic agency that women had previously been denied. (Also discussed is the role of pirates who did manage to make independent settlements as mediators in local conflicts — since they didn't have any strong connections with local groups, they could be trusted to be relatively neutral).

This relatively detailed and nuanced discussion of the common roles that foreigners and outsiders play in the places they arrive was, to me, one of the most novel and interesting parts of the book, but it seems to be largely in the background, taking backseat to the sort of "decolonializing the Enlightenment" that's discussed in more depth in The Dawn of Everything.

On the whole, I'm quite glad I read this book — it's useful background for some writing I've been noodling on for a long time, and it's interesting in its own right, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't interested in this history in its own right.