10.4 What Causes Seasonal Social and Political Structures? The Dawn of Everything Chapter 3:

In this episode we cover the rest of chapter 3 of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything.

10.4 What Really Causes Seasonal Social and Political Structures? The Dawn of Everything Chapter 3 (TRANSCRIPT)

This is a transcript of this video.
The bibliography for this episode can be found here.
For the audio podcast version click here on a mobile device.

Hello fellow kids and welcome back to What is Politics. 

In this episode we’ll be covering the rest of Chapter 3 from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything book, which is entitled Unfreezing the Ice Age. 

In this part of the book, the authors try to argue that human societies used to shift back and forth from hierarchy to equality for fun, play and expedience, which leads them to the big thesis question of the book: if societies in the past used to shift back and forth from hierarchy to equality seemingly at will, then how is it that for the past several thousand years, most societies seem to be stuck in hierarchy.  

Before we get in to the text, let’s do a little recap of some of the important theory points that we’ve been making in this series so we can understand what we’re reading, and also so that we can understand what’s going on in the world around us. 

As discussed in earlier episodes, the word politics refers to decision making in groups – which includes the state, but also any group, the workplace, the family, your basketball team.  

So, when we’re talking about hierarchy or equality in a political context, what were talking about is hierarchy or equality of decision making power.  Does everyone have the same power, or do some people have more power than others – and if so, what’s the basis of the inequality of power, and what are the moral or intellectual justifications for it – because inequalities of power always come with justifications of some sort – efficiency, merit, superiority, human nature, divine providence, being the vanguard of the working class. 

And whatever the justification is clearing out space for the master race, or creating the necessary conditions for socialism – any argument that justifies a political hierarchy is by definition a right wing argument.

Because in politics the left refers to the people who support equality of decision making power, and the right refers to those who support hierarchies of decision making power. 

And last time, we looked at the difference between dominance hierarchy, where the hierarchy is benefits the people on the top of the hierarchy, and imposed by them, vs. a democratic hierarchy where the hierarchy is formed for the benefit of its members, and where the people on top, only get to be there insofar as they benefit the rest.  

In the future and we’ll look at how democratic vs dominance hierarchy is a spectrum, and how democratic hierarchy can morph into dominance hierarchy in the right circumstances – or rather the wrong circumstances – but what we need to understand today, is that while people might choose to establish a democratic hierarchy in order to achieve shared goals for the sake of efficiency, the idea that a society as whole would choose to establish itself as a dominance hierarchy does not make any sense.  Dominance hierarchies are chosen by people on top choose it, and imposed on the people on the bottom, who at best tolerate it for lack of better options.   And the level of dominance hierarchy is determined by the relative bargaining power of the two parties of classes.  

Now, because people don’t choose to be stuck in dominance hierarchy on purpose – the existence of a dominance hierarchy can only be explained by particular circumstances which give some people certain bargaining power advantages over others.  

And we saw that there’s basically only one general recipe for all dominance hierarchies – 1st, you need to have some people who are able to control access to resources that other people need – and 2nd, you need for there to be no preferable alternatives to get those resources other than to subject yourself to the commands of the people who control those resources.

So, if we want to answer Graeber and Wengrow’s question of how we got stuck in hierarchy – meaning if you want to understand where a particular dominance hierarchy comes from and how to get rid of it, or how to reduce it’s severity, then first you need to ask “what are the conditions that are giving some people the ability to impose their choices on other people”.  And then once you’ve identified those, the next thing you need to ask is “what can we do to change those conditions in a way that reduces or eliminates those advantages”.

Unfortunately, as Graeber and Wengrow will later tell us in Chapter 5, they explicitly don’t want to think about conditions or circumstances.  Instead, they want to focus on conscious choice and “freedom”.  And the reason for this, is because they mistakenly think that if conditions are what result in hierarchy or equality, then this means that we are truly stuck forever stuck in hierarchy today because of the conditions inherent to advanced industrial civilization.  And they quote Jared Diamond and others to that effect in chapter 1.  

But what the authors forget as they go down this dead-end path of seeing hierarchy as a random choice disconnected from conditions, is that one of the powers of human beings is that we have the power to choose to shape and change the conditions that we live in – at least sometimes – it all depends on the conditions!   

Unfortunately, as a result of trying to avoid materialist answers, and of trying to focus on discombobulated conscious choices outside the context of the conditions in which those choices are made, not only are the authors unable to answer their own questions, but they routinely bury or ignore all of the parts of the sources that they discuss which actually do answer those questions, which we saw last time and which we’ll see more of today. 

Materialism and agency are not opposed to eachother – materialism is simply the context in which freedom and choice are exercised.  And without it we throw away our best tools for understanding why people make choices, or for predicting what choices they will make, which makes it impossible to design institutions and rules that will have the effect we want them to have.  

OK, so now let’s get into the book, and let the cartoon, begin:

CHAPTER THREE

So this part of the chapter starts off with some intellectual history:

The authors point out that in the ancient world – philosophers from greece to india to chiner  took it for granted that we only really think when we dialogue with others, and that this is why so many philosophical works are written as dialorgs instead of just monolorgs.  Individual consciousness on the other hand was something that was exceptional and the result of a life of contemplation and studying.  

“Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem. True individual self-consciousness, meanwhile, was imagined as something that a few wise sages could perhaps achieve through long study, exercise, discipline and meditation.  What we’d now call political consciousness was always assumed to come first.

But then in europe with the enlightenment, intellectuals got all of this backwards.   Because they saw europe as waking up out of 1000 years of lack of superstition and rigid religious dogma, european philosophers assumed that ordinary people could have individual consciousness but politically they would traditional people just blindly followed traditions and that political consciousness wasn’t possible until civilization and literature and enlightenment made it possible, and that it was only available to the educated and well read.  

> All this would have come as a great surprise to Kandiaronk, the seventeenth-century Wendat philosopher-statesman whose impact on European political thought we discussed in the previous chapter. Like many North American peoples of his time, Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation.“

OK so far so good, as far as I know since I have no knowledge of this field – but then the authors come back to their condescending misrepresentations about the anthropology hunter gatherers:

“Scholars still write as if those living in earlier stages of economic development, and especially those who are classified as ‘egalitarian’, can be treated as if they were literally all the same, living in some collective group-think: if human differences show up in any form – different ‘bands’ being different from each other – it is only in the same way that bands of great apes might differ. Political self-consciousness, or certainly anything we’d now call visionary politics, would have been impossible.”

As usual on this subject, the authors are arguing with scholars from the 1970s or before that.  Scholars no longer write like that, unless they’re discussing the entire palaeolithic era in like 2 pages in order to make a larger point about something else, because you can’t make generalizations or discuss giant periods of time in any other way. 

But then as they do so many times in this book, they try to have it both ways:

“Now, admittedly, there have always been exceptions to this rule. Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments.”

Newsflash: Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages is literally every cultural anthropologist with a PhD – that is how you get your PhD.  The authors are trying to make it seem like there are these good anthropologists who humanize the subjects of their research, but then there are all these bad anthropologists who believe in egalitarian origins and make generalizations about cultures – but in the real world, these are usually the exact same anthropologist doing both of these things!

When you write an ethnography, you will tend to write a lot of individualized stories about all the people you lived with for the years you spent there.  But then if you’re the exact same person and you go and write a book about anything involving about humanity as a whole – like human origins, or the evolution of violence, or the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture – you’re going to talk mostly in generalizations, and in ways that erase individuality because you can’t talk about these topics in any other way!  

For the authors to chastise people for this is like getting mad at someone who takes a picture of the earth from outer space for erasing individual human identities – it’s just nonsense – and it’s crippling nonsense, preventing us from being able to actually do anything useful with anthropology.  

It’s also extremely ironic because earlier the authors were chastizing anthropologists for not having the courage to make any generalizations!  Apparently generalizations are only permitted if you make the types of generalizations that the authors like.  

The authors then go on to point out that in many traditional societies, eccentric and nonconformist people are not punished for deviating from social norms, but instead they’re often revered or celebrated in different ways.  

And they go on to talk about how in times of crisis, the Nuer pastoralists in southern Sudan will often elevate people who would be considered insane or schizophrenic, and follow them as prophets.  

“a person who might otherwise have spent his life as something analogous to the village idiot would suddenly be found to have remarkable powers of foresight and persuasion; even to be capable of inspiring new social movements among the youth or co-ordinating elders across Nuerland to put aside their differences and mobilize around some common goal; even, sometimes, to propose entirely different visions of what Nuer society might be like.”

Now this is correct, and super interesting – but what would have been more interesting and more useful would have been for them to talk about how these Nuer bipolar prophets aren’t just randomly proposing different visions of what Nuer society might look like.  They’re fulfilling a specific social function, in response to particular conditions, as others have historically done in similar conditions.  

The whole phenomenon of crazy prophets in Nuer society seems to be recent phenomenon – starting around the turn of the 20th century.   And according to E Evans-Pritchard who wrote the classic studies of the Nuer in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Nuer prophecy began as a response to war and aggression from the outside, which required the Nuer, who are a male egalitarian tribal society, with no political leaders and no formal organization beyond the tribal level, to organize massive coordinated responses to colonial invaders and other people encroaching on their territories.  

So the reason that people suddenly started following anomalous weirdos who don’t conform to social norms, is because these people allowed the tribes to coordinate under leadership in ways that couldn’t otherwise have existed within the confines of their existing social structure.  If you elevated a regular person to a special leadership status, it would disrupt the whole existing social order and create disruption and conflict. But you could elevate a weirdo person who was already outside the norms of the existing society and existing politics without threatening the fiercely egalitarian power balance between men in Nuer society.

Evans-Pritchard also noticed that the Nuer culture as a whole had many similarities to the ancient israelites in the early parts of the old testament, including the prophetic tradition.  The ancient israelites were nomadic pastoralists just like the nuer with similar a social and political structure at that point in time, and the early biblical prophets emerged in similar circumstances: in order to unite independent competing tribes in order to fight wars in a system that allowed for no higher political authority beyond the male head of the family.  

Monotheism is thought to have emerged for related reasons, as a locus to unite the different competing tribes with different identities into one political group versus others.  And Evans-Pritchard noted that monotheistic ideas were gaining traction among the Nuer and spread by some of their recent prophets as well, apparently for similar reasons.  

The authors are hinting at when they talk about prophets allowing the Nuer to imagine new forms of social organization, but I think they left out all of this context for a reason – because it highlights just how important conditions are – to the extent that people 5000 years apart in time, living in totally different worlds, from different racial, religious and ethnic groups, end up making very similar choices in similar circumstances.  

NAMBIKWARA

OK, so now the authors try to push their conscious choice theory by talking about three cultures that change their social structures seasonally – or do they?

First they talk about the Nambikwara, who are an amazonian people who according to Claude Levi-Strauss, do horticulture in the rainy season for about 5 months, and then do hunting and gathering in very difficult conditions for the rest of of the year.  

And the first point that the authors try to make here is that the Nambikwara don’t fit into the supposedly rigid evolutionary models of behavioural ecologists / materialist anthropologists who divide people up into artificial categories like hunter gatherers and horticulturalists and pastoralists and sedentary farmers.  Supposedly these anthropologists heads would just explode at the idea of a culture that goes from one mode of production to the other seasonally, and the authors seem to be implying that we should stop using these types of categories altogether.  

As proof that these categories are useless as is all of materialist anthropology, the authors tell us that not only do the Nambikwara change economic activities from season to season, but that they also change their social structure, telling us that their chief has much more power and authority in the foraging season than he does in the horticulture season, which according to the authors is the opposite of what materialist behavioural ecology models tell us.  Apparently in the 2 dimensional 1960s caricature that Graeber and Wengrow paint of modern anthropological theory, hunter gatherers are all supposed supposed to be egalitarian, and farmers are all supposed to be hierarchical – which of course is strawman nonsense, there are plenty of hierarchical foragers and plenty of relatively egalitarian horticulturalists which anthropologists have been discussing since the 19th century – remember that Marx and Engels’ discussion of primitive communism was based on the Haudenosaunee horticulturalists.  

And on top of that, the authors also tell us that Nambikwara chiefs act like modern welfare statesmen redistributing wealth to the poor just like we see in our big industrial civilizations.  So Boom, there are no categories!  Take that the stages of history theory, even though stages of history theories have already been dead for several decades already!  

All of this is why anthropology has supposedly ignored the Nambikwara and all of the lessons they can teach us about agency and freedom and political consciousness blah blah blah. 

Now there is such a mess going on here, that it’s hard to untangle it – and my head is still spinning from just how bad it was which sucked up an enormous amount of time out of my life as I kept getting sucked deeper and deeper into a swirling vortex of total nonsense and awful scholarship.  

I was originally going to read the authors sources and then give materialist explanations for the seasonal differences in Nambikwara social and political structure – but that turned out to be impossible. 

The authors tell us that:

“Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the ‘nomadic adventures’ of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner; in the wet season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. In doing so they cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.”

But Levi-Strauss doesn’t say anything like this at all.  According to Levi-Strauss the chief had no coercive authority and that his only power was persuasion – all year round.   If anything you could read into Levi-Strauss that the chief had less authority in the hunting season because if he didn’t do a good job people would just leave and join a different band to the point where he could actually lose his position, but he doesn’t say anything specifically about changing levels of authority from season to season anywhere in his texts on the Nambikwara.

It seems like the authors just made this stuff up about the chief being authoritarian in the hunting season, in order to make it seem like the Nambikwara had two different political systems and that scarecrow strawman anthropologists are wrong about hunter gatherers always being egalitarian.  

I’ll include the relevant parts of the Levi-Strauss text in the transcript, because I had originally included a whole section comparing the two Graeber & Wengrow texts to the Levi-Strauss text – but then just before recording, I found out the Nambikwara don’t actually even switch from hunting and gathering to farming to begin with! 

David Price and Paul Aspelin who independently of each other each lived with the Nambikwara for years at a time in the 1970s, both confirm that the Nambikwara do not actually switch from nomadic foraging in one season to sedentary farming in the other season.  And Aspelin found that this was also the case in Levi-Strauss’ time as well.  Apparently Levi-Strauss only stayed with them during an extended hunting expedition and had misunderstood this to be the way of life for 7 months out of the year.  And he had never even visited a village.

So while I can’t give materialist explanations for things that don’t exist, what I can do is point out that the authors’ war on categories is completely insane.  It’s this very typical post-modern brain disease where you start with an important and valid critique – that categories are artificial constructs, not fixed realities – but then, instead translating that into constructive lessons they just go straight into throw the baby out with the bathwater mode – eliminate all categories – each individual tree is different!  There are no species!  Spruce trees are a social construct!!  

And the result is that if you take this garbage seriously, it prevents you from being able to apply knowledge in any practical way.  All categories of things that exist in the real world  – even things like fruits vs vegetables, arms vs wrists, berries vs citrus fruits, or man vs woman as is topical nowadays – these categories are all imperfect and they break down at a certain point.  But we use them anyways, because they are short cuts that prevent us from having to re-invent the wheel every single time we encounter things.  

Like good luck figuring out which wood to use if you want to building a house if you don’t know the difference between a pine tree and a douglas fir!  Or imagine trying to be a surgeon if you refuse to acknowledge that a heart and stomach are separate organs because there’s no exact way to tell where one ends and the other begins and all the organs are actually interconnected and work as one big system!  It’d be like being paralyzed on mushrooms staring at the ceiling. 

This is why academia has turned into a giant masturbation festival since post-modernist paradigms took over.  Jizzle jizzle jam!   

The reason that we create subsistence categories in anthropology – like foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists – immediate return vs delayed return foragers – is because those subsistence practices tend to create conditions which have important and specific consequences on culture and political structure and ideology etc. 

For example, as I’ve mentioned before, immediate return hunter gatherers are almost always hyper egalitarian – while hunter gatherers who focus primarily on fishing are usually very hierarchical.  

And crucially to the authors’ thesis questions about how do we get stuck in hierarchy – having these kinds of categories helps you isolate the causes of patterns and similarities that you find within those categories.   What is it about nomadic pastoralism that always results in male dominance and cultures with lots of blood feuds and honour codes?  Why are people in horticultural societies so often obsessed with accusing eachother of witchcraft?  Why is it that immediate return foragers never seem to care very much about witchcraft or to get caught up in blood feuds?  

And we have a lot of very good answers to these types of questions, but you’ll never learn about them from Dawn of Everything, because the authors heads are buried too deep in their own bunguses, wanking on about freedom and choice totally out of context of the practical conditions that those choices are made under. 

One of the main effects of post structuralist turn in academia – where you attack anyone who does any generalizing or who looks for materialist answers to things or who even uses categories – is that humanities academia is no longer oriented towards producing anything that can actually help anyone do anything to change society.  You can’t even take the first step of asking why anything happens.  You can ask who what where and when, but if you ask why, that inevitably leads to materialist inquiries, and suddenly everyone gets really uncomfortable like you made a big stinky and then they start accusing you of essentialism and objectifying people and whatever other nonsense.   

What started as a well intentioned critique of anthropology’s role in helping powerful institutions destroy traditional cultures for profit, turned into a formula for utter paralysis.  And this is one of the main reasons why postmodernism is so popular in elite academia – because it totally neutralized the threat to power that started to emerge in the 60s and 70s as working class people entered the university system because of the G.I. bill.  

So where anthropologists in the 70s used to want to want to learn from different cultures in order to figure out how to make the world a better place, today if you have an anthropology degree, unless you up becoming a professional masturbator your most likely job prospect is helping advertisers figure out how to make women in Mauritaria feel like they’re too fat.   “Hey Senegalese mom – does your baby suffer from premature baldness?  Give your 2 month old a normal life and a full head of elvis hair, with ro-goo-goo-ga-ga-gaine”

And ironically, although Graeber was critical of post-modernism, and although he and Wengrow wrote this book because they want to encourage us to change our society, Dawn of Everything very much contributes to these awful trends. 

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber wrote “

“In many ways, anthropology seems a discipline terrified of  its own potential. It is, for example, the only discipline in a position to make generalizations about humanity as a whole … yet it resolutely refuses to do so.

And that’s exactly right, but unfortunately, in this book they’re lobbing attacks that if taken seriously, would make it impossible to make generalizations!   

Now, if we read the work of authors who actually lived with the Nambikwara, we can see that there are differences of power in chiefly authority – not between different seasons, but rather between different chiefs in different regions of nambikwara territory. 

David Price did a study of 70 nambikwara leaders and in his article he found that 61 of the chiefs almost never told anyone what to do at all.  They led entirely by example.  

“The typical leader begins making a garden and other men join him; he announces his intention to hunt peccary and other men go along

The chief’s authority is so nonexistent that Price suggests that maybe he shouldn’t even be thought of as a chief, but more of as a respected elder brother member of his band, which he often literally is, of the type you often find in hyper-egalitarian immediate return societies.   

Now the other 9 chiefs still had no enforcement power, but unlike the other chiefs they did actually issue commands and tell people what to do.  And all of these more “authoritarian” style chiefs all lived in a northern area where the Nambikwara were frequently under attack which creates conditions which Price believes was the reason why people in those groups tolerated being given orders.

Anyways Graeber and Wengrow continue:

“What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was [the Nambikwara’s] political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. But in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists (in the tradition of Turgot) insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters and foragers to farmers and back again. 

Ugh – so now the authors are pretending that we’re in not just stuck in the 1950s, but more like the 1850s.  No one believes that foraging or farming are different “stages of development anymore”.  They are different adaptations to different conditions.  There are all sorts of examples of people who quit farming and become foragers, or pastoralists, or back and forth and around.  

In the 19th century you had the classic idea that Turgot first proposed, but was most famously articulated by Lewis Henry Morgan, that you had these stages of development where people moved from the worst, hardest form of economy – hunting and gathering, up to better and better ones, pastoralism and then horticulture and then farming and then awesome civilization – or as morgan put it savagery, barbarism and civilization, with different substages for each – lower savagery, middle savagery, higher savagery, etc. 

Although Morgan actually had enormous respect for the native american people that he lived with, there was a clear implication in his scheme that societies were advancing up the ladder of progress to becoming awesome civilized gentlement with big sideburns, stiff upper lips and extreme constipation issues.  

These theories fell out of favour after WWII and the rise of anti-colonialism and civil rights stuggles, but they revived in a very different form in the late 60s and 70s after the man the hunter conference, because people became interested again in how we went from equality to hierarchy.  And so, you the birth of modern social evolution theory.  

But in this version of social evolution is not about stages and progress from worse to better or from simple to complex, it’s about adaptation to conditions – just like biological evolution theory.  And people don’t talk about this anymore, but it’s always been a staple of anthropology that the whole reason humans have such extensive cultures is precisely to adapt to our environment and our circumstances. 

So cultural evolution could mean going from a simple social structure to a more complex one, because you can’t get to complexity without building from less complex stages – like you can’t build a car without first having invented wheels, and oil extraction and metalsmithing first – but it could also mean becoming more simple, like going from stratified agricultural society with hierarchy and specialization to a pastoralist or hunting and gathering society, which various societies have done, like the Lakota that we’ll talk about in a bit. 

Any lingering ideas of social complexity equating with progress fell apart when we realized in the late 1970s that moving from hunting and gather agriculture almost always resulted in going down the ladder in terms of quality of life!

Mark Nathan Cohen found that most societies that adopted agriculture for the first time, did so out of desperation, and that health measures decreased drastically after the transition!  And Marvin Harris one of the big Materialist anthropologists of the 70, 80s and 90s found that every major increase in technological and social complexity was actually adopted out of desperation, and that people’s lives at first got worse each time, and that it was only worth it because the alternatives were even worse. 

And then the authors make some more stuff up:

“Although Lévi-Strauss went on to become the world’s most renowned anthropologist and perhaps the most famous intellectual in France, his early essay on Nambikwara leadership fell into almost instant obscurity. To this day, very few outside the field of Amazonian studies have heard of it. 

David Price, on the other hand, writing in 1980 when social evolutionism was going strong, tells us that the exact same article has

“a central  place in the literature of comparative politics.  It has  become a classic study  in primitive leadership, assigned to students and cited in other articles whenever an  example of the world’s simplest political institutions is called for.”

And he points out that the article had been reprinted in three different versions in Levi-Strauss books, plus in a major anthology on comparative political systems that came out in the late 1960s.  

And the article is still cited in our times – for example, as I was trying to figure out what the story was with Nambikwara chiefs I found Levi-Strauss’ article referred to several times in an article on political leadership from 2015.  And the psychology leadership was the focus of the article – not the stuff about the seasonal changes that he got wrong and that Graeber and Wengrow got double wrong in Dawn of Everything.  

Anyhow, so here we get to one of the many parts of the book that make me vewy vewy angwy:

“One reason [for why Levi-Strauss’ article disappeared] is that in the post-war decades, Lévi-Strauss was moving in exactly the opposite direction to the rest of his discipline. Where he emphasized similarities between the lives of hunters, horticulturalists and modern industrial democracies, almost everyone else – and particularly everyone interested in foraging societies – was embracing new variations on Turgot, though with updated language and backed up by a flood of hard scientific data. Throwing away old-fashioned distinctions between ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’, which were beginning to sound a little too condescending, they settled on a new sequence, which ran from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’ to ‘chiefdoms’ to ‘states’. 

“The culmination of this trend was the landmark Man the Hunter symposium, held at the University of Chicago in 1966. This framed hunter-gatherer studies in terms of a new discipline which its attendees proposed to call ‘behavioural ecology’, starting with rigorously quantified studies of African savannah and rainforest groups – the Kalahari San, Eastern Hadza and Mbuti Pygmies – including calorie counts, time allocation studies and all sorts of data that simply hadn’t been available to earlier researchers.

So for all those assholes on twitter and youtube screaming at me that the authors aren’t against materialism, and that I’m strawmanning them and that they’re only attacking popular writers, not real anthropologists – behavioural ecology IS materialist anthropology.  It’s the people who try to explain the behaviour of human societies by understanding the environments and practical circumstances that we live in.   It’s where you find any serious scholar who’s interested in figuring out what causes societies to be hierarchical or egalitarian or what causes just about anything that people.  It’s exactly what the authors should be doing, yet it’s the target of their constant derision.  

And like I’ve been talking about throughout these book critique episodes, Man the Hunter is the conference that introduced anthropology and the popular reading public to the fact that hyper egalitarian and free societies actually exist.  Democratic, gender egalitarian, anarcho-communist societies without political authority or gerontocracy, and without organized warfare.  Things that Graeber and Wengrow should be deeply interested in, but that they insist on ignoring, or else attacking and dismissing.  

This conference happened right at the apex of the cold war, when we were being told that you can either have equality or freedom, but you can’t have both – and that equality is simply against human nature and that any attempt to create an equal world will result in the horrors of stalinism or the terror of the french revolution.  These are ideas that are still deeply, deeply ingrained in our minds – like listen to any Jordan Peterson lecture where he’s freaking out about the left and the cultural marxists, or any Praeger U video – this is where they’re coming from.  

This conference showed the world that not only can you have both equality and liberty, but that it was quite possible that most human beings were organized along libertarian and egalitarian lines for 90+% of our existence as a species – after all, human beings were all hunter gatherers until 12,000 years ago, most hunter gatherers are at least male egalitarian, and most foragers who practice the simplest type economy that our earliest ancestors probably practiced are hyper egalitarian with gender equality.  

The political implications of this were enormous and left wing anthropologists jumped on it, while those inclined to the right had a tantrum and tried their best to dismiss and downplay it, much like Graeber and Wengrow do in this book, albeit for different reasons.  Tellingly, the broader political left which was more interested in authoritarian types of socialism just ignored it, as did the broader political right and mainstream for obvious reasons – kind of like everyone just ignored what the anarchists accomplished in the spanish civil war until Noam Chomsky focused attention on it in the 1990s.  And as a result, outside of a brief flash, knowledge of this stuff has never really filtered into the general culture or even our political culture which is something that I’m trying to correct with this series.

Whereas for left wing anthropologists stuff was a revelation, for Graeber and Wengrow this conference was just a giant festival of infantilizing hunter gatherers:

“The new studies overlapped with a sudden upswing of popular interest in just these same African societies: for instance, the famous short films about the Kalahari Bushmen by the Marshalls (an American family of anthropologists and film-makers), which became fixtures of introductory anthropology courses and educational television across the world, along with best-selling books like Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People. 

Aha! … Colin Turnbull’s the Forest People.  This is all just speculation, but to me this one book just might be the key to understanding Graeber’s lifelong demented attitude towards hyper egalitarian societies and his belief that the theory of egalitarian ancestors by definition implies infantilism.  

The Forest People is a book written in 1961 for a popular audience about the Mbuti hunter gatherers of the Ituri rainforest in central africa.  The Mbuti are one of those immediate return, hyper egalitarian, gender egalitarian societies – and even as hyperegalitarian societies go, they’re one of the most hyperegalitarian, where women hunt together with men and even older children often can make decisions that trump the will of the adults if it’s something that will affect the future of the group, when todays kids will be tomorrow’s adults.  

And much like Graeber and Wengrow are doing with Dawn of Everything, Turnbull wrote The Forest People for a popular audience with a particular message in mind – in Turnbull’s case, the message was that human equality and freedom are possible and that we have a lot to learn about these things from societies like the Mbuti.  

And because Turnbull was trying to get that message across, and because the book was written for popular consumption and because it was 1961, the Forest People reads a bit like a fairy tale.  And it doesn’t exactly ignore the various problems or difficulties of Mbuti life at the time, but it does portray mbuti society a bit like a happy harmonious smurf village. 

So because of the romanticization, and also I guess becauase the Mbuti are a pygmy people, who are an average of 4’11” tall – a modern reader, might feel like the Forest People is infantilizing the Mbuti.  And I can see why Graeber might react negatively to this book, and also to the annoying hippie professors and others who glommed onto it as an example of our inherent Rousseauian smurfy good nature, polluted by civilization etc.  

To be honest, for it’s various flaws, the Forest People is what got me into anthropology and I think that Colin Turnbulls work is really amazing in terms of describing how the material circumstances of Mbuti life vs the circumstances of their patriarchal, witchcraft obsessed, horticultural neighbours really shape those societies and generate totally the starkly different values, and ideologies and relationships toward nature that you find in those cultures, which subsequent research has supported. 

Anyhow, the authors continue:

“Before long, it was simply assumed by almost everyone that foragers represented a separate stage of social development, that they ‘live in small groups’, ‘move around a lot’, reject any social distinctions other than those of age and gender, and resolve conflicts by ‘fission’ rather than arbitration or violence.35”

And of course the authors neglect to mention just how egalitarian these societies are, including gender egalitarianism, and just how important of a revelation that was at the time, and still is.  

“The fact that these African societies were, in some cases at least, refugee populations living in places no one else wanted, or that many foraging societies documented in the ethnographic record (who had by this time been largely wiped out by European settler colonialism and were thus no longer available for quantitative analysis) were nothing like this, was occasionally acknowledged. But it was rarely treated as particularly relevant. The image of tiny egalitarian bands corresponded perfectly to what those weaned on the legacy of Rousseau felt hunter-gatherers ought to have been like. Now there seemed to be hard, quantifiable scientific data (and also movies!) to back it up”

OK, now this is just shameful – remember how I mentioned earlier, that once the news about hyperegaltiarian socieites made it out into the word, the miserable cynics and right wingers who hate the idea that humans could ever be egalitarians flipped their lids and did everything they could to start attacking and downplaying everything about hunter gatherer egalitarianism?  

Well that whole paragraph comes straight out of that anti-egalitarian miserable asshole talking points playbook! 

The thing about hyperegalitarian foragers being refugees comes from the so called “Kalahari debate” from the late 80’s and early 90s where a group of scholars centred around Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow, tried to reject just about everything that anthropologists had been writing about the various Kalahari hyper egalitarian hunter gatherers since the Man the Hunter conference.  According to these revisionist scholars, far from having anything to teach us in terms of how our ancestors lived, or in terms of the potential for human egalitarianism and liberty, the Kalahari bushmen were actually just a bunch of sad losers.  

Not only were they not at all the “original affluent society” that hunter gather specialists had been depicting, who enjoyed both equality and freedom thanks to their ancient foraging economy, but they weren’t ancient, they weren’t egalitarian, they weren’t real foragers, and they weren’t even a real society! 

According the revisionists, the only reason that bushmen were equal was that they were the equally oppressed lower loser classes of a larger society of pastoralists and farmers.  And the only reason that they were foragers was because they had been forced to abandon pastoralism by stronger ethnic groups who had stolen all of their cattle and shoved them into a crappy wasteland.   Far from being a society that we can learn from, both their hunting and gathering economy and their equality were signs of degradation and subjugation – something Turgot would have loooved.   And all of this was being obscured by the evil sin of categories!

With a peculiar mix of self-righteousness and cynicism, these scholars portrayed themselves as advanced realists and anti-racists, crusading against the “essentialism” of the supposed fantasy world created by hunter gatherer specialists.  And the underlying political message coming from these scholars was that categories are bad and that human equality is some kind of rare marginal phenomenon that didn’t play a big role in human history.  In other words, hierarchy and exploitation and misery are the norm of the human species.  Jordan Peterson and Praeger U can breathe a sigh of relief. 

Unsurprisingly, most of these revisionist scholars have ended up on the wrong side of the more recent so-called “indigenous peoples’ debate” where they are not just rejecting the category of indigenous societies, but also have also been straight up supporting the eviction of kalahari bushmen and other peoples from their hunting lands, thereby supporting the destruction of these societies and their way of life in the in the name of progress development. 

Now there is a ton of literature on the kalahari debating these claims back and and forth since the late 1980s – but some reason Graeber and Wengrow don’t cite anything to back up their  statement about these people being refugees.   

Maybe it’s because the people who see the bushmen as a real culture basically won that debate over time – a big chunk of the revisionist argument was based on Wilmsen misreading the word “onions” as “oxen” in an old diary which led him to mistakenly that the Bushmen used to have cattle until recent times – or maybe because it’s because if you read any of the back and forth you’ll see that this it looks like something of a left vs right debate between people who think that equality is impossible and those who think that it is possible, and the authors of Dawn of Everything are championing the politically wrong side of that argument… or maybe they just forgot, who knows.  

Now, the whole thing about hunter gatherers living on territories that historically nobody else wants, like savannahs or rainforests or deserts is certainly true – hunter gatherers are generally militarily weaker than pastoralist or agricultural societies because their population densities are so low, so they get easily displaced.   But just because a territory is unsuitable for farming or pastoralism, or agriculture, doesn’t mean that it’s not a good foraging habitat, and every book about these societies by experts will remark on how the forager groups are better fed and live a more enjoyable lifestyle than their farmer and pastoralist neighbours, even when they’re stressed for resources – right up until they get pushed out of foraging by capitalism or civil war or encroachment by militarily stronger societies – which is sadly the case now with the kalahari foragers, who are no longer full time foragers as of the past few ten years or so.  And I’ll link to an article specifically addressing the quality of environment issue in the bibliographhy.

The authors continue:

“In this new reality, Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara were simply irrelevant. After all, in evolutionary terms they weren’t even really foragers, since they only roamed about in foraging bands for seven or eight months a year. So the apparent paradox that their larger village settlements were egalitarian while their foraging bands were anything but could be ignored, lest it tarnish this crisp new picture. The kind of political self-consciousness which seemed so self-evident in Nambikwara chiefs, let alone the wild improvisation expected of Nuer prophets, had no place in the revised framework of human social evolution.”

Another total garbage paragraph.

Even if Levi-Strauss hadnt messed up about the nambikwara having two separate modes of subsistence – there’s no reason why the Nambikwara be relevant to what our early ancestors were doing?  Our early ancestors weren’t doing farming for 5 months of the year or any months of the year.  There are dozens of other societies that we’d want to look at for insights into our origins before we looked at the Nambikwara.   But then again, Graeber and Wengrow think that we can generalize about our african first ancestors from 300 000 years ago by going on about gobleki tepe and about the european ice age people who lived on the fringes of human habitability in totally different circumstances – so wheee anything goes.

So to summarize this section – while the Nambikwara are certainly interesting, the entire section on them in this book is just a giant waste of made up garbage on top of made up garbage on top of giant mistakes, and bullshit strawmen that don’t teach us anything about anything besides what really bad scholarship looks like.  Please send me money to compensate me for all the time I wasted figuring this out!

OUT COME THE FREAKS 

Anyhow, from this complete waste of a section, the authors then go on to talk about societies that actually do change their social structures in terms of relative hierarchy or equality in different seasons, in particular the artcit inuit and the kwakiutl or kwakwakawakw as they’re properly called, of the pacific northwest coast.

Whereas earlier in the chapter, the authors tried to tell us that the rich burials of upper palaeolithic europe teach us that inequality has no origin – which implies that they are evidence of social hierarchy – in this part of the chapter, the authors tell us the opposite – that these burials actually are not evidence of hierarchy at all – they’re just ritually celebrated freaks with unusual bodies or birth defects who come from societies that had seasonal variations where people were dispersed into hunting groups part of the year, and then congregated en masse for another part of the year – like the fictionalized version of the Nambikwara that they just described.  

“Let’s return to those rich Upper Palaeolithic burials, so often interpreted as evidence for the emergence of ‘inequality’, or even hereditary nobility of some sort. For some odd reason, those who make such arguments never seem to notice – or, if they do, to attach much significance to the fact – that a quite remarkable number of these skeletons (indeed, a majority) bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings. 

“The adolescent boys in both Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice, for instance, had pronounced congenital deformities; the bodies in the Romito Cave in Calabria were unusually short, with at least one case of dwarfism; while those in Grimaldi Cave were extremely tall even by our standards, and must have seemed veritable giants to their contemporaries.

“All this seems very unlikely to be a coincidence. In fact, it makes one wonder whether even those bodies, which appear from their skeletal remains to be anatomically typical, might have been equally striking in some other way; after all, an albino, for example, or an epileptic prophet given to dividing his time between hanging upside down and arranging and rearranging snail shells would not be identifiable as such from the archaeological record. 

“It seems extremely unlikely that Palaeolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs.

“There are any number of other interpretations that could be placed on the evidence – though the idea that these tombs mark the emergence of some sort of hereditary aristocracy seems the least likely of all. 

So the authors see these rich burials not as evidence of hierarchy, but of something like Nuer prophets.  Anomalous people that are given some kind of special status as a result of their strangeness.  

And then they tie it in to seasonality:

“Almost all the Ice Age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture

And rememeber that we saw last time that they just made this up – there are precisely ZERO ice age sites with monumental architecture!

“these sites – were created by societies that lived a little like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another.

Which we just saw isn’t true

> This seems to be the explanation for those hubs of activity found in eastern Europe at places like Dolní Věstonice where people took advantage of an abundance of wild resources to feast, engage in complex rituals and ambitious artistic projects, and trade minerals, marine shells and furs.

> Archaeology also shows that patterns of seasonal variation lie behind the monuments of Göbekli Tepe.”

Which, remember was built in the holocene era that we live in now – not in the ice age.  And then they talk about how stonehenge was built by people who abandoned farming to do foraging and pastoralism, which they act like that’s supposed to be some kind of game changing big deal, and how those people had a seasonal structure too – which OK, great – stonehenge was built 5000 years ago by neolithic pastoralists, so I have no idea what that has to do with anything. 

If you read carefully, you see that just like the earlier part about paleolithic inequality, this whole section is a lot of smoke and mirrors – like what do nuer prophets or palaeolithic dwarves or albinos have anything to do with seasonal social structures?

The authors are painting a picture that suggests that during seasonal sedentary camps, people in the european ice age and throughout human history and prehistory engaged in rituals where we worshipped freaks and had play hierarchies – so we were always hierarchical and egalitarian on and off.  And I say play hierarchies because this is how they characterize them towards the end of the chapter as we’ll see. 

But Nuer prophets were totally unrelated to nuer seasonal patterns.  kwakiutl and inuit had pronounced seasonal settlement and social patterns, but they didn’t have special seasonal leaders and they didn’t revere freaks.

The palaeolithic freaks theory might be valid, but there’s literally no connection whatsoever to the Nuer or the Inuit or Kwakiutl. 

Anyways, then they connect the palaeolithic european societies to the Inuit and to the authors’ dumb thesis that social structure is a discombobulated conscious choice

> Recall that for Lévi-Strauss, there was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom. The fact that one structure applied in the rainy season and another in the dry allowed Nambikwara chiefs to view their own social arrangements at one remove: to see them as not simply ‘given’, in the natural order of things, but as something at least partially open to human intervention. 

And of course Levi-Strauss says absolutely nothing of the sort – just like they did with Christopher Boehm last time, the authors are turning Levi-Strauss into a muppet and making him say things he never said. 

And they continue:

“Writing in the midst of the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss probably didn’t think he was saying anything all that extraordinary. For anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century, it was common knowledge that societies doing a great deal of hunting, herding or foraging were often arranged in such a ‘double morphology’ (as Lévi-Strauss’s great predecessor Marcel Mauss put it).43 Lévi-Strauss was simply highlighting some of the political implications.”

that’s correct – he wasn’t saying anything super extraordinary, then or now, that article is only interesting in terms of the psychology of the chief, which is what it’s about.  

“But these implications are important. What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. It might be useful here to look back at this forgotten anthropological literature, with which Lévi-Strauss would have been intimately familiar, to get a sense of just how dramatic these seasonal differences might be”

So, where the authors were making shit up about the Nambikwara and wasting my life, here they do come up with actual examples of seasonal variations in the level of hierarchy and equality of a society, and there is a lot we can learn from this – if we focus on all of the things that Graeber and Wengrow choose to consistently ignore:

> The key text here is Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat’s (1903) ‘Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo’. The authors begin by observing that the circumpolar Inuit ‘and likewise many other societies … have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’.

“In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. 

“During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin – much more so than the Nambikwara chiefs in the dry season. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea.4

OK, so most of this is accurate, except that I have no idea where they get the part about summer bands being organized around 20-30 people under a single male leader – it’s definitely not in the book they’re referencing, and I tried looking elsewhere but didn’t see anything but I wasted so much time on the nambikwara that I didn’t want to waste more time on this – so maybe it is true, or maybe they made it up, and if you know the answer feel free to let me know.

In any case what Mauss actually says  about summer settlement size is that:

“From one end of the Eskimo area to the other, this group [meaning the settlement] consists of a family, defined  in the narrowest sense of this word:  a man and his wife  (or,  if there is  room, his wives)  plus their unmarried children …  In  excep­tional cases, a tent may include an older relative, or a widow who has not remarried and her children,  or a guest or two. 

And these aren’t settlements made up of individual families, the settlements are just isolated individual families “located at a considerable distance from one another.”

but anyhow, the authors continue:

“Mauss thought the Inuit were an ideal case study because, living in the Arctic, they were facing some of the most extreme environmental constraints it was possible to endure. 

“Yet even in sub-Arctic conditions, Mauss calculated, physical considerations – availability of game, building materials and the like – explained at best 40 per cent of the picture. (Other circumpolar peoples, he noted, including close neighbours of the Inuit facing near-identical physical conditions, organized themselves quite differently.) To a large extent, he concluded, Inuit lived the way they did because they felt that’s how humans ought to live.

Ooh 40% – that’s a very specific number.  It’d be interesting to see how Mauss got at that figure.  Did he do some kind of data analysis, or was that just a sort of guesstimate?  Let’s do a deep dive and find out…

So, if you read the book they’re referring to …  drumroll …. Mauss never says anything about 40% of anything, ever!  Just straight up making shit up, again.   Hey Bert, I made up some numbers bert!  69 Bert!

Not only that, but more importantly, Mauss basically says the exact opposite of what the authors are saying here.  

What Mauss actually says, sounding like a proto-behavioural ecologist, is that the seasonal differences between the Inuit’s social organization and cultural practices are almost entirely explained by material conditions – specifically the migration patterns of the animals that they hunt! 

“We must look to the Eskimo way of life for the causes of this situation [meaning their dual settlement patterns and cultural social structure]. Indeed, this is not at all difficult to understand; it is, on the contrary, a remarkable application of the laws of biophysics and of the necessary symbiotic relation among animal species. 

“European explorers have frequently insisted  that, even with European equipment,  there is no better diet nor better economic system in these regions than that adopted  by the Eskimo.  They are governed by environmental circumstances.

“In summary,  summer opens  up an  almost unlimited area for  hunting  and  fishing,  while  winter  narrowly  restrictsb this area.10  This  alternation provides  the rhythm of concen­tration and dispersion for the morphological organization of Eskimo society.  The population congregates  or scatters like the  game.  The  movement  that  animates  Eskimo  society  is synchronized with that of the surrounding life.

The only thing that Mauss points to that animal migration patterns don’t explain is why the Inuit choose to specifically live in multifamily igloos instead of living in separate houses in the winter, and why they build assembly houses, which the authors ludicrously called “monumental architecture” when referring to the palaeolithic versions of these types of small buildings.  

“The natives could have placed their tents side by side .. or they could have constructed small houses instead of living in family groups under the same roof.  One ought not to forget that the kashim, or men’s house, and the large house where several branches of the same family reside are not confined to the Eskimo.  They are found among other  peoples and, consequently, cannot be the result of special features unique to the organization of these northern societies.  

“They have to be related, in part, to certain characteristics that Eskimo culture has in common with these other cultures.  

And Mauss doesn’t say that other circumpolar people were organized quite differently.  He does say that some Inuit had contact with Athabascans and Algonquins as trading partners and that the Inuit would have benefitted from adopting Athabascan snowshoes instead of the waterproof boots that they used, but that they refused to do so – schizmogenesis?    But he doesn’t say anything about Algonquin or athabascan social organization one way or the other and the Algonquins don’t live in the artic at all, and athabastans lived in alaska in different circumstances, hunting different animals, with different seasonal rhythms, so again, all of this is just totally fake news. 

So that’s 2 cultures out of 2 so far where Graeber and Wengrow seem to have just been making a bunch of shit up about.

Then the authors talk about the cultural and legal differences from summer to winter

“… many aspects of winter life … reversed the values of summer. In the summer, for instance, property rights were clearly asserted and sometimes physically inscribed onto personal objects, especially hunting weapons. But in the communalistic atmosphere of the winter house, generosity trumped accumulation as a route to personal prestige. The right of male patriarchs to coerce their sons (and indeed the group as a whole) was acknowledged only in the summer months. It had no place around the winter hearth, where the principles of Inuit leadership were turned on their head. Legitimate authority became a matter of charisma rather than birthright; persuasion instead of coercion.

And another important change from season to season that Mauss discusses, but that Graeber and Wengrow didn’t get into, is that the inuit barely had any religious life in the summer, and they don’t really observe many taboos or rituals.  But in the winter they have a rich religious and ritual life with many rules to be observed.

So then the authors argue that all of these seasonal difference are because of conscious choice and awareness of different political possibilities, blah, blah, which of course Mauss doesn’t say anything at all about in his book. 

So how can we better explain these important cultural differences from season to season, and what does Mauss have to say about them? 

While Mauss tells us that the dual social structure of the Inuit is the result of the seasonal dispersal patterns of the animals that they hunt,  he doesn’t give us any specific reasons for how that translates into patriarchy and private property in one season vs gender equality and communalism in the other season.  So let’s use our materialist trained noggins to see what we can figure out. 

So remember, that according to Mauss the inuit all congregate together in winter because the seals and walrus they hunt are all clustered in one area each year. 

And in the summer they separate into individual families, because the animals that they hunt and the foods they gather are widely dispersed. 

This give us the information that we need to figure out some pretty parsimonious answers as to what’s going on:  

So for example property relations – why was there more private property in the summer vs more communal property in the winter:

Hunting and fishing in summer were mostly an individual affair.  So you have your individual stuff, and there’s nobody to really share it with, except for your immediate family.

In the winter hunting is communal, so people depend on eachother and share their catches and use eachothers’ property.  And that’s when they make all their social connections.  And there are lots of people around who you want to maintain good relations with, and also who have leverage to pressure you into sharing with them – so there’s are many more reasons and incentives to share, and people to share with vs in the very isolated and lonely summer season.

What about religion?

While some religions like western protestantism are more of an individual affair, in most traditional societies religion is largely a communal affair, and it’s often more about establishing different kinds of social relations and ties, and values and boundaries than about actual beliefs.  

You don’t really need as many practices and rituals if you’re just with your family.  Anyone who’s done an elaborate 3 hour passover seder when a lot of different guests are present with songs, and readings, and spraying wine and throwing rubber frogs at everyone, vs the five minute version with just mom and dad and siblings knows what I’m talking about.  

And how do inuit settlement patterns explain differences in gender relations?

The authors want us to believe that the inuit consciously understood that they had many social possibilities and that they chose patriarchy in the summer and equality in the winter, as opposed to us who are stuck.  

Well, here’s a description of inuit gender relations from a book called Inuit Women by Janet Mancini Bilson and Kyra Mancici 

“Life was hard for the Inuk woman, as one elder recalls: “She was the first to rise and the last to sleep. Her husband was always right—she could be punished by her parents for not pleasing her husband.” In terms of power distribution, the husband was clearly the head of the family: “He had the final word, and that’s just the way it was.” The Inuit tended to accept the principle of ultimate male authority, as an elder recalls: “The man was the boss . . . all the men.” 

Now this sounds to me like women were actually pretty stuck in gender hierarchy during the summer. 

Did women consciously choose this situation over and over every single summer because it’s some fun and kinky SM game to play subservient wife, or because of some random Inuit values that just emerge from the mysterious extraterrestrial inuit mind? 

Obviously not – men imposed this on women, and women tolerated it.  So what are the conditions that gave men the advantage to be able to impose this on women in the summer but not in winter?

Remember the two criteria for hierarchy: control over resources and having no better alternatives to access those resources. 

Well, in the summer, women are in single family units where they are almost entirely dependent for survival on father and brothers who do all the hunting.  And father and brothers are probably physically stronger than they are on top of that, and they’re hoarding their hunting weapons as private property not to he shared with their wives.   Private property in this case is most likely a concommitant of gender hierarchy!

Meanwhile tents are a large distance from one another in summer, so it’s hard to escape and there isn’t really any great place to escape to.  Since everyone is busy feeding their immediate families and chasing very dispersed resources, it’s a significant imposition to suddenly show up at your brother’s house and be another mouth to feed, so that everyone gets 15-20% less food thanks to you.

In other words, the conditions inherent to the economic activities of summer put men at a general bargaining power advantage vis à vis women.  

Now, women still had a decent amount of bargaining power and Bilson and Mancini point out that men could not survive without female labour either.  So if need be, a woman could play a dangerous game of brinksmanship to get concessions out of men – but a lot of cultural norms specifically exist to avoid these chaotic and dangerous power struggles which can end in catastrophe for the winners as well as the losers.  

That’s why a woman’s parents would punish her for being disobedient – because in the long run it could mean death for her and her kids and her husband as well. 

If there’s a physical fight, the man will likely win.  But it’s extremely dangerous to ever let it get anywhere near that point when you’re all alone for several months with only your immediate family.  That’s why inuit culture is famously extremely averse to any expressions of anger, even moreso than other hunter gathers many of whom share that same cultural trait.  See Jane Briggs book Never in Anger.  

And contrary to the idea of conscious choice, the whole point of cultural rules is usually to avoid conscious choices, to avoid individuals making calculations that might seem like they’re in your short term interest, but that will doom you or the wider group in the long run.  

Think about Kosher laws against eating swine.  Marvin Harris noticed that laws against eating swine exist not in the middle east among Jews and Muslims, but also in other regions around the world.  And what these cultures share in common is that in those areas, it’s only possible to feed pigs with the same foods that humans eat.  

If only some people raise pigs, or if it’s a good harvest year, raising pigs is a great idea to improve your farmer diet.  But but once everyone starts to do it, or when harvests are bad, suddenly you end up with massive food shortages, and starvation and class war between pig owners and non pig owners and chaos and social collapse.  

If you depend on peoples’ individual rational choices, then everyone will want to raise pigs, even even they know that it might kill them in the long run.   So it’s more effective to make it a deeply ingrained religious and social taboo where the actual cause is obscured and people just don’t even consider it in the first place because the whole idea of eating pigs just makes you supernaturally horrified.  

So after a few rounds of pig caused famines, people in these areas developed these taboos.  Just like Inuit must have developed patriarchal values after repeated power struggles causing chaos.  Over time, as a result of some of these battles, the values of the society end up reflecting the balance of power of the society,  determining the winner in advance in order to avoid constant battles. 

Meanwhile, in the winter, the inuit lived in multifamily homes in large settlements with many homes close together.  This means that both men and women had their relatives around – and women in particular had male relatives around.  This means that if anyone tried to bully a women, her brothers and father and uncles would have something to say about it.  Also any woman will likely have close relatives and friends around that she can move in with if she wants to get a way from her husband or divorce him.

I think that these explanations are much more parsimonious and insightful than decontextualized “conscious choice” and “experimenting with social possibilities”. 

LAKOTA BUFFLO HUNT

Now the authors move south from the arctic to the great plains of north america

“Plains nations were one-time farmers who had largely abandoned cereal agriculture, after re-domesticating escaped Spanish horses and adopting a largely nomadic mode of life. 

The authors continue, discussing the observations of early 20th century anthropologist Robert Lowie

“In late summer and early autumn, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet, as Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis. Once the hunting season – and the collective Sun Dance rituals that followed – were complete, such authoritarianism gave way to what he called ‘anarchic’ forms of organization, society splitting once again into small, mobile bands. Lowie’s observations are startling:

[and here they quote Lowie]

“”In order to ensure a maximum kill, a police force – either coinciding with a military club, or appointed ad hoc, or serving by virtue of clan affiliation – issued orders and restrained the disobedient. In most of the tribes they not only confiscated game clandestinely procured, but whipped the offender, destroyed his property, and, in case of resistance, killed him. The very same organisation which in a murder case would merely use moral suasion turned into an inexorable State agency during a buffalo drive. However … coercive measures extended considerably beyond the hunt: the soldiers also forcibly restrained braves intent on starting war parties that were deemed inopportune by the chief; directed mass migrations; supervised the crowds at a major festival; and might otherwise maintain law and order.46

Back to Graeber and Wengrow:

“During a large part of the year,’ Lowie continued, ‘the tribe simply did not exist as such; and the families or minor unions of familiars that jointly sought a living required no special disciplinary organization. The soldiers were thus a concomitant of numerically strong aggregations, hence functioned intermittently rather than continuously.’ But the soldiers’ sovereignty, he stressed, was no less real for its temporary nature. As a result, Lowie insisted that Plains Indians did in fact know something of state power, even though they never actually developed a state.

In other words the reason you had a police force part of the year, but then no enforcement of even murder for the rest of the year is not because of random conscious choices about political possibilities, but because during the buffalo hunt, you aggregated in big enough numbers to actually have a force capable of enforcing rules.  As lowie says – the tribe simply did not exist for much of the rest of the year as people were dispersed into small groups to pursue seasonally dispersed resources – somewhat similar to the inuit but with larger small bands not just isolated families.  

I’m suspicious of Lowie saying that small bands didn’t require disciplinary organization – the fact that Lowie talks about a murder case being dealt with moral suasion suggests to me that they did need discipline, but that you had no one to enforce it.  In a small band setting, it becomes really dangerous to punish or kill someone, even a murderer, because it can turn into a feud and destroy your ability to survive.  This is why most hunting and gathering societies have strict rules about anger and violence.  People would like to control murderers during the off season, but they can’t do it effectively.  

In his article Lowie compares this seasonal change to the season changes of the inuit as described by Mauss, and like Mauss, Lowie attributes social change to economic and logistical factors, and not Graebgrow’s shroom hyper consciousness. 

The authors continue, writing as if this stuff breaks the mold of strawman anthropology:

“It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between economic categories. 

“The Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine or Lakota would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to the other. They were a kind of band/state amalgam. In other words, they threw everything askew.

> Scholarship does not always advance. Sometimes it slips backwards. A hundred years ago, most social scientists understood that those who live mainly from wild resources were not normally restricted to tiny ‘bands’. As we’ve seen, the assumption that they were only gained ground in the 1960s. 

Ugh – There are zillions of articles discussing all the different types of hunter gatherers with different kinds of social organiztion – see Robert Kelley’s book The Foraging Spectrum originally written in 1995 and last updated in 2014 – and articles debating the implications of hierarchical vs egalitarian hunter gatherers, on what life was like for our early ancestors.  It’s a huge literature that Graeber and Wengrow seem to have no curiosity about.    

It is true that in the 1960s people paid less attention to non egalitarian foragers or less egalitarian foragers, because everyone was so excited about discovering the existence of hyper-egalitarian foragers, and by the very hopeful and inspiring possibility that humanity may have egalitarian origins and that we might be best suited to live in egalitarian societies. 

The authors continue:

> Since in this new, evolutionist narrative ‘states’ were defined above all by their monopoly on the ‘legitimate use of coercive force’, the nineteenth-century Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen as evolving from the ‘band’ level to the ‘state’ level roughly every November, and then devolving back again come spring. Obviously, this is silly. No one would seriously suggest such a thing. Still, it’s worth pointing out because it exposes the much deeper silliness of the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with. You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.

Again, what’s silly is pretending that anthropologists from the 1960s and 70s were time-warped from the 1860s and 70s.  A social evolutionist would not be freaked out by the lakota police, they’d be interested in thinking about whether or not that type of institution might eventually get “stuck” and turn into an authoritarian system and, they’d be wondering if some authoritarian chieftainships we’ve seen in recent times might have had their origins in this type of institution in the past, and Lowie actually talks about this briefly. 

And legitimite use of coercive force is not a « new evolutionist » definition,  it’s Max Weber from 1919. Social evolutionists and anthropologists and archaeologists are always trying to come up with a better definition of the state – it’s one of those worbs that no one agrees on exactly what it means that I really need to do an episode on.  

Anyhow, they go on:   

> Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ types, since what have been identified as the diagnostic features of ‘complexity’ – territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population.

No that doesn’t through anything into disarray at all – I don’t like the simple vs complex categories – but the term “Complex” hunter gatherers was specifically invented to describe the Pacific Northwestcoast people like the Kwakiutl who switched social structures back and forth seasonally, and much more dramatically than the inuit or the fake nambikwara did.  And these seasonal cultures don’t consciously choose to brush aside those institutions, those institutions evaporate as the society moves on to an economic activity that’s incompatible with maintaining those institutions, even when it would be preferable to do so.

The authors continue:

> Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognize that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgement has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history at all any more. Nobody has yet proposed an alternative.

So here I sort of agree with them, in that the categories that we have are not well developed, and good alternatives or rather, elaborations on the categories that we’ve been using are in order.  I’ll talk about these categories and the problems with them another time because I think it’s useful, and I have a lot to say about it, but what’s relevant here is that instead of developing better categories, the authors seem to want to just throw away all categories and lie on the carpet schrooming about the oneness of everything, leaving us unable to understand anything about being stuck in hierarchy. 

Ok, so now the authors bring it all back home, and they link all the cultures they’re been talking about back to the upper palaeolithic european burials from the beginning of the chapter.  

> Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments [not true] and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them [None of those cultures did this, except the Lakota] all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable.  

So at the beginning of the chapter they use the rich burials of upper palaeolithic europe to suggest that inequality has no origin, but then five minutes ago they tell us that they’re not actually signs of inequality at all, but rather just reverence of freaks, but now they’re telling us that they were in fact building authoritarian structures – so i guess they are signs of inequality?  They don’t give any other reason to think paleolithic europeans were building authoritarian structures.

And notice how if you take this seriously, that it implies that people are saying “ok, it’s winter, let’s do patriarchy – it’s summer, let’s do gender equality!  It’s the dry season, let’s not punish murderers, but now it’s the buffalo season, we should police murderers!”  Really?  

And it’s completely incorrect to say that these societies did all of these shifts “on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable” –  because their social orders were about as fixed and immutable as our own.  Every single winter the inuit had patriachy.  Every single summer they had more gender equality.   Every single year the plains tribes had a hard time punishing murders and other disturbances – but every single buffalo season they could enforce those rules.  

If these social systems were just random choice, or about some kind of mysterious internal cultural logic that the authors and the sources that they cite all forgot to tell us about, then why is it always the men who dominate in inuit summer instead of taking turns with the women?

Why doesn’t any culture ever have a different system every season, or every year?  Or why didn’t they cycle through 15 different seasons with 15 different social structures?  Why are they always they just stuck with the same two over and over… 

It’s because in different seasons, different environmental and economic conditions which mostly repeat every single year, change the balance of powers of various actors, which results in different social structures and different institutions and practices.  

These are the sorts of things we need to think about and understand if we want to identify the and modify the causes of hierarchy in our society and these are the sorts of things the authors insist on de-emphasizing and ignoring and inventing things about over and over.  

OK so now, at the end of the 3rd chapter of the book the authors pose their big thesis question in this section titled

> WHY THE REAL QUESTION IS NOT ‘WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY?’ BUT ‘HOW DID WE GET STUCK?’

and they tell us that

“If we are right, and if human beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again, the implications are profound. 

and what were they doing for the first 200,000 years before that though?  Don’t think about it Bert!

“For one thing, it suggests that Pierre Clastres was quite right when he proposed that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so

OK, that I can totally get behind – yes, people in smaller scale traditional societies have to be more politically conscious than we are, because they have direct involvement in their political systems.  Traditional people very often are their political system – they are the government – i.e. the people who make and enforce rules – or else they at least have continual direct contract with the people who do, be it the chiefs or their husbands or parents or clan mothers.    

We on the other hand, who vote once every few years, can live our lives having no contact with our political decision makers and no idea how they actually do things.  And even if we spend all day researching it, we still might have no actual experience engaging with it.   And where we do constantly engage with politics and government – in the family, the workplace, and school – the common definition of the word politics and government are commonly defined in such a way that we don’t even conceived of any of this stuff is politics and so we sleepwalk right through it.  

This why people think that donald trump and vladimir putin are rescuing the world from the lizard people new word order pedophiles Agenda 69 bill gates biolabs or the whatever nonsense of the day is. 

I’d also say that traditional people are not only more politically conscious than we are, but that they are also often more conscious of the material conditions that generate their cultural practices.

Like if you ask any peasant in rural china they’ll tell you that patrilocal residence is the cause of male dominance in their society, or if you ask an central african forager or their farmer neighbours about why their cultures and values are so differerent, they’ll point out to you that it has a lot to do with their economic actives, as per Colin Turnbull. 

And speaking of categories, a Bilo farmer in central african speaking to Jerome Lewis, spontaneously explained the differences between his culture and the neighbouring egalitarian Mbjendjele in terms of immediate vs delayed return categories that hunter gatherer specialists use. 

These people certainly have a way better understanding of what causes hierarchy in their societies than the two PhD scholars who wrote Dawn of Everything do!

KWAKIUTL

And here the authors switch to the Kwakiutl who call themselves Kwakwakawakw – and they’re one of the famous Pacific Northwest Coast societies that I’ve discussed a few times who were hunter gatherers, but who had an elaborate hierarchy, with chiefs and different social classes, commoners, nobility and slaves.  And they also had a seasonal social structure.  

And this time the authors are basing themselves on the work of Franz Boaz, who lived with and wrote about the Kwakiutl at the turn of the century. 

> Here, Boas discovered, it was winter – not summer – that was the time when society crystallized into its most hierarchical forms, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastline of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over compatriots classified as commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations – still ranked, but with entirely different and much less formal structures. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter – literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year 

and then they ask why did scholars ignore this phenomenon, even the anarchist clastres?  kind of like i always ask why did anarchist graeber totally ignore all the gender egalitarian anarcho communist societies his whole life…

“The answer is probably a simple one: seasonality was confusing. In fact, it’s kind of a wild card. The societies of the Great Plains created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving when they dispersed into smaller groups. But those of central Brazil dispersed into foraging bands as a way of asserting a political authority that was ineffectual in village settings. 

what???   the authors literally just said that the reason the nambikwara dispersed into small bands was “as a way of asserting political authority”!   Like not – oh we need to obey a leader in order to be efficient hunters and survive the dangers of this season – but instead they want us to think that the nambikwara were thinking “gee, all this equality is so boring – why don’t we ditch our productive farms and split up into small groups chasing snakes and small animals on the edge of starvation for 7 months (which is how Levi-Strauss describes the hunting season, in his articles) just so that we can play fun hierarchy and obey our chief more!”  This is what I mean by this book makes its readers stupid. 

And they continue:

“Among the Inuit, fathers ruled in the summertime; but in winter gatherings patriarchal authority and even norms of sexual propriety were challenged, subverted or simply melted away. 

By the way, if you’re inuit and you wanted to have sex outside of marriage in the summer, the main options you had would have been to have sex with your mom or dad or your brothers and sisters or if you were lucky your aunt – because there was no one else nearby … like gee i wonder why they didn’t do that…  

Anyhow back to why seasonality is confusing to anthropologists:

> The Kwakiutl were hierarchical at both times of year, but nonetheless maintained different forms of hierarchy, giving effective police powers to performers in the Midwinter Ceremonial (the ‘bear dancers’ and ‘fool dancers’) that could be exercised only during the actual performance of the ritual. At other times, aristocrats commanded great wealth but couldn’t give their followers direct orders. Many Central African forager societies are egalitarian all year round, but appear to alternate monthly between a ritual order dominated by men and another dominated by women.51 (knight 1991)

> In other words, there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question.

No patterns!  No categories!  Nothing happens for any reasons except choice and free will because we exist entirely in our minds and not the real world!  

As always this is all upside down, moishe kapoyel.    

Like I pointed out in the last episode, the relevant conditions to hierarchy or equality are not about winter vs summer, or forest vs savannah – but about what activities you do in those environments and what balance of powers results from it. 

Many cultures, like the Inuit, disperse in summer and aggregate in winter.  Why?  It’s not because of random choices and shroom consciousness, and it’s not because « summer causes dispersal » whatever that means – but because in a lot of places food is more sparse in hotter weather as animals disperse and there are less concentrations of things like fruits or edible insects.  

And whereas for the Inuit the time of congregating together was a time of more equality for the reasons we looked at, for the Kwakiutl the village was where class hierarchy was most important.  And the simple reason for this was because that’s when the chief would be redistributing food in potlatch feasts, according to class.  The higher your rank, the more you got.  

So you end up with opposite pattern of the inuit but that’s precisely because of material realities, not in spite of them like Graeber and Wengrow want us to believe.   

Again, the kwakiutl were as stuck as anyone, with the same structures repeating every year. 

So yes there is one single pattern – and it’s the material conditions shape social structure and customs.  

And the things about the “african forager societies” where they’re egalitarian all year round, but men alternate in dominating the ritual order every new moon, that’s referring to the Mbendjele of central africa – and the authors attribute this to Chris Knight, but it’s actually the work of Morna Finnegan’s and her writing on communism in motion, which I’ll link to, and I’ll talk about it another time because it’s super important in terms of how equality is maintained in a society with potentially competing groups like men vs women.    

OK, now we get to the big question of the whole book, which the authors never answer because they’re so dedicated to not understanding where hierarchy comes from:

“If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?

Boom – so there it is right in the authors thesis statement.  To the authors, the hierarchy that they’ve been describing to us is grand theatre, playing game and expedience.  Inuit women are subservient and Kwakiutl lower classes eat less food, and slaves do all the dirty work, because they’re “just playing games” or somehow it’s expedient – for whom?  And the reason that we’re stuck in hierarchy today isn’t because of material conditions, it’s because we all became morons and we “forgot” that we were playing these awesome super fun hierarchy video games. 

Now the idea of temporary expedience as a reason for seasonal hierarchy which the authors mention along with play and theatre – that would makes sense if we were talking about democratic hierarchies, like the Nambikwara chieftainship.  But the hierarchies that we’re stuck in today are dominance hierarchies, so that doesn’t help us – unless we want to explore the different ways that a democratic hierarchy can slide into dominance hierarchy in the right circumstances – and there’s a whole literature on that that’s super interesting, but of course the authors won’t touch it with a ten foot pole because it would mean looking at circumstances.  So instead we get 700 pages of doggerel about nothing.  

It’s really easy to get confused by ridiculous explanations for the practices of people in traditional cultures because we tend to think of these people as foreign and exotic, especially the way the authors describe their practices totally out of context from the circumstances they take place in.  But just imagine if someone was making these sort claims about our society:  

No society demonstrates the power of political consciousness more than the members of the McDonalds tribe who shift from hierarchy to equality every week and even every day!  

Workers and managers and franchise owners and corporate executives all form a chain of command of extreme political inequality.  The low ranking workers have to obey dictates on how to dress and how to act and what they can and can’t say, and if they disobey, they are at the mercy of their manages who can eject from the tribe and leave them to fend for themselves, facing eviction from their homes and starvation.   But then, every weekend and at the end of every shift, outside of the grounds of the holy MacDonalds monumental architecture, even the godlike CEO chief has no power over the lowliest janitor.  If they see eachother at the grocery store or going for a walk in the hills, they greet eachother as equal citizens.  

What’s happening here is that McDonald workers understand different political possibilities, and they’re assembling and dismantling hierarchies for games and grand theatre, and expedience, on a weekly and even daily basis.

That is how stupid this chapter is.  But we buy it because we don’t know enough about the cultures they describe and because they don’t give us any context.  

And then the authors finally conclude this shit show of a chapter with the following:

> We do not have to choose any more between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story. [diificult choice!] Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge (as Lévi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them – at least the most reflexive among them – just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature. They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.

The stinking hypocrisy of this – the chapter is full of insults to anthropologists for supposedly infantilizing indigenous cultures or our ancestors by doing things like using categories, or comparing human hierarchies to animal hierarchies or for the heinous crime insisting that we might have egalitarian origins – meanwhile the authors are the ones turning indigenous people into barney the purple shrooming hyperconscious neoliberal social structure choosing caricature cartoon dinosaurs.

The authors portray indigenous people and our palaeolithic ancestors the way that cavemen or fictional indigenous people are portrayed in bad movies and TV shows.  They do freaky deaky things for no reason and with no context – because it looks cool – they choose hierarchy and male dominance and slavery for fun and grand seasonal theatre – so mysterious – and they have superhuman powers of mystical wisdom, unlike us, they can just magically morph their social structure to one form or another for some magical reason that never gets explained in this book.  

It’s like when educated liberals think they’re sooo much more advanced than racist conservatives because liberals treat brown people like they’re objects of worship and self flagellation and guilt and put them on a weird pedastal that’s almost as dehumanizing and racist as old school conservative racist stereotypes.  

And the authors conclude: 

“If there is a riddle here it’s this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens – supposedly the wisest of apes – allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? Was this really a consequence of adopting agriculture? Of settling down in permanent villages and, later, towns? Should we be looking for a moment in time like the one Rousseau envisaged, when somebody first enclosed a tract of land, declaring: ‘This is mine and always will be!’ Or is that another fool’s errand?

“These are the questions to which we now turn.

And those are questions that that I give them enormous props for asking, but which they have rendered themselves utterly incapable of answering, because they insist on ignoring or insulting and slandering all of the scholarship that could actually explain those things.  

Next time we’ll see how the authors weird attitudes and prejudices cause them to miss the answers to some of these questions when they finally investigate an actual egalitarian anarcho communist society – and decide to dismiss and insult them instead of learning anything from them.  

---

Oof that one was a doozy, if you want to know more about all the stuff I talked about today, a link to the bibliography for this episode should be up soon in the show notes and video notes, and you can also find link to written transcripts that you can share with people who are more into reading.  

Also, I’ve been doing a fun series of talks with Derrick Varn – (hey varn!) about anthropology and politics – If you don’t already know him Varn is walking enyclopedia of intellectual history in general and he knows about everything and it’s grandmother when it comes to socialist intellectual history so check out his Varn Vlog youtube show / podcast to see us having some fun talks, plus check out his other stuff, he’s a regular on the This is Revolution show which is an excellent materialist political talk show, and he’s doing Mortal Science with Ezri from Swampside Chats where they question and re-evaluate the ins and outs of Marxism.  So check’em’er out as Blezz Beats says.  

And I finally did another interview with Arnold on the Fight Like an Animal show – the first interview we did the audio was too messed up, so he never released it, but this one is a lot of fun, so check it out and check out his show in general if you haven’t already, it’s maybe my #1 favourite political podcast. 

And I have an art history correction to do, but I’ll do it next time because this episode is just so damned long! 

And finally – if you can – gimme money. it takes me more than a month full time to make these critique videos and it blows a real hole in my already extremely modest income and I’ve been doing this non-stop since august without a break so that I can finish this before people lose interest in the book – so if what I’m doing is valuable to you and you have disposable income, please subscribe to my patreon.

I don’t monetize my channel even though I’m eligible for it, because I don’t want to gunk up your life with more stupid advertisements that you’re already subjected to, and I don’t do paywalled content because that defeats the whole purpose of doing a show geared at spreading knowledge and skills.  So your subscriptions are not purchasing a commodity, they’re solidarity payments, because you’re someone ho can afford it and you want the show to keep going.  And note that I charge per episode not per months because it takes so long to actually make these and sometimes I need to take breaks and work on different project, and I don’t want to be stuck cranking out stuff just for the sake of cranking out stuff.   

And please like and subscribe and also review this show on itunes or urple music, its really important and helps the show pop up more readily on searches – and contact me with any corrections or suggestions or comments at worldwidescrotes@gmail.com or comment on yout u-tubes … and until next time … seeya!

---

ADDENDUM: LEVI-STRAUSS MESHUGAS

This is part of the script I had written before I discovered that Levi-Strauss was wrong about the seasonal settlement patterns of the nambikwara.  N.B. that almost every nomadic culture has seasonal settlement patterns, usually more dispersed in the hot season and more condensed in the wet season, but sometimes it’s the opposite depending on the resources they depend on.  Even though he got the Nambikwara wrong, many cultures shift to different subsistence activities by season – for example the Nuer actually do pastoralism for most of the year and then do farming for a couple of months, much like the ancient Israelites did.   Many societies who end up being forced to abandon hunting and gathering begin by doing agriculture part of the year like this, and then relying on it more and more as populations increase and surrounding territories are cut off from them.  

…the interesting thing for us in terms of politics, is explaining the change in the Nambikwara’s social structure in terms of having greater or lesser authority in different seasons.

Except there’s a huuuge problem – and that is that Levi-Strauss does not actually say anything about the Nambikwara chief’s level of authority changing from season to season!  

Like maybe the authors got this from some other authors and forgot to cite them – or maybe they’re remembering the Levi-Strauss article that they cite incorrectly from having read them 20 years ago, and not bothering to re-read them again which would be typical – but I kind of think they’re just making it up! 

What’s giving me this impression is that in Dawn of Everything the authors seem to be saying the opposite of what they said about the chief’s authority in their Farewell to the Childhood of Man article from 2015. 

In that article which is a bit like a combination of chapters 1 & 3 of Dawn of Everything, the authors talk about the Nambikwara chief’s varying levels of authority this way:

Chiefs made or lost their reputations by offering guidance during ‘the nomadic adventures of the dry season’. And with the greater abundance of the wet season, a chief who had performed this task well could attract large numbers of followers to settle in villages, where he directed the construction of houses and tending of gardens.5 

And I emphasize those words, because when I read that passage, those words give me the impression that the chief had more authority in gardening season than in the foraging season.  

And when I first read Farewell to the Childhood of Man a few years ago, I went to look at the Levi-Strauss article that they cited, and he says that during the foraging season, if the chief doesn’t do a good job, his followers will eventually ditch him and he could lose his position as chief entirely if he doesn’t have a large enough band to be viable.  And he says that conversely a chief who was successful in the foraging season has his position cemented for the gardening season. 

So that, along with my knowledge of other cultures, seemed to reinforce my initial understanding, that during the foraging season when the Nambikwara were nomadic, the chief’s authority was lower because people had the option to leave, and he had please his followers in order to keep them, and then in the gardening season where people can’t just leave, his authority was stronger. 

Like think about your job – if there’s a labour shortage and you can just pick up and get a similar job anywhere, your boss has less authority over you. If you show up late one day, he’ll think twice about firing you or punishing you because he needs you there.  THat’s like the nambikwara in the foraging season. 

But if there’s a job shortage and you’re stuck in that job, your boss authority is much higher and you have to be on your toes and make sure to always smile and laugh at his stupid jokes.  And that’s more like the rainy season where people are stuck on their plots of land and with their Chief.  

But then in Dawn of Everything, the authors are saying the exact opposite of what they said in 2015 – here they say:

Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the ‘nomadic adventures’ of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner; in the wet season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. In doing so they cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.”

So when I read that I was like wait what – oh shit, did I read wrong the first time in the 2015 article?   

At first I got really embarassed thinking that I must have misread the 2015 article and the Levi-Strauss article.  So I reread the 2015 article, and then I went back and re-read the Levi-Strauss article, and then I also went and read a book that Levi-Strauss wrote about the Nambikwara – and then I realized – wait a second – although it’s a reasonable inference to think that the chief has less authority when people can just leave, and more when they’re stuck in the same place – Levi-Strauss doesn’t actually specifically say anything about the chief having different levels of authority in different seasons!

Levi-Strauss does talk about how the chief has no coercive authority, and how his only actual power is persuasion and example – which by the way means that the Nambikwara chiefdom is actually a democratic hierarchy, not a dominance hierarchy – but he talks about this as being the the case all year ‘round, not about in one season or another.

The following quote is the bulk of what the Levi-Strauss says about the chief’s level of authority in the article that the authors cite, and it’s more or less the same thing that he says in his other writings about the Nambikwara:

During the dry season, the Nambikuara live in nomadic bands, each one under the leadership of a chief, who, during the sedentary life of the rainy months, may be either a village chief or a person of position…

Each year, at the end of the rainy season, that is, in April or in early May, the semi-permanent dwellings laid in the vicinity of the gallery-forest where the gardens are cleared and tilled, are abandoned and the population splits into several bands formed on a free choice basis…

Personal prestige and the ability to inspire confidence are … the foundations of leadership in Nambikuara society. .. both are necessary in the man who will become the guide of … the nomadic life of the dry season. For six or seven months, the chief will be entirely responsible for the management of his band. It is he who orders the start of the wandering period, selects the routes, chooses the stopping points and the duration of the stay at each of them, whether a few days or several weeks. He also orders and organizes the hunting, fishing, collecting and gathering expeditions, and determines the conduct of the band in relation to neighboring groups. 

When the band’s chief is, at the same time, a village chief [meaning when they’re in the farming season] … his duties do not stop there. He will determine the moment when, and the place where, the group will settle; he will also direct the gardening and decide what plants are to be cultivated; and, generally speaking, he will organize the occupations according to the seasons’ needs and possibilities.

Seasons s apostrophe, meaning both seasons.

Then then he goes back to talking about the nomadic season:

If the chief’s authority appears too exacting, if he keeps too many women for himself … or if he does not satisfactorily solve the food problem in times of scarcity, discontent will very likely appear. Then, individuals, or families, will separate from the group and join another band believed to be better managed. … The day will come when the chief finds himself heading a group too small to face the problems of daily life, and to protect his women from the covetousness of other bands. In such cases, he will have no alternative but to give up his command and to rally, together with his last followers, a happier faction. Therefore, Nambikuara social structure appears continuously on the move.

And that’s about it when it comes to the chief’s level of authority.

Like maybe the chief does have more authority in the hunting season – if you know something I don’t please let me know – but there’s nothing about it in Levi-Strauss one way or the other. 

If it’s true that the chief has more authority in the hunting season, I’d guess that it’s related to the fact that the foraging season is very precarious.  Levi-Strauss keeps talking about how inhospitable the enviornment is and how they have to eat spiders and snakes and the hunting is mostly of small animals and catches are few and far between – so you might need strict group cohesion – Levi-Strauss talks about how the Nambikwara in general seem very passive about decisions and always want to defer to the chief.   And even in hyperegalotarian immediate retrurn hunter gathererers you have hunting party leaders for the duration of the hunt, but I’m really just guessing. 

10.1 Graeber & Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”: What is an “Egalitarian” Society? (TRANSCRIPT)

This is a transcript of this video.
The bibliography for this episode can be found here.
For the audio podcast version click here on a mobile device.

Hello fellow kids!  

And welcome to the second instalment in our critique of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s new book the Dawn of Everything. 

Today we’re going to read and critique the conclusion of the Sagesse de Kandiaronk preview chapter that Graeber and Wengrow released in 2019 and this conclusion is basically unchanged in the actual book, where the chapter is called Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress. 

And we’re going to start off with a short political and anthropological theory/history lesson so that we have the tools to evaluate what we’re reading and also what we’ll be reading in the future, so you can come back to this episode before we critique other parts of the book. 

But first – something unexpected happened right after I recorded this episode – and that is the publication of the full book, the Dawn of Everything. 

My initial plan had been to critique some of the preview articles and chapters from Dawn of Everything that Graeber and Wengrow had been putting out since 2015 before it was published, but I didn’t realize that the UK release date was 3 weeks before the US/Canada release date, so my initial plan got messed up and the book is already out now…

And of course I got a hold of it, and I haven’t had the time to read the whole thing yet, but from what I have read, I can say two big things: 

#1 it’s brilliant and it’s a really wonderful read, full of so much fascinating and illuminating anthropological and historical information, and tying together so much loose gunk that’s floating out there in the ocean of anthropology and history about human origins, in a really clear and insightful way.  And to my great surprise, it’s maybe my favourite Graeber book of all – and I’m relieved, because I really hate a lot of the stuff that’s in some of the preview chapters, and I was expecting this to be his worst book.

Now I still disagree with a lot of what’s in this book, but now I just respectfully disagree, instead of thinking they were doing something dishonest or incompetent, because for maybe the first time in David Graeber’s career, he actually stops pretending that the past 50 years of hunter gatherer studies on extremely egalitarian societies never happened – I think maybe he was forced to read this literature properly for the first time because of the book – and I’ll be explaining in this episode what I mean by that, and why it’s been making a lot of anthropologists on the left pretty pissed off. 

Which brings us to the second big thing I wanted to say about the book:

The book, as glorious as it is, does not actually answer the big and hugely important questions that it sets out to answer at the beginning – how did we get stuck with these permanent, oppressive hierarchical societies for the past however many thousands of years and what can we do about it?  They hazard a guess at the end, but it’s a really goofy guess as you’ll see when you read it.  

And the reason that they can’t answer these questions is because of bad theory.  The answers are right there under their noses, in the very texts that they cite – they even manage to figure out some of the ingredients, ability to escape for example – but they can’t get the actual answers, because they think that if you look for materialist explanations, that the answers that you’ll find are will be deterministic such that we truly are permanently stuck with hierarchies for ever and ever, which is a common misconception.   Like they can’t even figure out where male domination comes from even though there’s some classic anthropology that explains this pretty successfully, which I’ve covered – and compare my explanation in episodes 7 and 7.1 with the goofy guess they give at the end of the book about refugees in temples if you want a good giggle. And they don’t really understand what hierarchy is.  They think that seasonal hierarchies in traditional societies were just games and theatre rather than the result of bargaining power of different social groups in different seasons, and also practical solutions to the practicalities of seasonal conditions.

And bad theory leads to bad practice – the reason that this book is such a glorious success, but then ends with such a flop, is the same reason that occupy wall street was such a glorious success and then such a pointless flop at the same time, which I’ll talk about in a video which is an outtake from this episode.  And the reason that I started this show is so that our minds are less gunked up with nonsense so that we can have more clarity of vision, better instincts and therefore make better decisions in our political lives. 

But – I’m actually pretty happy that Graeber and Wengrow punted on these questions, because now my work after this episode is cut out for me.  Graeber and Wengrow put together an almost masterpiece and now I get to put the crowning jewel on top without having to do the hard work of setting it up and putting these important questions into public consciousness.

So subsequent to this episode – not exactly sure when, maybe next episode – I am going to answer the central questions of Dawn of Everything which they punted on – how did we get stuck with seemingly permanent entrenched hierarchies – Marx’ riddle of history – and also why some cultures change social structures seasonally – and I’m going to do it using the very texts that Graeber and Wengrow themselves cite and discuss, adding the missing ingredient of some very basic ABC material analysis, which for reason’s that we’ll discuss. seems to have become a lost art.

But for now, let’s get back to the conclusion of The Wisdom of Kandiaronk / Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress. 

So the three main issues that I have with Dawn of Everything, and the preview chapters that have been coming out since 2015 are:

1. Graeber and Wengrow’s allergy to materialist explanations for human social structure – which is the fatal weakness of an otherwise wonderful book.

2. Graeber and Wengrow’s maddening mis-representation of the literature on egalitarian hunter gatherer societies and the intentions of the people who write that literature.

and #3. Graeber and Wengrow’s tirade against the concept of equality and egalitarianism, which is a big problem in our political discourse in general, and which is the central theme of the text that we’ll be reading today.

I’ll be talking about the materialism issue when I tackle the book as a whole so let’s start off with our little theory and history lesson and then the text – but please keep in mind that the rest of this episode, besides this intro was recorded before the book was released – so while everything I’m staying is still accurate, in Dawn of Everything, after a career of ignoring 50 years of hunter gatherer research, Graeber and Wengrow finally do talk a little bit about actual egalitarian societies, and they do so honestly – so my condescending attitude that I express in this video is a bit obsolete, even if my criticisms of the text that I’m reading are still basically the same.  

OK, let’s do dis:

Now I’m going to be pretty harsh in my critiques today and in the next episode, and I want to say a little bit about the importance of political theory and getting certain things right before I make those critiques, because I want everyone to understand that I’m not just upset because a great anthropologist and thinker got a couple of concepts wrong – I’m upset because of the political real world consequences of getting it wrong. 

For a lot of people political theory can end up being either an academic wankfest or else a bit of a game of identity cosplay.  But when I’m talking to you about theory, the point is to have a basic understanding about how certain things work, so that we actually take political action, that we’re likely to take actions and adopt strategies that move us closer to our goals, and make us less likely to run full speed into a painting of a train tunnel like in a roadrunner cartoon.  

WHAT IS EQUALITY

The meaning of equality in a political context is an extremely simple concept.  But like I always talk about, even the most simple concepts are obscured and confused in our political discourse, even at the highest levels of academia and journalism.  

So, refresher course and you can get more details from my past podcast episodes on left and right:

The word politics refers to everything relating to decision making in groups.  Who gets to decide, who doesn’t, how are decisions made etc.  

In other words, politics is about who has power and how it is exercised.  

So when we’re talking about equality in the context of politics, and Graeber and Wengrow’s book is about anthropology and history as they relate to politics – we’re not talking about people being equal in terms of size, or attractiveness or in terms of their abilities – we’re talking about equality of decision making power. 

Equality means that everyone has an equal say in the decisions that affect them.  In other words, democracy.  And full political equality implies not just representative democracy, but direct democracy.  

And equality of power, has all sorts of implications.  

First it implies a high degree of individual freedom and autonomy.  Because if everyone has equal decision making power, that means that there is no authority figure who has the power to tell anyone what to do.  The only time you can’t do something is if what you’re doing interferes with the autonomy and freedom of other people and they join together to stop you.  

Next, equality of power, also implies a high degree of economic equality.  

Our political discourse always separates decision making involving the state from decision making in the private sphere, like at work in to two totally separate categories.  We tend to think of state decision making as politics, and private decision making as just life.  But that kind of thinking makes us stupid because power is power.  And politics is decision making in any groups, at work and at home as much as in the halls of parliament or congress.  

And when there is great economic inequality, that means that there are some people who dominate the resources that other people need to live, which means that the people with the wealth have the power to make the people without the wealth do what they want all day long, in exchange for some food or shelter or some salary. 

That’s why your boss tells you what to do all day at work, because he owns a revenue generating business and you depend on that revenue to live.  You and Jeff Bezos each have one vote in your political system – if you’re a citizen – but bezos can tell tens of thousands of his employees what they have to do all day, and how to do it and how fast to do it – and he can make them literally piss and shit in bottles and diapers if that suits him.  

And that’s because economic inequality is power inequality, i.e. political inequality.  

Meanwhile the only people that you can boss around is your dog and your kids, because they’re economically dependent on you, just like you’re economically dependent on your boss.  

And wealth inequality also means inequality in terms of government decision making power as well.  

You and George Soros or Bill Gates or the Koch Brothers or Jeff Bezos – you all have one vote each, but all of those zillionaires can afford to hire an armies of lobbyists to work 24-7 to teach your representatives what to think and how to think.  And they can flood them with electoral campaign contributions to incentivize them to do what he want.  

Meanwhile all you can do is vote every few years, and maybe go to a town hall meeting every once in awhile, and ramble about things that you don’t really understand very well, and no one pays much attention to you.  

Third, equality of decision making power also implies that there are power hierarchies or no negative discrimination based on cultural categories, like race, gender, religion etc.  Because cultural discrimination translates into inequalities of decision making power.  

Like in a patriarchal society, men have more power by virtue of their status as men.  In a gerontocracy old people have more power based on their age etc. 

So, in anthropology, like in politics, when we talk about an egalitarian society, we’re talking about a society which has a high degree of equality of decison making power.  And that includes a high degree of economic equality, and a high degree of power equality between cultural categories like age and gender categories.

So in theory, a truly egalitarian society would be one where there are no authority figures, where men and women are equal and where there’s total economic equality. 

And as we’ll see, it turns out  that isn’t just theoretical, there are actually several societies that approach this type of equality – but for some insane reasons that we’ll explore about next episode, David Graeber spent his whole career pretending that these societies do not exist, and also pretending that 50 years of hunter gatherer studies that talk about these societies, never happened. 

And finally, keep in mind that whenever we talk about the political left and right, that the left refers to hierarchy and equality in terms of political power.  The left refers to those who support equality precisely in the ways that I just described – equality of decision making power, which implies cultural equality and economic equality.  And the political right refers to those that support hierarchies of power, which also implies economic inequality and also gender or age or other hierarchies.   

WHY HUNTER GATHERERS

So that’s equality – so now let’s look at hunter gatherer and hunter gatherer studies.    

First, what is a hunter gatherer and why does it matter what hunter gatherers do today or did in the past?  The definition of a hunter gather is sometimes in dispute, but most commonly it’s a negative definition – it’s subsistence level society where it’s members do not do any agriculture.  And that’s a broad category that includes all kinds of societies that sometimes have very little in common with eachother. Like there are nomadic super egaltiarian societies with few possessions that follow herds of animals around all year, and there are sedentary, territorial fishing societies with chiefs and and nobility and slaves and all sorts of societies in between.  

Now all human societies are interesting from the perspective of politics, and I can’t stress enough how if you’re interested in politics, you should be reading ethnographies of different societites – but hunter gatherers are especially interesting in this regard because modern human beings evolved into a species while we were hunter gatherers, and we spent the first 93-97% of our existence as hunter gatherers depending on how you count it.  

Hunting and gathering shaped who we are.  It’s shaped our bodies, and our minds, our desires, our proclivities and our political dispositions.  And many of the problems we have today are commonly seen as being the result of our hunter gatherer bodies and minds being not well adapted to our current lifestyles and environments.   

One non controversial example of this is our endless desire for sugar, salt and fat, which was adaptive in a foraging environment where those things were relatively rare and when we did so much more exercise, but which cause an epidemic of diabetes and heart disease where those things are plentiful and where we sit in front of computers or stand in front of cash registers all day.  

So people have a lot invested in how our hunter gatherer ancestors are and were organized because there’s an implication that if hunter gatherers do or did things a certain way, that this must be the way that we’re best adapted to live.  And many of our social ills are therefore the result of us deviating from our natural species being, the same way that being exposed to so much more sugar than in the palaeolithic era makes us sick today.  

Are we best adapted to be politically and economically egalitarian or are innately hierarchical?  Are humans cooperative or are we competitive?  Are we selfish or altruistic?  Are we monogamous or polygamous and polyamorous.  Is gender natural or is it just an artificial construct?  How much of us is “made” to be any particular way, and how much is determined by culture?   Or are we just a mess of contradictory desires and impulses that aren’t really perfectly adapted for anything at all, but which have worked well enough to survive in a variety of conditions?  These are the sorts of things that people are constantly looking into and debating about when it comes to hunter gatherer societies.

In trying to understand the conditions that we evolved in, we look at archaeology, but hunter gatherer societies don’t leave a lot for us to find that lasts for tens of thousands of years, so we also need to make inferences based on hunter gatherers from today and from recent times who can help us intepret what we find, and who are presumed to share many of the same conditions as our ancestors.   And then we end up with all of these debates about how much the hunter gatherers of recent times resemble or don’t resemble the hunter gatherers of palaeolithic times and how much the conditions of today do and don’t resemble the conditions of 20,000 and 200,000 years ago.

HISTORY OF HUNTER GATHERER STUDIES

Now until the 1960s, there were all sorts of assumptions about hunter gathers among anthropologists which were based on a mix of common popular misconceptions, and also on the work of some famous anthropologists like Alfred Radcliffe Browne and Claude Levi Strauss both of whom had worked among Australian Aborigines in the early 20th century.  

Like a lot of people think that if someone is running around in a grass skirt with a spear that this is a hunter gatherer or close enough – and even many anthropologists have assumed that we can infer things about our palaeolithic ancestors based on anyone that looks “primitive” but most people with grass skirts and spears in recent times are actually horticulturalists – small plot farmers.  Something which didn’t exist in the palaeolithic era and which has completely different incentives and social structure and belief systems than hunting and gathering usually does.  

So, based on all this stuff, it was often assumed that hunter gatherers were male dominated societies where women were basically slaves and babymakers.  

It was assumed that hunter gatherers were made up of bands of closely related males, with unrelated females marrying into the group, and that cooperation was based on advancing the interests of the people genetically closest to you. 

It was assumed that hunter gatherers were fiercely territorial and competed and warred frequently with neighbouring groups.  

It was assumed that most of their food came from male hunting and that female gathering and hunting were relatively unimportant.  

It was assumed that existing hunter gatherer life was a nasty brutish and short, eternal hungry search for food, and that the worlds remaining hunter gatherers were the ones who were too stupid to figure out awesome efficient agriculture, or who were unlucky enough to be stuck in territories unsuited for agriculture.  

And particularly in the popular imagination it was assumed that there were chiefs and priests telling everyone what to do and what to think and to be afraid of powerful vengeful gods. 

MAN THE HUNTER

But then in 1966 there was the first big conference of hunter gatherer specialists from cultural anthropology and archaeology, called the Man the Hunter conference.  And that conference, which established the modern field of huntergather studies, and the research that came after it, completely upended all of these assumptions.  

While there was a variety of different kinds of hunter gather societies, living in all sorts of different circumstances, it turned out that hunter gathers are usually better nourished and healthier than their farmer neighbours.  They usually work less hours and less intensively than farmers do, and the work they do is usually more diverse and more enjoyable.  

Meanwhile archaeological finds showed that prehistoric peoples’ health almost invariably got much worse once they switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture.  And in many places the health of the general population never matches or surpasses hunter gatherer health until the 19th century, except among small urban elites.  

And hunter gatherers weren’t hunter gatherers because they were too stupid to invent or adopt agriculture, or because they lived in conditions that were too harsh for agriculture.  Most of them are well aware of agricultural techniques, but purposefully avoid agriculture as an unpleasant and undignified way to live.  

So for example, archaeology showed that huge parts of north america were perfect for agriculture, yet people stuck with hunting and gathering for 10,000 years.   

In terms of gender relations, far from being male dominated, women in most hunter gather societies tended to have a much higher degree of autonomy and freedom than their farmer or pastoralist counterparts – and several hunter gatherer societies turned out to be the most gender egalitarian societies that we’ve ever known, which we’ll get back to in a bit.    

Surprisingly it turns out that many hunter gatherers are not organized into bands of closely related members, but rather into bands of largely unrelated members that are always coming and going, kind of like a modern urban neighbourhood. 

It was also remarked that many hunter gathers societies are not territorial at all, and that they seem to engage in very little if any intergroup warfare.

Many hunter gatherer societies turned out to have no chiefs, no big men, no religious or patriarchical authorities nor any authorities of any kind.  

And most hunter gatherers don’t worship their ancestors, they aren’t too concerned with their lineage, and and they often have very loose religious beliefs, again kind of like urban people. 

And it turned out that many hunter gatherer societies strictly enforced economic equality via all sorts of interesting methods and institutions.  From social pressure to gambling to sharing on demand to explicit sharing rules.  Competition, grandstanding and status seeking are extreme social taboos in many of these societies, with the best hunters often ritually prevented from gaining status, wealth or power for their skills.  

In these societies, Men, women, and children alike enjoyed a life of material equality and personal freedom that had been considered impossible according to the prevailing cold war era ideology, where freedom and equality were presented as mutually exclusive propositions. 

In particular the kalahari bushmen cultures and the central african rainforest pygmy cultures and the Hadza in Tanzania were described as examples of the type of libertarian communism that socialists had been dreaming of since the early 19th century.  

And in terms of political implications of this research, to paraphrase anthropologist Robert Kelly, these societies were seen not just seen as a model of what our ancestors were like, but also as a model to emulate for our future.  

*“Increasingly dissatisfied, many rejected the materialism of Western society and searched for an alternative way of life in which material possessions meant little, people lived in harmony with nature, and there were no national boundaries to contest. It was the context for John Lennon’s song, Imagine, and for the numerous hippie communes. Hunting and gathering had kept humanity alive for 99 percent of its history; what could we learn from it?”

In the late 1970s and early 80s James Woodburn, who did his field work among the Hadza people in Tanzania, noticed that there was one category of hunter gatherer societies which stood out not only from other hunter gatherers, but from all other known human societies.  

These were the super egalitarian societies that I mentioned earlier, where there’s no political or religious authority, where men and women are as equal as anywhere on earth, and where personal liberty coexists with strictly enforced economic equality.   

“Unlike almost all other human societies, people – men, women and older children alike – are entitled to direct and immediate access to the un-garnered food and other resources of their country. These rights of access are not formally allocated to them and cannot be withdrawn from them. Neither parents nor other kin provide, control or direct access. … These open rights of access  to  material resources are matched by open access to secular knowledge and skills

For members of these societies one might almost say that the notion of property as  theft is not a novel revolutionary ideology but an implicit everyday view of the world”

Woodburn noticed that without exception, all of the societies who had all of these remarkable egalitarian characterstics all practiced the same type of hunting and gathering economy – which also happens to be the simplest type of economy – which means that it also happens to be the economy that was practiced by our first ancestors – where people are nomadic following animals around, and more or less less acquiring food and then eating in within the next few days without processing it or storing it in any elaborate way.  

Woodburn called this an “immediate return” economy, where you produce and the consume right away, as opposed to the “delayed return” economies practiced by every other culture in the world, where you produce now and consume later. 

Starting with his 1982 article, Egalitarian Societies, Woodburn hypothesized about why it is that every single society that’s so egalitarian and autonomous happens to practice an immediate return economy? And he points out that inherent in the practical realities of that type of nomadic hunting and gathering, is the fact that there’s just no real way to dominate anyone.  

No one can control any particular territory or important resources, so there’s no way to force people into the dependence relationships that political hierarchies are mostly based on.  If anyone tries to bully you, you can just go off an join another camp.  If any one tries to monopolize some resources, you can just go somewhere else and get similar resources yourself.  

And importantly, since everyone has access to projectile weapons and poisons, if anyone really gets out of line with domineering or anti social behaviour, they can just be killed or exiled, which is a big disincentive to even try. 

In 1999 Christopher Boehm in his important book Hierarchy in the Forest called this “reverse dominance” where the majority of people together to prevent anyone from becoming dominant.  And according to Boehm this has all sorts of evolutionary implications, because our ancestors killed off all the aggressive alpha male types which led to all sorts of physical and dispositional changes over tome.  

In other words the balance of power is relatively equal between all members of society.  Any person or coalition who tries to dominate others will inevitably fail.  All they can do is cause chaos and then get killed.  And that’s why you develop cultural values to prevent that chaos, to stabilize the system.  That’s not Woordburn talking that’s my original contribution to this body of work, which I’ll elaborate on another episode. 

Note that this is not a utopian argument.  No one is saying that immediate return foragers are magical unicorn people who don’t have competitiveness or dominance instincts.  And no one is saying that they’re innocent children who don’t know the sins of civilization.  It’s just that the conditions that they live in and institutions they have developed in order to adapt to those conditions, prevent a lot of the social ills that we take granted from from happening very frequently.  

Interestingly, game theory studies have shown that immediate return hunter gatherers, actually behave more selfishly when their actions are anonymous and their identities are secret than people from other cultures do!  And that’s because they have such strict obligations to share everything on demand.  

For example when musicologist Michelle Kisliuk casually gave a slice of tomato to an aka man sitting next to her, he immediately looked around, and then cut it into 16 tiny pieces and gave one to every person in sight.

So when people who have sharing norms like that get some privacy they just want to eat the whole damned tomato by themselves!

---

EVOLUTION OF THE WORD EGALITARIAN

Now before the Woodburn articles and before Man the Hunter and the subsequent focus on these hyper egalitarian immediate return societies, the term “egalitarian society” was often used to describe societies that still had significant elements of hierarchy.  

For example, the Nuer who are a traditionally pastoralist people of southern sudan were usually described as an egalitarian society because they have no chiefs, and they are egalitarian in terms of there being equal political authority between men.  But at the same time, they also have clear gender hierarchy and some wealth inequality.  

Or else people would talk about the nations of the Haudenosaunee confederation in north america as being egalitarian because they had a lot of economic equality and gender equality, even though they also had a significant degree of political inequality and  gerontocracy. 

But, since the 1980’s, when anthropologists talk about an “Egalitarian society” or “egalitarian hunter gathers”, they’re usually talking about those hyper egalitarian immediate return hunter gatherer societies that i’ve been talking about.  Because even if you accept the arguments made by critics about how their egalitarianism is exaggerated, those are still the most egalitarian societies known to exist in just about every respect. 

HUNTER GATHERERS AND THE LEFT

Needless to say, these developments in hunter gatherer studies have had an important impact on leftist politics, at least among people who know about them. And of course, not enough people know about them, because we wouldn’t expect our elite educational or media institutions to really publicize too strongly that free and equal societies are actually possible or actually exist!

Most anthropologists who study immediate return societies have left wing commitments of one sort or another.  Richard Lee, maybe the most famous hunter gatherer anthropologist who wrote about the Kalahari bush people is a marxist anthropologist and political socialist, and he was explicitly writing about the implications of hunter gatherer egalitarianism on the prospects for egaltarianism in industrial civilization.  Most other people working in that field are also very interested in human equality even if they’re not as explicitly political about it.  

And there’s a whole anarcho primitivist movement that spring up in the 1990s based on this anthropology – which honestly is a pretty ridiculous, because you’d need 95% of the world’s population to die in order to live as immediate return hunter gatherers.

More recently there’s a Radical Anthropology Group in the UK that’s been around since the early 2000s made up of people liek Jerome Lewis, Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Chris Knight who are communists who have been doing a lot of amazing work about immediate return foragers – about the dynamics of their egalitarian ideology and how gender equality is maintained, and their religious beliefs – I strongly suggest you check out their work – I’ll put some links in the bio – and as I was writing this I was contacted by Camilla Power and Chris Knight and they will be appearing on my show very soon, so look out for that, very excited about it!  

And it’s worth noting that in almost all of the debates that have happened about egalitarian hunter gatherers over the last 50 years, it’s almost always people who haven’t lived with these societies who argue that their egalitarianism is an exaggeration or that it’s not real, or that it’s the result of extreme poverty and circumscription, and it’s always the people who know them the best who argue that yes they are really egalitarian and by choice. 

But ironically, one place on the left of anthropology where you won’t find anything at all about these perfectly functional anarcho communist societies is the one place you would most expect to find something about them – and that is in the works of the anarchist anthropologist and activist David Graeber!  

DAVID GRAEBER IS WACK ON EQUALITY

When I was a wee lad and in university I was soo excited when I discovered David Graeber.  An anarchist anthropologist and activist!  Like a Noam Chomsky of anthropology! And he was a great and original writer who was writing all sorts of amazing stuff of debt and on manners and hierarchy, and I couldn’t wait to see what he had to say about egalitarian hunter gatherer societies!

But if you look through Graeber’s bibliography, like I did when I first learned about him – I don’t think he mentions a single immediate return society one single time.

And then I noticed that whenever he did mention a society as being “egalitarian”, it would never be an actual egalitarian society – it would always be a society with significant forms of hierarchy.  

So like in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology there’s a short section when he discusses three supposedly egalitarian societies the Piaroa, the Tiv and Malagasy cultures, and he describes a bit about them, and his takeaway is that they aren’t really egalitarian.  

None of these societies are entirely egalitarian: there are always certain key forms of dominance, at least of men over women, elders over juniors.

And this is totally true about those three particular societies. The Piaroa which are the most egalitarian of that bunch, have positions of authority that are all dominated by men.  The Tiv have very clear patriarchy and gerontocracy, and the Malagasy are not really egaltiarian at all – they have all kinds of class and wealth distinctions, cultural hierarchies and discrimination, gender. 

The clear implication is there’s no such thing as an actual egalitarian society, there’s always a significant form of hierarchy in every society.   

Reading this stuff I kept wondering – does he just not know about immediate return societies?  How could he not?

And then in 2015 Graeber and Wengrow published Farewell to the Childhood of Man – the first preview of Dawn of Everything, where they argue that humans were always going back and forth from hierarchy to equality, and that to claim that people used to be egalitarian is to claim that they’re children without agency.  

And then in 2017 Graeber published On Kings, co-written with Marshal Sahlins.  And in it, Graeber and Sahlins try to argue that even the most supposedly egalitarian societies have hierarchical religions and cosmologies where the gods rule the humans who must obey or face their wrath… 

And they go as far as to say that the true primordial state of humanity is authoritarianism not liberty or equality!  

Even the so-called “egalitarian” or “acephalous” societies, including hunters such as  the Inuit or Australian Aboriginals, are in structure and practice cosmic polities, ordered and governed by divinities, the dead, species-masters, and other such meta-persons endowed with life-and-death powers over the human population. There are kingly beings in heaven where there are no chiefs on earth.

Although Chewong society is described as classically “egalitarian,” it is in practice coercively ruled by a host of cosmic authorities, themselves of human character and metahuman powers. 

So  while,  on  one  hand,  Howell  characterizes  the  Chewong  as  having “no social or political hierarchy” or “leaders of any kind,” on the other, she describesa human community encompassed and dominated by potent metapersons with powers to impose rules and render justice that would be the envy of kings. 

…basically  similar  cosmologies  are  found  among  basically  similar societies  .. .  the  Central Inuit; …, Highland New Guineans, Australian Aboriginals, native Amazonians,  and  other “egalitarian”  peoples  likewise  dominated  by  metaper-son-others who vastly outnumber them. 

and later on Graeber alone says 

In  the  first  chapter  of  this  volume,  Marshall  Sahlins  makes  the  argument that insofar as there is a primordial political state, it is authoritarianism. Most hunter-gatherers actually do see themselves as living under a state-like regime, even under terrifying despots; it’s just that since we see their rulers as imaginary creatures, as gods and spirits and not actual flesh-and-blood rulers, we do not recognize them as “real.” But they’re real enough for those who live under them. We need to look for the origins of liberty, then, in a primal revolt against such authorities. 

Again, not one of the societies discussed in this entire book are immediate return egalitarian societies.  There are no immediate return societies in the amazon or in Papua New Guinea.  All the societies he talks about have some sort of obvious hierarchy right here on earth, usually male domination.  The Chewong and Highland New Guineans discussed above are not even hunter gatherers.

It’s like Graeber and Sahlins were writing in the 1970s when these societies would have been considered egalitarian, except this was 2017.  

And more shocking, is that what they’re saying just isn’t true. If you look at the religions of actual egalitarian societies, central african foragers like the mbuti, aka, efe and mbendjele, the bush people of the kalahari desert, the Hadza in Tanzania, the Batek in Malaysia, or the Nayaka in the mountainous forests of India and various societies related to these societies, you’d see that their religions don’t fit Graeber and Sahlins’ narrative at all.  

For example, the Mbuti and the Nayaka – these are two totally unrelated immediate return societies located more 4000 miles apart on different continents.  They each have a very similar religion where they see their respective forests as a generous genderless loving mother father deity who provides everything for their children.  Far from quaking in fear of it, Turnbull tells the story of one Mbuti man who was literally having sex with the forest bceause he loved it so much.  And the forest never tells anyone what to do besides just respect and maintain the forest, don’t overhunt the animals, don’t use up more than you can replenish etc.  

Meanwhile, the Hadza have been argued to not have a religion, which I don’t think is correct, but they certainly don’t have any Gods that they take very seriously.  If you ask a Hadza what happens after you die they will say stuff like “we bury you and people cry” and if you keep pushing them they say things like “maybe you go to the sun, we don’t really know”.  They see their gods as legends and stories not as any sort of authoritarian figures.  It’s very modern in a weird way, which I don’t think is a coincidence, and we’ll talk about that another time

I’ll link to an article about Hadza religion, and also to a recent video by some safari bro dude who asks some Hadza philosophical questions and then gets the most material, unreligious answers you can imagine, and that’s a lot of fun.  

Meanwhile, the Kalahari bush people have a trickster type of god that they often complain about but again it never tells them what to do, it just causes random bad luck, which they resent.  And far from a hierarchical relationship to this god, they see themselves as equals to it, as they do to all their deiteies!  l’ll link to a video of Helga Vierich telling a funny story about this, where they tell stories about their god like he’s some sort of mr magoo character getting himself into all sorts of goofs. 

Now you can certainly make an argument that there’s no such thing as a truly egalitarian society, and that all societies have some elements of hierarchy in them. But if you’re going to make that argument properly and honestly, you would take the most egalitarian societies and then try to point out that inequalities of wealth and power and ideology that exist there.  

And there are some arguable signs of potential inequalities worth looking into and debating about in immediate return hunter gatherer societies – and several anthropologists have done just that.  But not Graeber.  He acts like they’ve never existed.  

If you’re familiar with hunter gatherer literature, It’s so conspicuous that it seems dishonest.  What he does is the equivalent of arguing that there are no countries on earth where men and women have equal legal rights, and then citing Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, 17th century France and the old Testament as proof.   It’s like he’s counting on the fact that his readers don’t know anything about immediate return societies so he can push his narrative.  

WHY??

Now the big questions here is Why?  Why would a left wing anarchist anthropologist with commitments to all sorts of legitimate and serious left wing causes and organizations want to pretend that the most anarcho communist societies ever known do not exist?  Why would he sign off on the idea that the true primordial state of humanity is authoritarianism??  And how is it that Unabomber has literally done a more thorough and honest job of arguing that egaltiarian societies don’t exist than David Graeber has!

I’ll answer that question, next episode when we read How to Change the Course of Human History, but now, we finally have the background that we need in order to be able to intelligently judge the conclusion of The Wisdom of Kandiaronk that we glossed over last time, so let’s get to it, and let the cartoon begin!

*** 

THE END OF KANDIARONK

So the entire conclusion of Wisdom of Kandiaronk is basically a call for rejecting the whole idea of equality.  

Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ were the rallying cries of the French Revolution [62]. Today, there are whole disciplines, sub-branches of philosophy and political science and legal studies, which make equality their raw material. Equality is almost universally recognized as a value, despite the almost total absence of consensus on what the term actually refers to. Equality of opportunity? Equality of condition? Formal equality before the law?

Well if Graeber RIP and Wengrow had only listened to this podcast they would know that equality refers to equality of decision making power. 

Similarly, societies such as the Mi’kmaq, Algonquin or 17th century Wendat are regularly referred to as ‘egalitarian societies’ – or, alternatively, ‘bands’ or ‘tribal’ societies, which are generally assumed to mean the same thing. 

Oof – so two major problems in this one sentence.  As always, Graeber is ignoring the most egaltiarian societies and then focusing on societies that have clear signs of hierarchy in order to argue that equality doesn’t exist.   

So the Mikmaq, Algonquin or 17th century Wendat would have been referred to as egalitarian societies before the 1970s – but not an anymore.   

And to be clear, you will still see some people referring to societies like these as egalitarian if they’re comparing them to our society, because they’re significantly egalitarian, compared to us, but Graeber and Wengrow should know better.  The Mikmaq had a degree of patriarchy and the Algonquin and Wendat had a degree of political hierarchy all beyond what you find in egalitarian immediate return societies.  

Now the next part of the sentence really surprised me.  Bands and Tribal societies are assumed to mean the same thing?  By who?  Homer Simpson or Fred Flintstone?  No anthropologist thinks this.  

A band is a group of people who travel around together – like a music band!  Membership in a band is determined by who’s present when you’re counting.  If you’re not present, then you’re not part of the band.  Most, but not all hunter gatherers are organized into bands, and the membership of those bands is usually pretty fluid.  People are coming and going all the time, visiting friends and relatives, getting away from their enemies or their spouses, leaving one band and joining another. And as a result bands are most often made up of largely unrelated people, which has interesting evolutionary implications which we’ll talk about another time. 

A tribe on the other hand is an entirely different shebang.  A tribe is a descent group.  You’re born into a tribe.  If you go off and live somewhere else, you’re still part of your tribe.

A larger tribe is usually made up of clans which are made up of lineages, which are made up of nuclear families, which is why in more recent times anthropologists will refer to tribal societies as segmented lineage societies – because each unit is made up of larger segements, and also because the word tribe has a bit of a confused definition because colonial governments used to invent “tribes” in order to make it easier to govern and those tribes didn’t really have any organic existence.  

Ordinary people, like Fred Flintstone and Homer Simpson, will often erroneously use the word tribe to mean an ethnic group – people who have the same language and general culture – but one ethnic group can have multiple tribes – like think of the 12 tribes of ancient israel, or current various tribes of afghans or kurds.  

Now the whole reason that a traditional, tribal system exists is because it’s a way of dealing with collective property.  If your subsistence depends on a particular fishing territory or farming territory or a herd of animals, then a descent group like a clan or tribe is a way to have clear ownership rules, and to have a group that can collectively defend the territory.  

So if you see a tribal system of organization you know that this society has collective property to manage, whether it’s a hunting territory like the Mikmaq, a farming territory like the Huron a fishing territory like the Tlingit, or a herd of animals like the Nuer. 

An anthropologist not knowing the difference between a tribe and band is like an architect not knowing the difference between a house and an apartment building.  It’s ridiculous.  

OK, back to Graeber and Wengrow:

It is never clear what the term equality is supposed to refer to. Is it an ideology, the belief that everyone should be the same – obviously not in all ways, but in some ways that are considered particularly important? Or should it be a situation in which people are really the same? And if the latter, should it mean that an egalitarian ideal that characterizes this particular society is in fact largely realized, so that all members of society can be said to have equal access to land, or to treat each other with equal dignity, or to be equally free to make their opinions known in public assemblies? Or can it be a measure imposed by the observer: monetary income, political power, caloric intake, size of house, number and quality of personal possessions? 

I bet that if Graeber and Wengrow had spent like 20% of the energy that it took to think up all these goofy examples and put that energy into trying to think about what equality should mean if you want to have a coherent politics, especially a coherent left politics, they would have easily figured out that it means equality of power, point final  

Would equality mean the erasure of the individual or the celebration of the individual? (After all, a society in which everyone was exactly the same, and they were all so different that there was no criterion for saying that one was superior to the other, would seem both ‘egalitarian’ to an outside observer.) 

yibbedeyabbedeyibbedy – well, if you know that equality means equal power, then you can figure out pretty easily that it means the celebration of the individual.  Because no matter who you are, how big or small, ugly or good looking, strong or weak, how much or how little or how much you contribute to society, you matter, your say matters as much as everyone else’s.  

And when we look at immediate return societies that’s what we see.  You can be weird, and contradict gender roles, you can be ugly, you can be gay – and people don’t judge you for it.  People are only judged negatively only insofar as they disrupt, disturb or threaten the equal power of everyone else.  

Can we talk about equality in a society where the elders are treated as gods and make all the important decisions, if everyone in that society who survives past, say, fifty years becomes an elder? 

No, you can’t because that’s not equality, that’s a weird kind of gerontocracy that does’t exist.  And note to the editor – humanities writing is usually way better when you use real examples to illustrated things vs nonsense examples…

What about gender relations? Many so-called ‘egalitarian’ societies are really only egalitarian between adult men. Sometimes the relationships between men and women in these societies are anything but equal. 

Yes, that’s exactly right – if you’re writing this from 1970.  That’s why we don’t usually call patriarchal societies egalitarian anymore unless we’re comparing them to much more hierarchical societies.  Today you’d call a society like that “male egalitarian”.   Left wing anthropologists should know this.  

Other cases are more ambiguous. It may be that men and women in a given society not only do different jobs, but have different theories of what is important, so that they both tend to think that the other’s main concerns (cooking, hunting, child care, war…) are insignificant or so profoundly different that it makes no sense to compare them at all. Many of the societies encountered by the French in North America fit this description. They may be considered matriarchal from one point of view, patriarchal from another. [63] In such cases, can we speak of equality between the sexes? 

So if Graeber and Wengrow knew anything about hunter gatherers, I would think that maybe this was a reference to some debates that were had in the aftermath of Man the Hunter, and that you still have today, where some people argue that the very fact that there are general gender roles in immediate return foraging societies, is proof of male dominance.  

Hunter gatherer experts usually reply that yes there are gender roles, but they’re not enforced or policed in any way.  Men and women do eachther’s work when it’s convenient or necessary without any stigma, and often aren’t interested in doing the other gender’s work.  The video i’ll post from Helga Vierich on this is pretty interesting and fun so check that out.  

And then the thing about societies that seem patriarchal from one angle and then matriarchal from another is probably a reference to societies like the haudenosaunee in north america, where women monopolized all of the positions of authority at the local level, but it’s only men who got to vote on broad public affairs beyond the clan level.  And the chief of the tribe is always a man, though he’s elected by the exclusively female clan mothers who can always recall him.  

Now you can debate on whether societies like the Haudenosaunee are gender egalitarian or not – but they are not egalitarian societies – at least not to the level of immediate return societies – because you do have positions of authority to begin with – clan mother, chief, head of the household, gerontocracy. 

Or could we do so only if men and women were equally equal according to some minimal external criteria: to be equally free from the threat of domestic violence, for example, or to have equal access to resources, or to have a say in common affairs?

Equal say in common affairs!  Hello, i’m right here!!

Now this is just bad writing on op of being about more non existent hypotheticals – equally free from the threat of domestic violence?   Interestingly, I think Frank Marlowe talks about how he’s never seen an Aka man hit his wife but he has seen an Aka woman hit her husband a bunch of times.. 

But regardless – I can’t help but notice how they can say equal when it comes to equal access to resources and they say equal when it comes to the threat of domestic violence, but that they can’t bring themselves to say an equal when it comes to an equal say in common affairs, which is the definition of political equality.   

Is that freudian thing on their part, or am i just seeing conspiracies everywere beacuse i’m so fed up with this crap?  

Since there is no clear and generally accepted answer to any of these questions, the use of the term ‘equal’ has led to endless arguments. In fact, it is still unclear what the term ‘egalitarian’ means. 

Let me just interject here again, because I want to point out how completely insane it is that we live in a society where a left wing anarchist political activist with proper bona fides like Graeber does not know what egalitarian means, especially when commitment to equality is literally the defining trait of the left.  

This is a testement to how impovrished and confused our political theory is and to how important it is to do what i’m doing in this series, cleaning up the definitions of political terms, rebuilding our political alphabet from the ground up. 

And actually before all you Marxists get smug about how these foolish anarchists don’t know any theory, Graeber was in good company – good old papa smurf himself Karl Marx and MC Freddy Engels actually made similar arguments back in their day.

But they had a better excuse – in Marx’ day, the word equality was most often used to describe “procedural equality,” i.e. equality before the law, where the same rules apply to you if you’re from the nobility or a bourgeois or a farmers or a labourer – as opposed to before the french revolution where separate rules applied.  

And on the left liberal side, equality was used to describe universal male suffrage in a capitalist economy – where every man gets an equal vote, even though the wealthy still have all the power via owning the means of production and funding the political system.  

So Marx didn’t like the word equality because he wanted to make sure that the focus was on the abolition of classes instead of on procedural equality 

But if you watch this podcast where political terms get proper definitions and where political theory actually makes sense, you know that actual equality clearly implies the abolition of classes because wealth is power – see episode 3 for example.  

For his part Engels must have been listening to my podcast because he does use the word equality – he makes the criticisms as Marx but he would make sure to endorse “real equality” as opposed to “bourgeois equality”.  

So back to Graeber and Wengroats:

Ultimately, the term [equality] is not used because it has positive substance, but rather for the same reason that sixteenth-century natural law theorists speculated about equality in the state of nature: 

The term ‘equality’ is a default term, referring to that kind of protoplasmic mass of humanity that is imagined to be left over when all the trappings of civilization are stripped away. The ‘egalitarian’ people are those who have no princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests, and are generally without cities or scriptures. They are societies of equals only in the sense that all the most obvious signs of inequality are missing.

So what they’re doing here is saying that like Rousseau’s vision of equality was two dimensional because it’s just not anything real, it’s a caricature, or marx talks about a future where everyone’s free and equal but he never elaborates or goes into any detail because at the end of the day equality isn’t real, we’re never supposed to get there. 

And this is some straight up bullshit, and it should be embarassing to the authors.  

If unlike Graeber and Wengrow you take the time read any actual ethnographies or articles by people who have spent time with real egalitarian societies you’ll see that writers constantly talk about how pro-active and deliberate their egaltiarianism is.  

You can read endless anecdotes and quantitative studies on how thoroughly demand sharing is enforced – again, think of that man cutting a tomato slice into 16 tiny pieces to give one to everyone in sight.  Because if he didn’t he would get in huge social trouble.  

And you can read countless stories about how anyone who seems to be accumulating too much prestige or power is seen as a threat to be actively dealt with via various cultural mechanisms, from anonymous public criticism to joking to shaming to excommunication and even execution. 

There’s the famous story about shaming the meat that I talked about in episode 6 among the Kalahari people, or more recently Jerome Lewis talks about how a very excellent hunter among the Mbendjele was run out of his local area by the women’s organization because he refused to stop boasting about his skills.  

And they did this despite the fact that he brought home an enormous amount of meat which was obviously to everyone’s material advantage, and these are people who prize meat above all foods and who love food almost more than anything.  Again I’ll link to the article in the notes. 

It follows that any historical work that purports to investigate the origins of social inequality is in reality an investigation into the origins of civilization; a work that in turn implies a vision of history that, like Turgot’s, conceives of civilization as a system of social complexity that guarantees greater overall prosperity, but at the same time guarantees that certain compromises will necessarily have to be made in the area of freedoms and rights. We are trying to tell a different story.

Yeah a bullshit story that you guys invented.  Again this is incredibly insulting garbage, and this paragraph has two big false or foolish statements.  

First of all, investigating the origins of hierarchy is not about civilization – it’s about the origins of hierarchy.  Why do men dominate women in so many societies.  Why is there so much racism.  Why do religious groups dominate and exclude and kill eachother.  Why did slavery happen?  

All of these things happened thousands of years before civilization ever developped.  Is it part of our nature?  Is it circumstance?  Is there anything we can do to about it?  

If anything an inquiry into the origins of hierarchy is about human nature and about the future.  

Next, and this is the truly obnoxious part – Graeber and Wengrow are saying that anyone investigating the origins of hierarchy is ultimately arguing that the hierarchies and inequalities of civilization are a necessary price for all the blessings of civilization.  

This is an insult to 50 years of hunter gatherer studies.  Yes, you can find some authors doing this – or one author – Francis Fukuyama is maybe the only one I can think of, maybe there are other non experts who do this.  

But most of the people interested in the origins of hierarchy, especially if they’re deep into hunter gatherer studies are precisely interested in how we can get rid of hierarchies.  How do our hunter gatherer brothers and sisters live without hierarchy?  What lessons can we learn from them to be applied to industrial civilization?  

Ironically, in an introduction to a new edition of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, David Graeber quotes Kropotkin, saying 

Radical scholars are “bound to enter a minute analysis of the thousands of facts and faint indications accidentally preserved in the relics of the past; to interpret them with the aid of contemporary ethnology; and after having heard so much about what used to divide men, to reconstruct stone by stone the institutions which used to unite them.”

The only viable alternative to capitalist barbarism is stateless socialism, a product, as the great geographer never ceased to remind us, “of tendencies that are apparent now in the society” and that were “always, in some sense, imminent in the present.” 

But this is exactly what Graeber and Wengrow are throwing out the window with this Dawn of Humanity book.  You have all of this literature about all of these stateless socialist societies, which can teach us so much about where equality comes from, and about how we can create an order that preserves both equality and liberty at the same time just like they do – but instead Graeber and Wengrow are intent on pretending that these societies don’t exist, and that the literature about them is actually some kind of conspiracy to justify the hierarchies of our day!  

And they continue: 

It is not that we consider it unimportant or uninteresting that princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests – or for that matter writing and cities – emerged only at some point in human history. On the contrary: to understand our present predicament as a species, it is absolutely crucial to understand how these things came about. However, we also insist that, to do so, we must reject the idea of treating our distant ancestors as some kind of primordial human soup. 

To say that all of the anthropologists who have been doing so much amazing and important writing and reserach about immedate return foragers are treating them as primordial human soup is a complete insult to those authors.

It’s also a complete insult to the people they write about, and it’s also a complete insult to the intelligence of all the people who have ever read those works. 

And I urge you to read that literature, not just to dispite Graeber and Wengrow, but so you can see for yourself how human beings like you and I with all our shitty flaws our selfishness our weaknesses, our pettiness and stupidities can nonetheless manage to live in and maintain a free and egalitarian order, not in utopia, but in this world full of injustice and brutality, so much of which simply does not need to exist and which does not exist in many societies.

Accumulating evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and related fields suggests that, like the Native Americans or the eighteenth-century French, our distant ancestors had very specific ideas about what was important in their societies, that these varied considerably over the thirty thousand years or so between the beginning of the Ice Age and the dawn of the civilization we call home, and that describing them in terms of uniform ‘egalitarianism’ tells us almost nothing about them. 

This is a strawment statement that doesn’t mean anything.  No one has ever said that every society only valued egalitarianism until civilization showed up and then people suddenly had complex lives.  Societies started switching away from egalitarianism long before civilization – though by Graeber and Wengrow’s definition, egalitarianism seams to mean that if you run around in a grass skirt, and there’s no state you’re somehow egalitarian, which is why they think the term doesn’t mean anything.  

ANd if you read the hunter gatherer literature you’ll see that these are complex people with emotions and conflicts and jealousies and everything that we have, except their worst emotions and impulses tend to be held in check in ways that we fail to do. 

There is no doubt that there was generally some degree of equality by default: a presumption that humans are all equally powerless against the gods; or a strong sense that no one’s will should be permanently subordinated to another’s. It would probably have been necessary to ensure that hereditary princes, judges, overseers or priests did not appear for such a long time.

No, not equally powerless against the Gods, that is not a feature of our most egalitarian societies, despite what Graeber and Wengrow and Marshall Sahlins for some reason want us to believe.  But yes, a strong sense that no one’s will should be subordinated to another’s – that is the essence of egalitarianism, and a core feature of egalitarian societies and it is the core principle of the left and of anarchism in particular, which makes it even more ridiculous that Graeber is doing his best to deny it.  

But self-conscious ideologies of ‘equality’, that is, those that present equality as an explicit value, as opposed to an ideology of freedom, dignity or participation that applies equally to all, seem to have been relatively recent in history. 

Again, you need to be ignorant of 50 years of hunter gatherer research to think this.  Read Richard Lee on shaming the meat, or Jerome Lewis on the exile of Benasongo the boastful hunter.  THe commitment to equality is so strict that when Hadza for example have disputes that need mediation, they have to go get someone from one of the neighbouring non Hadza communities to do it, because they idea that a fellow Hadza can sit above the others to arbitrate or mediate is seen as unacceptanble!  

There’s no reason to think that the Kalahari bushmen or the Central african forest pygmies or Hadza made this stuff up in relative recent history, and to say that Europeans made this up in the 18th century is just obnoxious. 

Even when they do emerge, these ideologies rarely apply to everyone. The ancient Athenian democracy, for example, was based on political equality among its citizens – even if they represented only 10 to 20 per cent of the total population – in the sense that everyone had equal rights to participate in public decisions. We are taught to see this as a milestone in political evolution, as we consider that this older notion of equal civic participation was revived and expanded, some two thousand years later, at the time of the French and American revolutions. This is a dubious proposition: the political systems referred to as ‘democracies’ in nineteenth-century Europe have almost nothing to do with ancient Athens, but that is not really the point. Athenian intellectuals of the time, who were mostly of aristocratic origin, tended to regard the whole arrangement as a sordid affair and much preferred the government of Sparta, which was run by an even smaller percentage of the total population, who lived collectively off the labors of the serfs. The Spartan citizens referred to themselves as the Homoioioi, which could be translated as ‘the equals’ or ‘those who are all the same’; they all underwent the same rigorous military training, adopted the same haughty disdain for both effeminate luxury and individual idiosyncrasies, ate in communal halls, and spent most of their lives practicing warfare.

Again, all this is interesting, and great critique of the use of the word “egalitarian” in the 1970s and before, but the fact that they’re saying this stuff now while ignoring 50 years of hunter gatherer research in order to discredit the idea of egalitarianism is completely idiotic and also completely insane coming from two left wing anthropologists.  

And the dynamics of societies like athens or sparta where have a community of equals ruling over others is super interesting and we’ll talk about it in the future.  

So this is not a book about the origins of inequality. 

Well then what the hell is this book about?  They just punted on one of the biggest questions of all humanity!  

And we’ll see next time that they’re going to end up arguing that we’ve always had inequality, humans were always shifting between hierarchy and equality, even though equality doesn’t exist anyways, but then something caused us to have more inequality… but somehow equality does exist for Graeber and Wengrow when they start talking about egalitarian cities and civilizations!  Which is actually the good part of their book which I recommend you read because it’s fascinating. 

But back to Graeber and Wengrow:

But it does aim to answer many of the same questions in a different way. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong in the world. A very small percentage of its population controls the destiny of almost everyone else, and it is behaving in increasingly disastrous ways. To understand how this situation came about, we have to go back to what made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers and judges. But we no longer have the luxury of assuming that we already know exactly what it was. Drawing on indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, we must approach the historical, archaeological, and ethnographic record with fresh eyes.

More like fresh eyerolls…

My pancreas hurts reading this.  Yes we do know how this situation came about.  It came about because conditions on earth changed over time, such that some people were able dominate others in ways that hadn’t been possible earlier.  And we’ll talk about that next time when we finally do How to Change the Course of Human History, one of my least favourite pieces of anthropology that I’ve ever read!

And by then the full book will be out, and maybe I’ll do a follow up if there any surprises in there…

In the meantime, please tell other people about this show, it’s really hard to get the word out in this algorythm ruled, supersaturated podcast landcape, especially for a show that doesn’t have a ready made teenage sectarian political niche, so spread the word share the epsiodes – 

and speaking of which I want to give a special thank you to Saint Andrew – not the apostle, but the youtubesman from Trinidad who posted one of my episodes on his channel and on his tweeters.  I’ve gotten more views and subscribers and great comments and questions than I’ve ever had in such a short period of time thanks to that, and I checked out his videos and they’re great, dealing with a lot of the same questions that I’m dealing with, so that you andrew, and check out his channel called saintandrewism.  

Also a shout out to Tom Obrien host of Alpha to Omega for hooking me up with Camilla Power and Chris knight, and it’s one of my favourite podcasts, check out the Fundamental Principles book series which is super exciting a previously forgotten book of socialist theory.  

And also thanks to lucky black can another great youtuber who’s always been supportive and to Arnold Schroeder who has maybe the best political podcast out there FIght Like an Animal, just check that out you will thank me, history psychology personal experience such important stuff. 

And please like and subscribe and also review this show on itunes or urple music, its really important and helps the show pop up more readily on searches – and contact me with any corrections or suggestions or comments at worldwidescrotes@gmail.com or comment on yout u-tubes, and please subscribe to my patreon so I can keep doing this because it takes an unbelievable amount of time and the economic sacrifices that I have to make to keep doing these are complelety insane … and until next time … seeya!

10. David Graeber & David Wengrow’s The “Dawn of Everything”: The Wisdom of Kandiaronk (TRANSCRIPT)

This is a transcript of this video.
The bibliography for this episode can be found here.
For the audio podcast version click here on a mobile device.

Hello fellow kids, 

And welcome back to what it politics. 

The late David Graeber, who was a wonderful anthropologist, writer and political activist, is going to be publishing a post-humous book co-authored with archaeologist David Wengrow called The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.  

And based on the preview chapters and essays that they’ve been publishing over the past few years, this book is sure to be an a great read, really stimulating, extremely popular, asking all the right questions – and then coming up with a lot of right answers, but then also a lot of wrong answers, and some right answers but for all the wrong reasons – and those wrong answers and wrong reasons are going to be a really harmful influence on our political movements and our political intelligence in a bunch of ways. 

So In this episode, and the next episode, I’m going to reading from and criticizing those preview chapters and essays that Graeber and Wengrow have been putting out from Dawn of Everything.  And i’m going to highlight the good stuff, and the bad stuff, so that we can learn to avoid all sorts of common mistakes and traps that people often fall into, and so that we can learn all the right answers to the extremely important questions that they’re asking: Where does human dominance hierarchy come from?  And what can we do today to reduce or eliminate it?

And I want to give a lot of credit to Graeber and Wengrow for asking these questions.  Very few anthropologists or political activists do this nowadays and very few have ever done it in such a straighforwardly political way.  

But I also want to really highlight how messed up the answers they’re giving us, and how bad for our political brains they are and use this as a springboard for my mission of reconstructing the basics of political theory, of which anthropological theory is a huge component.  

In part Graeber and Wengrow are making these mistakes, because everyone makes these mistakes because the state of political and athropological theory are deficient like I’ve been talking about.  But on top of that David Graeber had a real bug up his butt about the concept of equality and he spent his career ignoring the anthropology of very egalitarian societies – those societies who live according to the principles of libertarian communism – where the individual is free, yet wealth and power are shared equally – which is extremely weird for a left wing anarchist anthropologist like him to be ingnoring – and it really affected his work in a bad ways as we’ll see and we’ll make some guesses about why he was doing that. 

So next episode, I’m going to be doing a line by line critique of Graeber and Wengrow’s very popular article from 2018 called How to Change the Course of Human History, and at I’ll be citing a few passages from Farewell to the Childhood of Man from 2015 which is basically an earlier version of that article.

But first, in this episode, I’ll be discussing and reading excerpts from an actual chapter of Dawn of Everything which was published in 2019, but only in french under the title of La Sagesse de Kondiaronk, la critique indigène, le mythe du progrès et la naissance de la Gauche and which in English translates to The Wisdom of Kondiaronk, the Indigenous Critique, the Myth of Progress and the Birth of the Left. I read it in french which I’m fluent in, but you can get a pretty good english translation on gargl translate or deepl translate – though the full english book will be out a couple of weeks after this video comes out. 

Graeber and Wengrow’s also published another piece from Dawn of Everything in 2020 before Graeber died called Hidden in Plain Sight, Democracy’s Indigenous Origins in the Americas.  Unlike the other articles, I don’t have much to critique about it, it’s quite exciting – it’s about how the city state of Tlaxcala in central Mexico at the time of the encounter with Cortez was actually democratic, and how historians never mentioned or noticed it’s democratic nature because they couldn’t imagine that such a thing was possible, even though people at the time reported it clearly.  And I think this will be an introduction to their discussion of various potentially eglitarian city states and civilizations like the Indus Valley civilization, and this is the work of David Wengrow, who’s work I’ve just started to get to know a little.  I don’t have the expertise to evaluate it one way or another, but I certainly hope it’s true, and if so, it has really important implications for the future.  I might do a separate episode on Wengrows stuff on egalitarian cities after I do this series.  Interestingly Wengrow is not in denial about egalitarian hunter gatherers the way Graeber is!  

LA SAGESSE DE KONDIAROK – GRAEBER’S THESIS

OK so let’s get into The Wisdom of Kondiaronk, the Indigenous Critique, the Myth of Progress and the Birth of the Left and you can find the original french version of this linked in the show notes, and let the cartoon, begin!

In this chapter – and I don’t know which chapter it is, just that it’s not the first chapter because in the article at some point it says “in the last chapter” – but anyways – in this chapter Graeber points out that many of they key insights and concepts associated with the European enlightenment – ideas of individual liberty and equality, and the rejection of religious dogma and established social hierarchy based on ascribed status – that these ideas were heavily influenced by europeans’ encounters with Native Americans.  This influence came both from observing the American way of life, which flew in the face of the social order which europeans had been taught to believe was natural and ordained by god for hundreds of years – and the influence also came from specific critiques of European society, religion, economy and values made by the Americans.  

Merchants, Jesuit missionaries, soldiers, militarymen and various kinds of settlers, went across the atlantic occean to the new world taking for granted a whole array of rigid social dominance hierarchies, between rich and poor, kings and subjects, lords and serfs, masters and servants, men and women, massive wealth inequalities, and property relationships that kept some people in servile and dependant relationships to others.  

But North America truly was a new world in more ways than one.  The european immigrants and colonists were shocked to discover that the so called savages that they encountered, lived in societies where these hierarchies either didn’t exist at all, or else they existed in relatively mild forms compared to what they had taken for granted all of their lives.  

And it was a further shock in their encounters, to hear the Americans excoriating and making fun of those hierarchies, ridiculing the europeans mistreatment of eachother, their shameful rules of private property, and money exchange and calling them slaves.  

WHAT IS HIERARCHY

So before we go any further I want to clarify what hierarchy is in a political context.  A hierarchy is a system where people or things are ranked according to some value.  You can rank fruits according to which one tastes better, models according to who you think is more attractive, runners accordings to who is faster, or chess players according to who is the most skilled – hierarchies of competence like Jordan Peenerson talks about.

But when we’re talking about politics we don’t care about any of that stuff.  The word politics, refers to decision making in groups. So when we’re talking about hierarchy or equality in the context of politics, what we’re talking about is hieararchy or equality of decision making power – i.e. dominance hierarchies, where one person or group or class of people dominates another, in the sense of they get to tell them what to do.  

And we’re only interested in other kinds of hierarchies, like hierarchies of competence or of wealth, if and when those hierarchies translate into dominance hierarchy – hierarchy of decision making power.    

So for example we often talk about economic inequality when it comes to politics.  Why?  We don’t care that one person gets to have a lot of toys and rollercoasters and another person has less toys.  The main reason it’s a political issue is because economic inequality translates into decision making inequality.  

The lord tells the serf what to do because the lord owns the land the serf depends on to live.  Your boss tells you what to do and not the other way around because youre boss has money to start a workplace and you need the salary the he has to give you and you don’t have those things.  Your landlord tells you what you can and can’t do in your own home because your landlord inherited a downpayment from his parents and you didn’t.  You and Jeff Bezos both have one vote, but Jeff Bezos can hire an army of lobbyists who work 24-7 to influence how politicians think and what they know, and you can write an email once in awhile and get ignored.  

The other reason economic inequality is a political issue is that in a democratic society – meaning a society where people have a meaningful say in the decisions that affect them, if a majority of people don’t have enough resources to live well, they will likely decide to transfer wealth away from a minority of people who have an emormous amount of resources.  

So – decision making hierarchies serve three main purposes:

1. they allow for more efficient group cooperation – for example you can’t produce a movie if everyone is just doing whatever they want and making their own calls at every given moment.  
2. they reduce conflict and arguments – because if there’s a disagreement, the person on top wins in advance – the lighting director wants to use bright blasted lighting, but the director says, no, we want dark grainy lighting – well the director automatically wins – which is one reason hierarchies allow for large group cooperation 
3. and finally hierarchies allow people on the top of the hierarchy to exploit the people on the bottom, to extract more than their proportional share of the benefits of their labour.  The investors in a film sit on their butts and do nothing except for having money, but they get all the profits from the film and the crew gets nothing.

And we can distinguish between two types of decision-making hierarchies.  organizational, or democratic hierarchies, and dominance hierarchies.  A democratic or organizational hierarchy is where people voluntarily organize into a hierarchy and choose their superiors in order to achieve certain goals, and ultimately the purpose of the hierarchy is to serve all of its members.  Large cooperatives usually have democratic hierarchies.   But a dominance hierarchy is one where the purpose of the hierarchy is to serve the people on top and there is an element of coercion to the hierarchy.  And there’s a spectrum in between. 

And always keep in mind, that whether a hierarchy is necessary for survival, or whether it exists mostly for exploitation, dominance, there is always some kind of justification or at least an excuse.  

In europe at the time of the colonization of North America, the justification was religious.  It’s not that the king was the biggest thug who could conquer the most people.  It’s that he was appointed by God.  There was the great chain of being where every creature from the angels to animals to plants to minerals and dirt were all orginized into a hierarchy.  To defy this hierarchy was like Satan defying God and falling from heaven.  

And today, if we look at workplace hierarchy, it’s not that your boss inherited money from their parents and you didn’t and you’re forced to sign away your free will for 60 hours a week because if you don’t you’ll die –  it’s because your boss is a job creator and innovator and deserves his power, and you’re too lazy or stupid to start your own business, so you “voluntarily” signed a labour contract, so it’s not actually a hierachy at all because you chose to have a job where you have to shit in diapers because you’ll get fired if you take a bathroom breaks!

And when we talk about class in politics, we’re essentially talking about ranks of a political hierarchy, even if though that’s not how people traditionally describe it.  The owner class on top, management in the middle workers on the bottom.  Lords on top, serfs on the bottom.  Officer class on top, enlisted on the bottom.  

And finally, when we are talking about hierarchy vs equality we are talking about the political right vs the political left.  Because that’s what left and right refer to.  The right represents the forces in favour of a dominance hierarchy and the left represents the forces in favour of equalizing or eliminating the ranks of a hierarchy.  And that’s ultimately a spectrum between authority on the right and democracy on the left.

And I know that there are a lot of other definitions floating around, and I know that lots of people who think that they are on the right are pro democracy and some people who think they are on the left are pro dictatorship – but too bad for you, you’re in the wrong camp!  Those are the historical definitions, and they are also the only definitions that make any sense and you can go see episodes 5 4 and 3 if you want to understand why.  

EUROPEANS REACT TO AMERICA

So – when people, like the 16th and 17th century europeans immigrants to the americas, who are entrenched in a dominance hierarchy system, and a system of beliefs and values that justifies those hierarchies – when people like that encounter other people who aren’t stuck in that kind of system, like the native americans they were encountering, there are two basic ways of reacting to this.   

The first is to realize – holy shit, i’ve been putting up with this crap all of my life for no reason – fuck this!  And then you rebel in some way against the hierarchy in your society, or you go live with the natives which many people did.  

And we have another example of this in American history – the early suffragettes.  I actually made an episode, number 8 where I talked about how women in north america and europe got the right to vote, and I talked about the status women in Haudenosaunee society where women help most of the important positions of political power, but I only learned the connection between suffragettes and the Haudenosaunee after I recorded the episode.  Many of the early suffragettes were moved to fight for equal rights based on their encounters with Haudenosaunee and Huron women would laugh at them for being subject to their husbands’ authority and who needed permission to do things like buy or sell property or horses.  

So one reaction to encounters like this is to reject the legitimacy of the hierarchy, and the other is to be horrified by the fact that people don’t conform to that hierarchy – and to feel these people who don’t recognize the legitimacy of that hierarchy is a threat to your whole identity and sense of self worth.  And in hierarchical societies, self worth is generally tied in to accepting one’s place in a hierarchy – that’s literally what separate adults from children.  And then you try to crush those people who you see as savages who need correction – much like you as a child needed to be crushed into accepting hierarchy, which then conferred on you the status of an adult and serious person.  Think of the expression, if you’re a socialist after a certain age you have no brain.  

Anyhow, the reaction that you’ll will have will depend on various things like how psychologically and materially invested you are in the hierarchical system you’re a part of.  If you’re at the top of a hierarchy and enjoying all the benefits, you probably will sense the other culture without hiearchy as an existential threat.  You need to crush it, or else your servants or your wife will get ideas about equality.  And you can also be near the bottom of your hierarchy, but still be really psychologically invested in it.  Your whole sense of being a good person is based on all the sacrifices you make on a daily basis, not having sex, obeying your asshole husband or your stupid boss or your master – and then these hippies and savages think they’re entitled to just do what they want and not listen to anyone?   Who do they think they are?  They need to be punished and made to obey!

Like imagine someone who’s gay in a very religious anti gay area – and they gain their sense of being a good person by suppressing their desires.  When someone like that encounters a radical queer freakshow party, they either realize – gee, why am i doing this?   Or they go crazy and want to destroy them, like a lot of weird closeted right wing politicians we read about.  

And to me when you want other people to suffer the oppression you suffer in order to validate your own self oppression – that’s the definition of evil.  

JESUIT RELATIONS

So the europeans encoutering the native americans of course had both of these reactions.  

For some people the encounters contributed to the growing enlightenment ideas about how  much of the hierarchy that europeans were subject to were not necessary and not just, and that they should be overthrown.  But to other people, the Native American ways of life were perceived of as a threat to the social order that needed to be crushed.  

So Graeber and Wengrow quote some of the reactions of Jesuit missionaries to the people they encountered which are telling.  Graeber points out that the Jesuits saw liberty as a low, animal quality.  

First there’s Pere Lejeune who did his missionary work among the Montagnais Naskapi people in what’s now Quebec who were an extremely egalitarian hunting and gathering people, who I’ve talked about before – and I might have even given this same quote in one of my epsiodes, it’s often cited, from 1642:

And then he cites a famous quote by Pere Lejeune who did his missionary work among the Montagnais Naskapi people in what’s now Quebec who at the time were extremely egalitarian hunter gatherers:

They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages…

LeJeune continues beyond the passage the Graeber and Wengrow quote:

“Our Savages are happy; for the two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests, I mean ambition and avarice.  They have neither political organization, nor offices, nor dignities, nor any authority, for they only obey their Chief through good will toward him… Also, as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth.”

LeJeune goes on to talk disapprovinly about how they have sexual freedom, women don’t obey men, and how the indians love to laugh and make fun, particularly of LeJeune!

And here’s another quote from Pere Lallemant who missioned among the Wendat people, from 1644: 

I could hardly believe that there is any place in the world more difficult to subject to the Laws of JESUS CHRIST. Not only because they have no knowledge of letters, no Historical monuments, and no idea of a Divinity who has created the world and who governs it; but, above all, because I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever, so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. 

And I’m quoting a bit more than Graeber and Wengrow quote because they tend to leave out the parts where people have no political authorities or authoritarian Gods to obey, which we’ll discuss next episode because Graeber wants us to believe that even the most egalitarian cultures have hierarchical religions. 

Now these quotes come from the various volumes of the Jesuit Relations books, which were accounts by Jesuit missionaries which were extremely popular in europe at the time – like imagine if people from earth landed on another planet and we got reports from how the people from those planets lived, how popular those reports would be!

And then Graeber and Wengrow continue about the native reaction to the Europeans.

In the view of the Montagnais-Neskapi, by contrast, the French were little better than slaves, living in constant fear of getting into trouble with their superiors.  Such criticisms appeared regularly in the Jesuit accounts, not only from those who lived in nomadic hunter gatherer bands, but also from settled town dwellers like the Wendat.  

And what’s really fascinating and I think a great insight is that Graeber points out that people today who would be reading these reports in western democratic countries would have a lot more in common in terms of world view and attitudes with the native american hunter gatherers and tribal horticulturalists than they would with their own european ancestors.  And this is exactly right.  Over the past 500 years, and particularly in the past 100 years, various social movements have been fighting to eliminate most of those social hierarchies that the Americans ridiculed the Europeans for, and as we’ve reduced those hierarchies, we’ve become more like them as a result.

And actually it reminds me of something my friend Josh said years ago when we were watching the documentary Mingus from the 1950s about Jazz Bassist and composer Charles Mingus.  From the beginning of the movie until about 20-30 minutes in, during which all the people on film are black people you don’t really think about what year it is.  You just see people talking music and joking with eachother.  But then suddenly when the first white person walks in the room it slaps you in the face that you’re in the 1950s – the way they hold themselves, the way they speak, the affect – so much more uptight and stuck up than the norm today – basically the cultural changes we’ve had since the 1950s inspired in part by black liberation and rights movements have shed a lot of internalized social hierarchy – and mainstream white culture resembles black culture more than it does the white culture of the 50s.  Charles Murray might thing this is awful, and the cause of all of our economic problems today, but Charles Murray has no materialist analysis – most of us would probably see this as a good thing.  

Anyhow, learning about the the way of life of the native americans, and their critiques of European life contributed to the discussions and debates and cultural changes and challenges that were already happening in Europe at the time.  And these challenges had been set off by other factors – like increasing wealth across europe with the re-establishment of long trading and travel routes which had fallen apart with the fall of the roman empire, and which put europe back into contact with influences and ideas from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

And most importantly, there was the shift away from a local land based economy which put lords at the centers of power, to a in international and global trading economy which was putting merchants and bourgeois owners at the center of power.  

The wealthy and middle class urban dwellers who saw themselves correctly as increasingly becoming the economic engine of society, had not much use for the rules and religous and social conventions that had existed in the middle ages which had served to maintain the stability of power for the rural nobility, and which kept the merchants relegated to the bottom ranks of society.  Again this is me not Graeber and Wengrow, but this is all well known stuff.  

On top of these Jesuit books, eager european readers were also gobbling up other books about the New World, like Baron Lahontan’s collection, New Voyages to North America, 1666-1716.  Of particular interest is a section called Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled which was first published in serial form in 1703.  

In these dialogues, Lanontan reports debates between himself and Adario, a fictionalized version of the real Chief Kondiaronk – a Native American of the Wendat nation of great renown who Lanhontan had made friends with and who had engaged in many debates and discussions with in the IRL, in Montreal, where I’m recording this video from.  Maybe in this very apartment?

And in these debates, Adario many detailed critiques of European society – religion, patriarchy, social castes, wealth inequality, ownership of private property, the existence of a punitive legal system – much of which Kondiaronk had likely expressed to Lahontan, but some of which was also likely Lahontan’s own point of view as he was himself a forward thinking critique of traditional europe.  And these same arguments were soon echoed and sometimes wholesale adopted by enlightenment philosophers in their debates and treatises, in particular the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  

KONDIARONKS WORDS

So let’s look at some of Kondiaronk’s critiques as recorded by Lahontan in his book where the author debates with Adario i.e. Kondiaronk, as cited by Graeber and Wengrow:

… I find it hard to see how you Europeans could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human being, what kind of creature must Europeans be to be forced to do good and refrain from evil only for fear of punishment? …

You have noted that we lack judges. What is the reason for this?  It’s because we never bring charges against each other. And why do we never sue eachother? Because we have made a decision not to accept or use money. Why?  Because we are determined not to have laws.  Since the world was a world, our ancestors were able to live happily without them.

Kandaronk then goes on eviscerate the French legal system point by point, [this is graeber and wengrow talking] focusing particularly on judicial persecution, perjury, torture, accusations of witchcraft, and differential justice for rich and poor. And in the end, he returns to his original observation: the whole punitive apparatus of trying to force people to behave properly would be useless if France did not also maintain contrary institutions that incentivized people to behave badly. These institutions consisted of money, property rights, and the resulting pursuit of material self-interest.

Kandiaronk continues: 

I’ve spent six years thinking about the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single one of your ways that isn’t inhumane, and I sincerely believe that it can only be because you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evil; the scourge of souls and the slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine that one can live in the land of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining that one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigue, deceit, lies, betrayal, insincerity, all the worst behaviors in the world. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all for money. In light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right to refuse to touch or even look at money?

Lahontan then tries to counter-argue that without money, europe would collapse.  

Without it, nobles, priests, merchants and many others who do not have the strength to work the soil, would simply starve. Our kings would not be kings; what soldiers would we have? Who would work for the kings, or for anyone else? This would plunge Europe into chaos and create the darkest confusion.

And one gets the impression that this is a setup for Adario’s response which is what Lahontan really thinks, and that Lahontan and Kandiaronk were actually on the same page:

So Adario, aka Kandiaronk replies: 

Do you really think you will influence me by catering to the needs of nobles, merchants and priests? Yes, such distinctions between men would dissolve; a leveling equality would then take its place among you as it does now among the Wendat. 

And he goes on to say that all the useless parasites who live off of others’ labour will die off but their children will know how to work and the world would be a much better place.

I’ve enumerated many times the qualities which define humanity: wisdom, reason, justice, etc.  And I’ve shown that people having opposed material interests turns all of these things on their heads.  A man motivated by interests can never be a man of reason.   

So you have this critique coming from native americans, but also from europeans like Lanhontan who clearly agrees with Kandiaronk, and this stuff is tearing across europe challenging the social order like heavy metal and rap records in the 1980s. 

And ultimately, Graeber and Wengrow argue – and I think this is where their original argument comes in – the stuff about the native influence on the west has been argued before by other scholars – so they’re original argument is that it was in order to fend off these types of critiques from Native Americans, and the Europeans influenced by them, that European thinkers developed the theory of stages of human progress.

So the originator of this idea is not a conservative traditionalist, but a bourgeois liberal free market economist, Turgot, who notably was Louis XIV’s economic adviser who opposed the reduction of bread prices during a famine – so someone who was against the medieval hierarchies of the three social orders, and the rule of the church, but who was for economic hierarchies, and also for a monarchical absolutist government.  

In Turgot’s formulation, people start as hunter-gatherers, and then move up and advance to being pastoralist animal herders, then they advance to being farmers, and then finally they advance to commercial market civilization, with each stage being better and happier for everyone than the previous one.  

And in this schema, the liberty and equality that the native americans enjoyed were ultimately signs of economic and cultural backwardness, something that’s incompatible with avanced civilization. At the end of the day hierarchy and submission to authority were the price that people had to pay for all the benefits of civilization and markets.  

Quoting from Graber:

Yes, we all like the idea of liberty and equality, Turgot writes, that is, in principle. But one must take into account the larger context. In reality, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority, but proof of their inferiority, since such equality is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient, and thus where all are equally poor. As societies evolve, and technology advances, the natural differences in talents and abilities between individuals become more and more important, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labor… and where the poverty and dispossession of some, however lamentable, is the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole. There is no way to avoid this. The only alternative, according to Turgot, would be massive state intervention to create a uniformity of social conditions, an imposed equality that could only have the effect of crushing all initiative and thus be an economic and social catastrophe.

And these are the same arguments we have heard over and over ever since, but which reached a particular crescendo during the Cold War when these arguments became the heart of the pro capitalism argument, with the Soviet and Chinese communist dictoatorships as the ultimate examples of Turgot’s thesis.  But in Turgot’s time they were actually referring to the Peruvian Incan empire which was sort of the soviet union of the americas, but not really – though interestingly some russian communists like Georgi Plekhanov in the late 18thC were worried about a communist government becoming an Inca style dictatorship if a revolution happened in the wrong conditions, which is more or less what happened after 1917.  

But note the assumption built into Turgot’s theory, that natural inequalities of ability – Peenerson’s “hierarchies of competence” automatically lead to wealth inequality as soon as you have wealth surplus and accumulation, and that these can only be reversed by some tyrant imposing unnatural equality from above.  Now this isn’t true as we’ll see next time, but it’s an idea that’s very much ingrained into our own culture today.

So you had the Native American and European critique of european hierarchy, and then you had Turgot’s and others’ defense of european hierarchies, particularly of wealth and power.  

And then, you have Jean Jacque Rousseau – and according to Graeber and Wengrow, what Rousseau does with his Discourse of Inequality, is that he synthesizes the two opposing views into a masterful declaration of impotence.  He issues a scathing and shocking for the time critique of European hierarchy and economic inequality, but according to Graeber and Wengrow his critique ultimately implies that we have no alternative, and thus his critique ends up serving as a justification of the status quo, or at least of a society with unjust dominance hierarchies.   

Woe is me, everything sucks, it’s not right, and it goes against human nature – but hey what can you do, we can’t go back to living in trees amirite?  Whip yourself on the back and jerk off with your friends about it while servants get you tea and clean your piss bucket.  

Now I don’t exactly buy this.  

If you read Rousseau’s essay, it concludes with a “what then is to be done?” section – the last big paragraph basically, where he asks how do we improve our unnatural hierarchical conditions.  And he more or less says well we can’t go back to living on acorns, but what we can do is be good people, obey our laws when they’re just, obey our leaders, but make sure they put out good laws and good constitutions… 

Now this is very reminsicent of what weird hypocritical left liberals do today – they issue a harsh and perceptive critique of our social institutions, and then instead of calling to overthrow or fundamentally change those institutions, they’re like that’s why “corporations need to be good corporate citizens!”  Or “we should vote for a president who’s a nice good boy instead of a meany weenie!”  Almost every book written by a non-socialist author ends up with this kind of garbage.  Or in the wanna be left post raisin bran critical theory academic version, they’re like “revolutions are doomed to failure because the hegemonic power discourse reproduces the structures of power, but challenges to power are still possible in the interstices of power – like we can make tiny useless changes – so let’s fight the power by criticizing the representation of data as an autistic coded person in star trek the next generation” yibbedeyabbedyibbede.  

So all of this does track with what Graeber and Wengrow are saying, but realistically, if Rousseau had actually proposed any real solutions – like had he called for the overthrow of Monarchy and the Church, he would have ended up in jail!  Like it was the enlightenment and all, but France was still an absolutist Monarchy.  And if you read that concluding paragraph it really just seems like like he just slapped that in there so as not to get in trouble.  

in short, who are persuaded that the Divine Being has called all mankind to be partakers in the happiness and perfection of celestial intelligences, all these will endeavour to merit the eternal prize they are to expect from the practice of those virtues, which they make themselves follow in learning to know them. They will respect the sacred bonds of their respective communities; they will love their fellow−citizens, and serve them with all their might: they will scrupulously obey the laws, and all those who make or administer them; they will particularly honour those wise and good princes, who find means of preventing, curing or even palliating all these evils and abuses, by which we are constantly threatened; they will animate the zeal of their deserving rulers, by showing them, without flattery or fear, the importance of their office and the severity of their duty. 

At the end of the day, given that Rousseau was a major inspiration for the Jacobins and the sans culottes – the more radical egalitarian factions in the french revolution – it’s clear that those people took the critique part of Rousseau way more seriously than the stupid passive 3 second slapped on stephen king novel conclusion. 

It’s actually Turgot that does what Graeber and Wengrow say Rousseau is doing – and you can see that just from reading their own section on Turgot which I talked about above!

Graeber and Wengrow also point out that Rousseau can’t really envision what a society would actually look like in a state of liberty and equality.  Rousseau says that humans in a state of nature are free and equal, but Rousseau’s description of humans in a state of nature – a state of liberty and equality according to Rousseay – is individuals living all alone in the trees with no ties to one another and without even language.     

But, his description of humans in a state of nature is not supposed to be real, it’s not based for example of any of the literature on native americans for example – instead he’s talking about a hypothetical people, lacking many essential human traits like language and sociality, who exist in a hypothetical state of nature—a state that, as he puts it, “no longer exists,which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist,”

It’s just a thought experiment of the situation that it would take in order to reveal the true nature of humans. 

What Rousseau is saying is that if humans are just left to their own individual devices, without any dependence on anyone else for anything, then we have no need to oppress anyone and we would live free and equal lives.  

In a way, his concept of human nature prioritized freedom, but it was also fundamentally anti social.  According to Rousseau, it’s almost society itself – social ties and obligations that oppress us.  It’s like a spoiled north american kid – or adult – who thinks that happiness is just the right to do whatever you want whenever you want at any second without any limits or obligations to anyone interfering with it, and then they become an ayn rand libertarian.  Just like Ayn Rand he saw social obligations as the antithesis of freedom.  The second every person isn’t totally self sufficient, you are oppressed.  

As Rousseau puts it in english translation:

…from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.

And interestingly, Rousseau, like Turgot also takes for granted the assumption that inequalities or hierarchies of ability will necessarily result in economic inequalities.  Quote:

In this state of affairs, equality might have been sustained, had the talents of individuals been equal … but, as there was nothing to preserve this balance … the strongest did most work; the most skilful turned his labour to best account; the most ingenious devised methods of diminishing his labour: the husbandman wanted more iron, or the smith more corn, and, while both laboured equally, the one gained a great deal by his work, while the other could hardly support himself. Thus natural inequality unfolds itself insensibly with that of combination, and the difference between men, developed by their different circumstances, becomes more sensible and permanent in its effects, and begins to have an influence, in the same proportion, over the lot of individuals.

Graeber and Wengrow see Rousseau’s thinking as stuck in european notions of liberty which are rooted in individual ownership of private property where liberty ultimately comes at someone else’s expense, like the ancient athenians who needed slaves to be able to enjoy liberty – as opposed to Native Americans who saw that liberty actually comes from being part of a society, from mutual interdependence.  

So quoting from Graeber and Wengrow

For the Americans, the freedom of the individual was supposed to be based on some level of basic communism, 

And as articulated since his Debt book, Graeber’s concept of communism is basically the idea of a sharing relationship with someone, like between parents and children, or between friends, rather than a relationship where you keep score of exchange and debts.  Quote:

For the Americans, the freedom of the individual was supposed to be based on some level of basic communism, since, after all, people who are starving or without adequate clothing or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything except what is necessary to stay alive. 

The European conception of individual freedom, on the other hand, was intimately linked to conceptions of private property. 

From a legal point of view, it goes back to the ancient absolute power of the Roman head of the family to do whatever he wanted with his personal and private property, including his children and slaves. [52] In other words, freedom was always at least potentially at the expense of others. 

Moreover, there was a strong sense that households should be self-sufficient; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of will, but in no way dependence on other human beings (except those under their direct power or control). [53] 

Rousseau, who himself always insisted that he wanted to live his life in a way that did not make him dependent on the help of others (even if he had all his needs met by mistresses and servants), echoes this logic.

When our ancestors made the fatal decision to divide the land into individual parcels and created, first, legal structures to protect their property and then governments to enforce those laws, they imagined that they were creating the means to preserve their freedom. 

But in reality, they ‘ran headlong into their chains’. This is a powerful image. But it is hard to imagine what exactly Rousseau’s lost freedom consisted of, if (as he insisted) any continuing human relationship, even of mutual aid, was a restriction on freedom. No wonder, perhaps, that he ended up inventing a purely imaginary age in which each individual human wandered alone among the trees.

and then a bit later we have this passage:

Of course, Rousseau’s effusions on the fundamental decency of human nature and the lost ages of liberty and equality were in no way responsible for the French Revolution in the sense of putting strange ideas into the heads of the sans-culottes (as we have noted, it was the intellectuals in European history who seem to have been the only class of people who were unable to wrap their heads around these ideas). But, it could be argued that by bringing together the indigenous critique and the doctrine of progress originally developed to counter it, that he in fact wrote the founding document of the left as an intellectual project.

So here they’re differentiating between the spirit of the sans-culottes, the true revolutionaries of the french revolution, and the intellectual left – the lawyers and intellectuals who took power – and they’re saying that Rousseau’s narrative which according to Graeber and Wengrow is a half assed cop out synthesis of the indigenous critique and the right wing reaction to that critique, where we criticize inequality, but we ultimately resign ourselves to hierarchy – they’re saying that this cop our is the foundation of the intellectual left!  

So what Graeber and Wengrow are doing with this chapter, is they’re setting up some of their main arguments for the rest of the book.  In the paragraph I just read, they’re setting up a critique of the intellectual left, by which I assume is going to become a critique of the marxist left.   So like in their interpretation of Rousseau, where you have a harsh critique of hierarchy based a vague two dimensional vision of a society of free and equals that is ultimately a justification for hierarchy to persist, in the marxist left and leninist left you have a far off vision of a free and equal future, but you need these hierarchical parties and states to get us to that point, which never really materializes, and this is where we get the USSR and Communist China etc.  

So in the next few paragraphs they quote an original member of the illuminati calling for a small cadre or intellectuals to lead society into an era of equality and liberty and they point out that this seems to prefigure the French and Russian Revolutions and also that it looks just like an excerpt of Rousseau’s writing.  

And hopefully they’ll also throw in a critique of the post-raisin bran academic left and it’s ideology of powerlessness as well.  

And then, as part of this critique of the intellectual left, they’re going to argue that the idea that human beings started out as egalitarian hunter gatherers, and then transitioned to hierarchical societies because of changes in material conditions, like the advent of agriculture and civilization, is part of this intellectual left justification for hierarchy – in other words people who argue that human beings started out as egalitarian hunter gatherers – which is the majority opinion among anthropologists since the 1960s’ – that what these people are ultimately doing is saying that we can’t have egalitarian societies anymore because we’re not hunter gatherers anymore, like Turgot or Rousseau saying that hierarchy is the price of civilization.  

And this is one of the big points they’ll be making in their article “How to Change the Course of Human History” which is what we’ll be focusing on next episode, and this is where I’ll be starting to critique them ferociously, because this argument is just not true.   

There are some people with no expertise like Francis Fukuyama who make arguments like that, usually in passing – it’s just dumb “common sense” folk wisdom – but there are no hunter gatherer specialists who make arguments like that, and there are many hunter gatherer experts who make the exact opposite argument – that the fact that humans probably started out as egalitarian hunter gatherers enjoying liberty and equality at the same times shows that human being are capable of living in a state of equality and liberty – and maybe that we’re even evolved and best suited to be living that way, and that we can do that in a context of civilization if we change some of our major institutions and our material conditions.  

And we’ll see why the evidence that they present that humans weren’t mostly egalitarian hunter gatherers is really weak, and based on a really flimsy theoretical basis, and total ignorance or in Graeber’s case total denial of the anthropology of egalitarian hunter gatherer societies – and we’ll see why the egalitarian origins thesis is still the majority opinion among anthropologists and hunter gatherer specialists.  

CRITIQUE OF EQUALITY

OK, so up until now, I have a few quibbles with what Graeber and Wengrow have been saying, but in general I find this chapter super interesting, it’s really exciting I learned all sorts of interesting history i didn’t know, it changed my view of the enlightenment etc. 

But then in the closing paragraphs of the chapter, we get to the part that makes me want to pull my hair out, because it’s basically a big tirade against the idea of equality as a meaningful concept – Graeber and Wengrow say that they don’t know what equality means, and then instead of trying to figure out what it means given that it’s such a foundational concept – they just want to throw away the whole idea.  And this is a theme that has quietly appeared in Graeber’s work throughout the years – but here he’s finally saying it outright – the arguments in this section are based on all sorts of inaccuracies, outdated information, and weak cop-outs.  

And it exemplifies what’s wrong with the state of political theory today, and what’s wrong with anthropological theory today, and what’s wrong with David Graeber’s thinking on human social organization, and it’s why I’m doing this show in general and these episodes in particular.

But in order for you to really see what’s wrong with this stuff, and why it’s just so obnoxious and counterproductive – and why their arguments in How to Change the Course of Human History are so obnoxious and counterproductive – I need to give you a little lesson on the history of the anthropology of hunter gatherer societies.  

And that’s what I’ll start off with next week, before I read the end of this Kandiaronk Chapter, and then I go on to read and criticize the How to Change the Course of Human History preview article, and hopefully I can get that out there before Graeber and Wengrow’s book comes out on october 15th!

In the meantime, please tell other people about this show, and share the epsiodes, and please like and subscribe and also review and rate on itunes or urple music, its really important and helps the show pop up more readily on searches – and please subscribe to my patreon so I can keep doing this and until next time … seeya!