In 19 66, there was the first big conference of hunter gather specialists from cultural anthropology and archaeology called man hunter. The research that came after it completely up ended all of these assumptions. It turns out that most hunter gatherers are usually better nourished and healthier than their farmer neighbors. In terms of gender relations, far from being male dominated, women in most hunter gather societies tend to have a much higher degree of freedom and autonomythan many of their urban sisters. And several hunter gather societies have turned out to be the most gender agaltrian societies we've ever known.
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In this episode we read and critique the conclusion of Chapter 2 of Dawn of Everything, “Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of the Noble Savage”, which was previously released in French in 2019 as La Sagesse de Kandiaronk.
Given that the conclusion of the chapter is a tirade against the concept of “equality” we first examine what the world equality means in a political context, and what the term “egalitarian society” implies, followed by an examination of the history of the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunter gatherer societies.
We also cover material from Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and On Kings in order to look at how his treatment of egalitarian societies over his career routinely ignored 50 years of research on extremely egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, a practice which he and Wengrow continue in this chapter.
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