The kalahari bush people have a trickster type of god that they often complain about. It just causes random bad luck, which they resent. They see their respective forests as a generous, genderless, loving mother, father deity who provides everything for their children. And the forest never tells anyone what to do, besides just respect and maintain the forest. Meanwhile, the hadza have been argued to not have any religion at all,. But they certainly don't have any gods that they take very seriously.
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Transcript
Episode notes
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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