What Is a Hunter Gather Society?

In theory, a truly agalatrian society would be one where there are no authority figures. Equality of decision making power implies that there are no power hierarchies based on different categories like race and gender. There are actually several societies that approach this type of equality. The left refers to those people who support equality in precisely the ways that i described. And the political right refers to thosepeople who support hierarchies of power which also imply economic inequality.

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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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BIBLIOGRAPHY / SUGGESTED READINGS

GRAEBER AND WENGROW

Graeber & Wengrow 2021 – The Dawn of Everything

Graeber & Wengrow 2019 – La Sagesse de Kandiaronk (deepl or googl translate will give you a decent English translation)

Graeber & Wengrow 2015 – Farewell to the Childhood of Man

Graeber & Wengrow 2020 – Hiding in Plain Sight, Democracy’s indigenous origins in the Americas.

David Graeber 2004 – Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins 2017 – On Kings

David Graeber & Andrej Gubačić 2020 – Introduction to Pyotr Kropotkin 1902 – Mutual Aid

CRITIQUES OF GRAEBER AND WENGROW

Chris Knight 2021 – Did Communism Make Us Human? The Anthropology of David Graeber

Christ Knight 2021 – The Anthropology of David Graeber (video)

Camilla Power 2018 – Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s ‘How to change the course of human history’

GENERAL

Robert Kelly 1995/2014 – The Foraging Spectrum

James Woodburn 1982 – Egalitarian Societies

James Woodburn 2005 – Egalitarian Societies Revisited, in Widlock & Gossa (eds) – Property and equality, Volume 1: ritualisation, sharing, egalitarianism

Richard Lee 2004 – Power and Property in Twenty-first Century Foragers: A Critical Examination

Richard Lee & Irving Devore (Eds.) 1968 – Man the Hunter

Richard Lee & Eleanor Leacock (eds) 1983 – Politics and History in Band Societies

CENTRAL AFRICAN FORAGERS

Jerome Lewis 2017 – Bayaka Elephant Hunting in the Congo

Lewis, J., 2014. Egalitarian Social Organization: The Case of the Mbendjele BaYaka

Morna Finnegan 2013 – The politics of Eros: ritual dialogue and egalitarianism in three Central African hunter-gatherer societies

Hewlett 2017 ed – Hunter-Gatherers of the Congo Basin

Colin Turnbull 1961 – The Forest People

KALAHARI BUSH PEOPLE

Richard Lee 1969 – Eating Christmas in the Kalahari [“Shaming the meat”]

Richard Lee 1979 – The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society