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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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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