Greber is ignoring the most egalaterian societies and then focusing on societies that have clear signs of hierarchy in order to argue that equality doesn't exist. The micmac algonquin or seventeenth century wandat would have been referred to as the galaterian societies before the 19 seventies, but not any more. A tribe is an entirely different shabang. You are born into a tribe. If you go off and live somewhere else, you are still part of your tribe. But no anthropologist thinks this. Tribal membership will be determined by who your father is in a patrilennial society, or who your mother is in a matrilenial society.
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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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