Aspelin: The author's war on categories is completely insane. It's this typical post modern brain disease, where you start with an important and valid critique like that categories are just tools. And then instead of translating that into constructive lessons, they just go straight in to throw the baby out with the bathwater mode," he says.
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In this episode we cover the rest of chapter 3 of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything.
In this chapter, the authors claim that the seasonal social structures of the traditional Nambikwara, Lakota and Kwakiutl were the result of conscious choice, grand theatre, play and expedience.
In doing so, they repeatedly invent various things that they attribute to famous anthropologists like Clause-Levi Strauss and Marcel Mauss which those authors never said.
They also claim that those authors attribute social phenomena to conscious choice when in reality they attribute them to material conditions.
We also discover that Claude Levi-Strauss goofed up Nambikwara social organization.
And we look at materialist explanations for phenomena such as:
Why did the traditional Inuit have private patriarchy and private property in summer but gender equality and communal property in winter?
Why did the Lakota have an Akicita police force that would punish crimes and enforce rules in the buffalo season but not the rest of the year?
The similarities between Nuer prophets and ancient Israelite prophets in the Old Testament.
Finally, we apply the authors’ logic about conscious choice and seasonal social structures to McDonalds employees and have a good a laugh.
PATREON (I refuse to monetize my YouTube because I don’t want to subject you to ads, and it takes me 2-6 weeks to make one episode of these, so please help out if you can!)
