An immediate return economy is where you produce and consume right away, as opposed to the delayed returne mies practised by every other culture in the world. No one can control any particular territory or important resources, so there's no way to force people into dependence relationships that political hierarchies are mostly based on. And importantly, since everyone has access to projectile weapons and poisons, if anyone really gets out of line with domineering or anti social behavior, they can just be killed or exiled,. which is a big incentive to even try.
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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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