Investigating the Origins of Hirarchy Is Not About Civilization
Greber and wangro: Anyone looking into the origin of hierarchy is trying justify hirarchy on some level. This is an insult to 50 years of hunter gather studies, they say. They ask how do our hunter gather brothers and sisters live without hirarchy? What lessons can we learn from them to be applied to industrial civilization? We are trying to tell a different story," Greber says.
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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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