Equality means equality of power poin finel. No matter who you are, how big or how small, how ugly or good looking, strong or weak, or how much or how little you contribute to society, you matter. And when we look at immediate return societies, this is pretty much what we see. People ar only judged negatively in so far as they disrupt, disturb or threaten the equal power of everyone else. That's a weird kind of geretocracy that does not exist anywhere on earth. Many so called agaletarian societies are really only a galetarian between adult men.
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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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