In the late 19 seventies and early eighties, an anthropologist who did his field work among the hadza people in tanzinea noticed that there was one category of hunter gather societies which stood out. These were the super egaletarian societies where men and women are as equal as anywhere on earth - with personal liberty coexists with strictly enforced economic equality. Unlike almost all other human societies, men, women and older children alike are entitled to direct and immediate access to the ungarnered food and other resources of their country. Neither parents nor other kin provide control or direct access these open access rights to material resources. The notion of property as theft is not a novel, revolutionary
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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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