The political systems referred to as democracies in nineteenth century europe have almost nothing to do with ancient athens. Athenian intellectuals of the time, who were mostly of aristocratic origin, tended to regard the whole arrangement as a sordid affair. The dynamics of societies like ancient athens or sparta, where you have a community of equals ruling over others, is superinteresting,. and we'll talk about that in the future. But back to greburn wengro. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong in the world. A very small percentage of its population controls the destiny of almost everyone else. It came about because conditions on earth changed over time such that some people
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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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