i noticed that whenever he did mention society as being a galetarian, it would never be an actual agalitarian society. It would always be a society with significant forms of hierarchy. The pioroa have positions of authority that are all dominated by men. The tive have very clear patriarchy and garitocracy. And the malagasse are not really a galaterian at all. They have all sorts of class and wealth distinctions and cultural hierarchies. There is always a significant form of hierarchy hiding in even the mostg tarian societies. When i was reading this stuff, i kept wondering, does this guy just not know about immediate return societies? How could he not?
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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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