Evidence from archaeology, anthropology and related fields suggests that our distant ancestors had very specific ideas about what was important in their societies. A strong sense that no one's will should be subordinated to another's is the essence of agaletarianism. Equality implies freedom, dignity and participation that applies equally to all. The ancient athenian democracy, for example, was based on political equality among its citizens - even if they represented only ten to 20 % of the total population. We are to see this older notion of equal civic participation revived two thousand years later as a dubious proposition.
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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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