The term equality is a default term referring to that kind of protoplasmic mass of humanity that is imagined to be left over when all the trappings of civilization are stripped away. The galetarian people are those who have no princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests and are generally without cities or scriptures. They are societies of equals only in the sense that all the most obvious signs of inequality are missing. So what they're doing here is there saying that rousseau's vision of equality was two dimensional, because it's just not anything real. It's a caricature. We're never really supposed to get there. And this is some straight up bochet. This should be
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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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