I'm not pronouncedly more persuaded by hippie evolutionary theories than by the red-faced shouting Oakley guy in a pickup truck versions.
Be either. I'm also feeling sorry for all the monkeys being slammed as selfish lovers.
Yeah, they rather show their hand with the line about "this hypothesis is unpleasant, therefore wrong". And the whole business about the egalitarian hunter-gatherers who avoid tension by moving away rather ignores the amazingly high homicide rates recorded in hunter-gatherer societies everywhere. ("Pre-state societies are very violent" is also an unpleasant hypothesis and was therefore regarded as wrong by anthropologists for decades.)
I am so interested in the topic, but am hampered by wanting to read work that's well grounded and well reasoned. Our understanding of neanderthal society has grown really quickly in recent years, I haven't kept up, but that's where I'd like to read. I have David Reich's book flagged; John Hawks is the other person whose writing I always find worth reading.
This was a great review, thanks for sharing. I'm afraid that Debt, while well-intentioned and not without good spots, was so deeply flawed that I'm disinclined to look at more of Graeber's work
egalitarian hunter-gatherers who avoid tension by moving away
how unlike the home life of our own dear Unfogged!
ps there is a really good blog about this sort of thing here. meet the Human Leopard Society: https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog
I wish they had been more clear about the distinction between Darwinian physical evolution and non-Darwinian social evolution. They conflate them at times and distinguish them at times. It's annoying.
Also, I don't think it's productive to use words like "class" and "inequality" in reference to human ancestors whose "societies" (mostly bands of a few dozen people) are each represented by small numbers of bones, knapped flints, and wall paintings.
That being said, both responses in the link were interesting and worthwhile reading.
Here's their review of a similar "on the veldt, everyone was totally having great sex in a way that would be fully approved of by my ethics committee" book: https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2020/12/13/book-review-humankind-by-rutger-bregman
"Bregman sums up his caricature, writing that, "For most of human history, then, men and women were more or less equal. Contrary to our stereotype of the caveman as a chest-beating gorilla with a club and a short fuse, our male ancestors were probably not machos. More like proto-feminists." Yet the Ache have literal club fights, which were utilized as a tool of social control by powerful adult men. Anthropologists Kim Hill and Ana Hurtado write that, "Before contact, middle-aged men between thirty-five and fifty-five years old were politically powerful and monopolized many fertile women in the population. Younger men were afraid of these "fully grown adult men" because of their strong alliances and the fact that they sometimes killed younger men in club fights." Hill and Hurtado also note that, "In the first few days [after a club fight] some men might die, but most recovered, even if their skulls had been split after a direct hit. Many Ache men have multiple large dents in their skulls, evidence of past fights and their ability to recover.""
Obviously, women can correct me if I'm wrong. But only if they've seen enough men with club-dented heads to be informed.
The bits about more recent societies (the Kwakiutl, for example) are, as the authors suggest, usually examples of post-Discovery societies that have been irrevocably damaged by disease and war.
Vis a vis human sacrifice, I see no grounds for their assumption that the purpose was to intimidate the lower classes. How it worked with the Aztecs is that the victims were almost entirely captured enemy warriors, not members of the Aztec lower classes. Aztec imperialism was driven by the need to "hunt and gather" these sacrificial victims, thus appeasing the gods. (Other cultures with human sacrifice may have worked differently, of course. The Maya dropped young women into cenotes, and they weren't captives, AFAIK.)
The Maya dropped young women into cenotes, and they weren't captives, AFAIK
totes empowering!
10. Those guys are less likely to find sound arguments for their side of the motorcycle or minivan conversation.
The only thing you can say about humanity is that societies are so insanely widespread and varied that any universal conclusion you try to draw is marred by sampling error. There's a society out there somewhere that illustrates what you think people do, and one which turns it on its head.
I bet a nice dent would make it easier to stay on your head.
The thing about societies is that they very much differ in how many people they have. If you count them all equally, you sometimes are taking something really rare and comparing it to something very common as equal things. And if you go by population, you are effectively assuming every trait of a society is central to why it became common when it's probably the case that most of those traits are simply along for the ride.
Way to caricature, folks. I read this as a grounded summary of a lot of research, that wasn't wrenching facts to posit some pre-capitalism utopia but measurable differences, accepting a lot of variation.
(As opposed to the Graeber book it reviewed, which was much more polemical and all over the place, it seems.)
While accepting that there would be many non-ideal, non-edenic aspects, sometimes very prominent, does it not stand out that on average, human societies, especially non-settled ones, are much more egalitarian than other primates, save bonobos? Is that not worth investigating empirically? As long as you stay away from on-the-veldt-style free-floating hypotheses.
I think another useful section was where it acknowledges there are competing, jostling impulses to domination and to fairness, but the latter impulse has strengthened over deep time - the implication being it can be further nurtured than we do now:
He says that we retain our ape heritage which encourages us to submit, to compete and to dominate. But for humans to survive we had to agree consciously together to repress the jealousy, aggression and selfishness which welled up in us, and we had to repress selfishness in others.
Boehm's ideas are now widely accepted. All of this is not because people are naturally egalitarian or nonviolent. It is because we have that potential within us, and its opposite. But we understood that we had to share and be egalitarian to survive.
This is killing me. In the last month or so, I read a lengthy look into the evidence about equality among H-G societies, with the conclusion being that there's virtually no evidence for it--a lot of shifting definitions, tendentious conclusions, and treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
I didn't have strong priors on the topic, but it certainly seems like 1 & 4 are correct.
20: OK, at least you're reacting to the research instead of ridiculing a priori.
The thing about societies is that they very much differ in how many people they have. If you count them all equally, you sometimes are taking something really rare and comparing it to something very common as equal things. And if you go by population, you are effectively assuming every trait of a society is central to why it became common when it's probably the case that most of those traits are simply along for the ride.
I haven't had time to read the reviews closely, but I see that Timothy Burke (who is generally very good) has a review up, and it looks like it touches on that.
These variations are not the inevitable product of different environmental preconditions within West Africa, nor are they analogous to drivers who are at different positions on the same road but are headed for the same destination. Graeber and Wengrow's vision of world history would have us instead see these variations as a shifting conversation or argument between human beings across such a region. If Igbo communities in the Lower Niger steadfastly rejected centralized authority while building elaborate commercial and cultural institutions that linked them together, then perhaps that was because they saw their neighbors' elaborately centralized and military state--the Oyo Empire--and they didn't care for it. (And vice versa.) It's a vision of world history that scales down to individuals and casts a new light on what historians frequently see in the historical record, which is people as individuals and small groups making choices, driven by affinity and aversion to join or emulate a new society, or to flee or reject their old one.
Graeber and Wengrow freely concede that their reframing of world history is tied to an anarchist political project. I have no quarrel with this vision as such, but it does put some strains on the book. These strains are most visible in the book's repeated focus on equality and egalitarianism. The authors are at great pains to argue that when human societies have been devoted in some respect to egalitarian social arrangements, that devotion has not been a by-product of size, scale, or environmental circumstance. This proposition puts them at odds with intellectuals and scholars (including other anarchists) who argue that the evidence for an association between small-scale foraging societies and egalitarian norms is robust.
Perhaps as a consequence, Graeber and Wengrow are mostly uninterested in human societies that have been hierarchical, unequal, centralized, or aggressive. They're interested in dethroning those societies from their privileged status as typical or inevitable. But such societies are not rare. If we are to understand human beings as active agents in shaping societies, then applying that concept to societies at any scale that have structures and practices of domination, hierarchy, and aggression should be as important as noting that these societies are neither typical nor inevitable.
(I'd be interested in a link to what you read, if available.)
This book was very interesting on the topic
https://www.amazon.com/Hierarchy-Forest-Evolution-Egalitarian-Behavior/dp/0674006917
A common dynamic is that when somebody is too much of a bully the other guys (more out of sorrow than in anger) agree to stab the guy in his sleep. This option isn't really available for other primates. This leads to a flatter hierarchical structure than for other primates. The dynamic is compatible with a lot of non equitable treatment of women though
Sometimes you stab the guy on the floor of the Senate
5.2 speaks for me also.
5.1. Hawks ran a MOOC about 10 years ago which was excellent, but would presumably be totally out of date by now because this stuff moves so fast. It's almost a full time job keeping up.
OK, here's Tim Burke:
The authors are at great pains to argue that when human societies have been devoted in some respect to egalitarian social arrangements, that devotion has not been a by-product of size, scale, or environmental circumstance. This proposition puts them at odds with intellectuals and scholars (including other anarchists) who argue that the evidence for an association between small-scale foraging societies and egalitarian norms is robust.
Burke doesn't say where he comes down, but it seems the association is at least credibly argued.
23: Yeah, sorry, the "this is killing me" part was the fact that I can't recall where I read it. And now I've spent 15+ minutes and still can't find it.
Whoever wrote it was pretty rigorous, finding claims in lots of different sources about specific H-G societies (IIRC restricted to documented ones, not prehistoric) and tracking down A. their veracity B. their scope and C. egalitarian how? I don't know if he was primarily focused on gender equality but that's stuck with me. So for instance, Tribe X in New Guinea is on the list of tribes with gender equality. But when you track it down, what this means is that all decisions are made by men in public fora, but women are consulted privately. The Abigail Adams of H-G societies. Meanwhile, a lot of other claims were completely vague and barely more than tautological.
There's not nothing to it, but it sure looks like conventional wisdom based on extrapolating from partial and inconsistent date rather than any kind of consistent, unmistakable pattern.
specific H-G societies
I suggest a different abbreviation. On unfogged that read as "Heebie-Geebie societies" to me.
I do believe in egalitarian societies, though.
"does it not stand out that on average, human societies, especially non-settled ones, are much more egalitarian than other primates"
I have no idea on what basis you are calculating the Gini coefficients of the ring tailed lemur compared to those of the howler monkey. Bit I'm not sure it's very reliable.
Orgasms per animal and the standard deviation of that.
If the point of the Lemur Center isn't to watch the lemurs fucking, why did they put it in North Carolina?
29: was it this?: https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/
Interesting thread listing different explanations various scholars have given for the origin of patriarchy: https://twitter.com/_alice_evans/status/1492541677621362690
"Will touch only one penis for bread. "
12- next week I'm paying to go into a cenote.
Be sure the ticket includes getting out.
Especially if somebody remarks about the rain being lacking lately.
32. "Human equality is a contingent fact of history"- Stephen Jay Gould.
36. Does this make hunter-gatherer war bands HunG'er marchers?
Huh, and it appears that I also read some of his later pieces on creativity ("Where's Today's Beethoven?") without realizing it was the same guy.
Because he was wearing a hat the second time?
42.1: Gould was talking about equality in the sense of "all men are created equal." Ajay is talking about what happens after they are created.
Thanks to 46. You can actually have a grossly unequal society made up entirely of people who are biologically equal; or, of course, vice versa.