I notice that some anthropologist believe all humans were egalitarian in the past, and others believe inequality was more common they we currently we think with hunter gathers.
This seems to along with anthropologist using modern hunter gathers as way to look at the past which is now considered not a best practice from what I read. Which this influenced the egalitarian hunter gathers idea even more.
Material conditions determine how we organize more than innate biology.
Innate biology was determined by a set of material conditions in subsaharan Africa that we evolved alongside of. The evolutionary psychologists should be out there doing paleontologic work to recreate those conditions. If they weren’t all hacks ofc
Evo Psych is a trash tier quack science that is used by STEM nerds to justify sexual violence and hierarchy. I've never seen the field produce any respectable research and I've never met a respectable scientist who had time for Evo Psych.
Also, the material conditions we evolved in shaped us to incredibly flexible and resilient generalists. We can, and have, adapted to every hostile and marginal environment in the world (except arguably Antarctica) and we've produced a vast diversity of skills, technologies, and societies in the process. The material conditions of our evolution should be understood as providing the framework for diversity and variety rather than a biological straightjacket that determines our behavior.
no we are complex creatures not ants or some shit
even dogs change their nature based on material conditions. the only constant is that we are social creatures that get a natural drug rush from touching each other
I get your point but stepping in to defend ants here, ants are social insects with complex behaviors
shout out to leafcutter ants that do fungiculture
yeah thats true. still, one ant is just part of a larger whole. basically the entire hill is a big machine. sometimes they can be adaptable but a lot of them are hardcoded to their natural environment and just straight up die elsewhere
Some basic context pieced together from what I know, for anyone who's not too familiar with how anthropology addresses this: the vast, vast majority of pre-agricultural societies that exist/existed up to the 19th and 20th centuries weren't hunter/gatherers but instead what are referred to as "horticulturalists" who have established permanent or semi-permanent homes and who grow crops, may keep some livestock, and supplement that with a large amount of hunting, fishing, and/or foraging. Further, hunter/gatherers that persisted to the modern era did not do so in a vacuum and had frequent contact with both horticulturalist and later agricultural societies and so cannot represent an actual snapshot of what humans would have done and believed prior to permanent settlements and the cultivation of crops. There are also pastoralists, who historically have only ever existed as nomadic drovers trading with agricultural societies and similarly can't be viewed as a snapshot preserving pre-historic human behavior and beliefs.
Further still at this point there are no "uncontacted peoples" existing as some sort of isolated preserve of pre-historic humanity: everyone alive has been touched by the global systems of imperialism and the cultural hegemony it brought with it in some way, even if indirectly (and before this they still existed as parts of larger networks of communication and trade with agricultural civilizations in most cases). Holdouts existing in remote places aren't simply ignorant of an outside world but instead exist in conflict with capitalist interests that seek to encroach on and steal the land and resources they rely on or who have actively adopted a siege mentality after suffering abuses at the hands of imperialists (like the Sentinelese, whose hostility towards outsiders can be directly traced back to the British abducting and killing people from those islands). One can't learn about a "default" or "natural" state from them because they're not building from nothing but instinct every generation and instead have had millennia of their own cultural development and cultural exchange with other civilizations.
A lot of the anthropology that came out of studying pacific island cultures reinforces this. While it was true that you had isolated societies on islands, sometimes being uncontacted by others for centuries, there was no "natural" way for humans to end up on those islands. They migrated there, over centuries, using advanced navigation techniques. They came with tools, technologies, language, social fabric, edit: as well as animals and plants for cultivation. It was a deliberate process. If I am remembering this correctly, they would tack and sail into the wind for as long as they could. If they found no land they would turn around and use the seasonal winds to blow them back home.
If I am remembering this correctly, they would tack and sail into the wind for as long as they could.
I read that it was that they'd sail into the prevailing currents, but yeah the reasoning is the same: go slower on the way out, then turn around when your supplies are half gone and you have the current speeding you along so you get back to safety with supplies to spare in case something goes wrong.
There's a lot of fascinating stuff about just how you find tiny islands maybe a mile or two long at the most that are so flat you can't see them over the horizon too, like how islands leave a massive footprint in the ocean from how they change the waves and how debris from plants will float down current or with the wind, so the target for finding one isn't just a few miles wide but instead potentially tens of miles long, making it much easier to spot and home in on the islands especially if you already knew roughly where it was.
That might have been it, current instead of wind, those college courses are shrouded in memory fog :D I remember Heyerdahl getting brought up solely to debunk him, if that can kinda place where academics was at the time.
They were egalitarian then because technology was so primitive that surplus value didnt exist, making exploitation impossible
all tribes started with the gold bars, frog sweat, HGH, and elk meat.
the only way to get back to that pure, primordial state of symbiosis is to put everything on the blockchain and use apps to measure peoples' skull shapes.
I think all "states of nature" are kind of a myth. Some are useful myths, some aren't. But we're always informed by history and material conditions - we are "naturally" unnatural as tool users, cooks, etc.
The classic example I always use for this is otters using rocks to break open clams on their bellies. Do animals use tools to create further tools? I can't quite remember if that's a uniquely hominid thing or not.
That is true yeah. It's more trying to imagine a "natural" humanity without tools and such denies our humanity.
After all, "culture" is probably where most of our humanity comes from. Nature can be pretty brutal after all.
An experiment involving introducing the game “musical chairs” to children attempted to answer this question. In addition to the normal version, an alternative version where everyone would share fewer and fewer chairs was played.
The children almost ubiquitously preferred the cooperative version.
I'm gonna go against the grain and say that there even though economic structures varied wildly among prehistoric humans based on their material conditions, one aspect of human society that was common enough that you could call it the "default" is clans. We tend to stick with the people we're related to, periodically swapping members with other clans and budding off groups to form new ones, and this pattern happens to some extent no matter which pre-agricultural economic lifestyle you're living in.
But even norms of familial relationships, marriage practices, and the way that groups separate and join varies enormously. Some cultures don't have a recognized social role of a father, some determine who aunts and uncles and cousins are in very different ways than Western societies do, and so forth and so on.
You would have to first define a default environment. Just because it's in the past doesn't mean it's the default. If hunter-gatherers had grocery stores, and everything that comes along with that, then it would probably look a lot like today's world. We tend to think of development as linear, the past is less developed and the future is more developed, but that doesn't really make sense. If we nuke everything and reset to the stone age, are we still more developed? History is an ebb and flow of development. It's not always progressive. We sometimes regress.
If a past state isn't always the state of the past, and states don't develop linearly, then there is no default. Just a series of different states that exist at any given time depending on the conditions we face. Even within the current state of organization there exists different forms. Capitalism isn't 100% one kind of organization. It's the predominant one, but not the only one. Within capitalism you can have people who organize differently under it.
In all honesty I think if you want a tabula rasa approach then how toddlers and kindergartners organize and interact is somewhat of a possible indicator, with empathy being a huge development milestone in children and that many are naturally sharing when an individual is in visible duress. I think one approach in anthropology and recent historical research that should be supported more is to view current hierarchical society as maladaptive states of humanity under stress either via system/environment or stress via others as previous viewpoints on society and organizing viewed these things as stepping stones of advancement instead.
I'd argue no. The state of organization is largely a product of material conditions with some local quirks/tradition mixed in randomly. In hunter gatherer groups, there would have been somebody with clear advantages over others, or just a random disposition to violent risk taking that fate made into a ruler which allowed them to accumulate more than others. Even on a micro level within a tribe, there's going to be certain people who are favored for some reason, even if just by pure chance, who will accumulate more and be able to assert economic dominance and further their advantage.
This doesn’t happen because hunter gatherer societies don’t generate a surplus
Sure they do. Someone is gonna be bigger and stronger or just luckier and get access to better hunting grounds, more fertile patches for horticulture, etc. The primitive accumulation process starts before people settle permanently.
there would have been somebody with clear advantages over others
Nooooot really. Most hunting and gathering societies use a relatively straightforward toolkit of techniques and technologies that are learned by most or all members of the society. Most people will learn to make any of the tools needed for survival and resource gathering, and those tools will rely on relatively simple to acquire resources in their territory.
And hierarchy in a hunting and gathering society is difficult to enforce. If you're in a resource situation where the average person can meet their own caloric needs by hunting and gathering then there's not much you can hold over their heads. !Kung people are well known for having very little social violence do to the simple reality that they can carry all the stuff they need, so if someone in their camp is being a jackass they can simply leave and go stay in another camp. From what I remember they also have a lot of social norms that emphasize community achievements and de-emphasize individual achievements. Like successful hunters will be gently chided that their kill isn't that big or that impressive, with the goal being to defuse individual ego.
Just to restate it, because it's important; It's very hard for one individual to take control of a hunting and gathering group because everyone has equal access to the same tools and resources, accumulation of resources and surplus is nigh impossible, and if anyone doesn't like your leadership they can just leave and go live with relatives or by themselves and do perfectly fine.
Edit: I did a quick re-read and it seems like most societies that were hunting and gathering societies in recent history are becoming increasingly settled due in large part to the intrusion of global economies and agricultural practices in to more and more marginal land. The !Kung people who have been protrayed as the "model" hunting and gathering society are now increasingly settled as a result of the expansion of agriculture and the intrusion of cattle ranching in to their traditional lands.
Not all hunter gatherers are egalitarian. The material conditions play a huge role. And there's evidence that for a couple thousand years after farming was developed, it was managed by egalitarian women's councils while nearby hunter gatherers became patriarchal in reaction to the dominance of women in farming society.
Yeah, there's some evidence that patriarchy was established by male dominated pastorialists/hunter primacy cultures extorting female dominated agri/gatherer dominant cultures by force.
That said everyone kind of has an axe to grind in anthropology so it's hard to tell how evidence should be weighted.
