10.4 What Causes Seasonal Political Structures? Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything Ch. 3

In this episode we cover the rest of chapter 3 of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything.

In this chapter, the authors claim that the seasonal social structures of the traditional Nambikwara, Inuit, Lakota and Kwakiutl were the result of conscious choice, grand theatre, play and expedience.

In doing so, they repeatedly invent various things that they attribute to famous anthropologists like Clause-Levi Strauss and Marcel Mauss which those authors never said.

They also claim that those authors attribute social phenomena to conscious choice when in reality they attribute them to material conditions.

We also discover that Claude Levi-Strauss goofed up Nambikwara social organization.
And we look at materialist explanations for phenomena such as:

Why did the traditional Inuit have patriarchy and private property in summer but gender equality and communal property in winter?

Why did the Lakota have an Akicita police force that would punish crimes and enforce rules in the buffalo season but not the rest of the year?

The similarities between Nuer prophets and ancient Israelite prophets in the Old Testament.

Finally, we apply the authors’ logic about conscious choice and seasonal social structures to McDonalds employees and have a good a laugh.

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TIMESTAMPS
0:00  Intro/Recap: Democratic vs. dominance hierarchy
2:27  Answering the authors’ thesis question: how to dismantle hierarchy
4:22  Individual vs political consciousness
6:12  Strawmanthropology: the authors’ ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ anthropologists are the same people
8:56  Nuer bipolar prophets
9:45  Nuer prophets in context
11:11 The Nuer and the ancient Israelite prophets
12:35 Strawmanthropology: the Nambikwara vs materialist anthropologists
14:51 Making sh*t up: the Nambikwara don’t have seasonal political systems!
16:36 Messing sh*t up: the Nambikwara don’t have seasonal economic systems!
17:22 Post-modernism’s war or applied anthropology
18:59 Why subsistence categories are important
21:53 The causes of power differences between different Nambikwara chiefs
23:01 Strawmanthropology: 19th vs 20th century social evolution theories
26:32 Making sh*t up: Levi-Strauss’ article was not obscure at all
28:01 Strawmanthropology: Behavioural ecology as racist stages of development
32:41 The Forest People: is this why Graeber hated the idea of egalitarian societies so much?
35:17 The Kalahari and Indigenous Societies debates: the authors hate egalitarianism part 69
40:44 Why the Nambikwara are not particularly relevant to human origins
42:08 Nambikwara section summary: a bunch of made up b.s. and giant errors
42:30 European rich ice age burials as Nuer type prophets
47:00 Making sh*t up: Graeber and Wengrow write more Levi-Strauss fan fiction
48:35 The dual morphology of the Inuit
51:35 Making sh*t up: Marcel Mauss says the opposite of what Graeber & Wengrow say he does
55:40 Inuit summer vs winter cultural practices: materialist explanations
58:58 Inuit summer gender hierarchy
1:02:12 Culture vs. Consciousness: Kosher laws
1:03:43 Inuit winter gender equality
1:04:29 The Plains Indians: seasonal Akicita buffalo police
1:07:08 Why the Lakota police only operated in the buffalo hunt season
1:08:26 Strawmanthropology: The Plains Indians break the mold of imaginary social evolutionists
1:11:32 Messing sh*t up: Graeber and Wengrow goof up “complex” hunter-gatherers
1:13:39 Incoherent nonsense: ice age foragers were hierarchical but not hierarchical but hierarchical though!
1:15:09 Seasonally hierarchical societies were just as stuck as we are
1:16:42 Traditional people had more political consciousness
1:19:44 The Kwakwak’wakw dual social structure
1:20:54 Total insanity: the Nambikwara chose foraging in order to have more hierarchy??
1:22:13 Ignoring all the patterns that explain seasonal social structures
1:25:32 Hierarchy is theatre and play and expedience
1:27:39 Extra-terrestrial anthropology: the dual morphology of McDonalds
1:28:22 The authors’ hypocritical conclusion
1:32:39 Gimme money to compensate me for torturing myself for weeks in order to untangle this awful chapter for you