10.1 Do "Egalitarian Societies" Exist? David Graeber & David Wengrow’s "The Dawn of Everything"

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 word 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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0:00 Intro: Comments on the successes and failures of the book as a whole.
4:53 Outline of my main critiques
5:50 What is "equality"?  What is an "egalitarian society"?
10:38 Assumptions about hunter-gatherer societies before "Man the Hunter"
14:00 Our understanding of hunter-gatherer societies after "Man the Hunter"
18:38 Egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies vs. all other societies.
23:00 Meaning of the term "egalitarian society" before and after the 1980s.
24:11 David Graeber's treament of "egalitarian societies" throughout his career (before 2020).

33:10 Conclusion of Chapter 2: Wicked Liberty
34:58 Bands vs tribes
37:25 No one knows what equality means?
38:25 Equality and individuality
39:17 Gerontocracy, patriarchy and “male egalitarianism”
40:12 Gender equality
42:51 The poverty of our political vocabulary
43:38 Marx and Engels on bourgeois vs real equality
44:58 Egalitarian societies as “protoplasmic mass”?  No way!
47:18 Origins of inequality as origins of civiliation?  No way!
48:28 Is inquiring into the origins of hierarchy a justification of hierarchy? No way!
50:36 Insulting anthropologists, foragers and readers
51:32 Why you should read about egalitarian societies
52:14 Strawmanthropology
54:20 Egalitarian ideologies as recently invented by Europeans?? No way!
55:01 Athens and Sparta: elite egalitarianism
56:46 Graeber and Wengrow punt on their thesis questions
58:22 Help! Shout outs.