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The author makes a lot of claims such as > Until this phase of history or prehistory, the elders and males rarely exercised socially dominant roles because the

• kiliantics 5y ago
  From my lay understanding of anthropology, having read stuff by people like David Graeber, it does seem pretty well established that pre-agrarian societies were mostly organised non-hierarchically, or at least with very limited social stratification.
  • nwah1 5y ago
    My understanding is that it varied based on the level of local resource scarcity.
    • anonporridge 5y ago
      I'm assuming that local resource scarcity leads to more social hierarchies to manage and politic over the scarce resources, while those with abundant resources tend to not have significant social stratification because there's less incentive towards infighting. Seems like all societies would eventually devolve towards resource scarcity, since abundance will almost always lead to over population.
      • nine_k 5y ago
        Since humans have invented simple and painless birth control, this is no longer the case. Birth rates are falling across the world (including poor traditional societies), and are below replacement in many countries, basically in 100% of the Western civilization.
        • anonporridge 5y ago
          I personally believe birth rates are falling not because of easy birth control, but because the Earth is already extremely over populated and resources are increasingly scarce per capita. If anything, easy birth control is simply making the population correction softer than it would otherwise be, e.g. through war and famine. If we're lucky, our population will continue to decrease relatively peacefully and painlessly to a sustainable level, or until we open up new frontiers of resources and people feel like they have enough breathing room to start expanding again.
          • hkt 5y ago
            > I personally believe birth rates are falling not because of easy birth control, but because the Earth is already extremely over populated and resources are increasingly scarce per capita. People don't really make personal choices based on global level data. So I'd say there are two problems here: 1) is that there is enough to go around without wrecking the environment. For instance, it is markets that cause famines, not crop failures - a fairer way to distribute food (and organise its logistics) would ensure that nobody ever starved. Likewise shelter and so on. 2) People are mostly choosing not to have children (in rich countries) because of the precariousness of their own existence. Why have kids when you can be fired when the market turns and be left to a hostile welfare system? Why have kids when your landlord's right to evict you is considered more important than your right to a stable home? The real choice people are making is about not having children who might end up living in poverty. Secure people with rights have kids: the parents of the baby boomers are a great example of this, choosing to have big families after the war because they were encouraged and facilitated in doing so.
            • nine_k 5y ago
              Statistics show that often poorer families in precarious circumstances have more kids than well-off families. Interestingly, your logic partly applies to well-off, too: the standards of some families are so high that they consider it impossible to keep them while having more than 1-2 kids. Many people choose to not have kids because it's a lot of work, and it takes a lot of time. They prefer to pursue other, more easily rewarding goals, like their careers. Pursuing a career while at the same time caring for a (small) child is notoriously hard, for pretty natural reasons: you can outsource being a mother only to a certain extent.
• culi 5y ago
  It's an active area of debate with archeology and anthropology. It's generally been assumed that hunter-gatherer societies were very egalitarian, but there's a lot of evidence that this is an over generalization. We now have pretty good evidence of small-scale societies being very hierarchical and evidence of larger scale societies being extremely egalitarian. In addition, the general categorization of the political organization of these societies seems to be the most problematic thing. In just 200 years, western society has profoundly changed the way we self-organize so there's no reason to think these societies somehow remained the same for millions of years. Instead we see evidence of deep experimentation in most societies. Some even varied drastically from season to season. For example, the Cheyenne (Suhtai and Tsitsistas) and the Lakota of the Great Plains in the 19th century would appoint a leader with basically absolute authority during the late summer for buffalo hunts. The rest of the year they were extremely egalitarian with no one holding any formal power. Similarly, many societies experimented heavily with forms of agriculture and hybrid forms of subsistence and would adapt their form of social organization to adapt to those forms of subsistence. So yeah, it's problematic to make such a generalization. However, it should also be noted that many scholars have recently pointed out that the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest might've had a larger impact on the core debates of the European Enlightenment than past European thinkers did. People from the Pacific Northwest likely had a lot of experience living in large hierarchical urban societies like Cahokia (which at one point was larger than any European city) and their egalitarian politics can be examined as a direct response to this experience. Anthropologists have also documented what they unfortunately named "Missipization" that spread throughout much of Eastern North America after the decline of Cahokia, possibly bringing with it a wave of democratic forms of political organization.