By Duncan Stibbard Hawkes and Christopher von Rueden. Hawkes is a Professor of Anthropology at Baylor University and von Rueden is a Professor of Leadership Studies at University of Richmond. Excerpts:
"our experience as anthropologists working with the Hadza people of Tanzania and with the Tsimane people of Bolivia’s Amazon rainforest is that inequalities are part of even the most equal of societies. Furthermore, the equalities that do exist often emerge from selfish motives."
"Hunter-gatherers are often at the center of heated academic battles about what it means to be human, including debates over gender, war and peace and whether humans are, by nature, egalitarian or hierarchical.
Sometimes these debates oversimplify. So we pulled together hundreds of different sources covering more than a century of ethnography to find out just how egalitarian hunter-gatherer and other subsistence societies really are."
"A quick trip to your local bookshop will reveal grand claims, including that past hunter-gatherer societies had no permanent leadership and no hierarchy, inequality only spread with the development of agriculture, and humans are noble by nature.
Some scientists are pushing back against these utopian portrayals. The popular bestseller, “The Dawn of Everything,” calls egalitarianism a “Garden of Eden narrative” that lacks substance. Other scholars have called egalitarian societies a scientific origin myth."
"In our recent wide-ranging review of the evidence from the early 20th century onward, we found that no society lacked inequality.
Like the Hadza, the Ju/’Hoansi of the Kalahari desert in southern Africa had little property and widespread food-sharing, yet certain families controlled valuable hunting territory surrounding waterholes. The Bayaka of the central African rainforest had little material inequality, yet they bought, sold and hoarded ritual knowledge. The Philippine Agta controlled and arranged their children’s marriages, hugely discriminating against orphans.
Gender inequalities were commonplace. The Tanzanian Hadza keep certain cuts of meat exclusively for older men, and give more respect to better hunters. Across societies, women have universally done more direct parenting, and men have participated more frequently in community-level decision-making.
No society lacks informal leadership. Age was another source of inequality. In many Australian societies, older men controlled ritual secrets and had power over the marriage choices of younger relatives.
Our study also found that although hunter-gatherers are frequently generous, the processes limiting inequality often do not require any generosity. Instead, equality often results from people’s self-interested motives to acquire resources, status and autonomy.
A great example of this is food-sharing. Although each Hadza family gets a cut of kudu meat, it often happens not because the hunter’s family prioritizes total equality, but because other families request it vociferously. It can involve more taking than giving, often through strongly stated demands or complaints.
Another example is ridicule and mockery of stingy or braggadocious individuals, which keeps greed and bravado in check. Paradoxically, status-seeking can also promote equality, when cooperating to gain status diffuses status throughout the community."
"Our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t reach the giddy heights of inequality seen in other societies over the last 6,000 years, but putting hunter-gatherers on a pedestal as paragons of equality is a mistake."
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