I'm not a huge fan of Sahlins nor post-structuralism, but he's done some amazing work that heavily impacted our understanding of nomadic gatherer hunter societies.
This essay crashed the scene in 1966. It turned what were once conventional ideas about human nature on their heads and exposed that civilization had not only failed to offer us any value or growth, but taken it away. The primal anarchy in which our nomadic gatherer-hunter ancestors and relatives live is stronger than anything technology produces. And it will outlast.
"The wanderers will re-arise."
The Original Affluent Society
anarcho-primitivist death metal.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Egalitarian Societies
If you only read one anthropological essay, let this be it: Egalitarian Societies by James Woodburn.
Woodburn is largely responsible for laying out the distinctions between hunter-gatherer societies, why some are the most egalitarian societies to ever exist to why sedentary hunter-collector societies had more rigid hierarchies. What this essay says about human nature and our primal anarchy says more than everything in the anarchist cannon.
It is by seeing where hierarchy and power originate that we can find the methods to undo it.
Egalitarian Societies
Woodburn is largely responsible for laying out the distinctions between hunter-gatherer societies, why some are the most egalitarian societies to ever exist to why sedentary hunter-collector societies had more rigid hierarchies. What this essay says about human nature and our primal anarchy says more than everything in the anarchist cannon.
It is by seeing where hierarchy and power originate that we can find the methods to undo it.
Egalitarian Societies
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