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#Farming was not a 'wholesale success' when it arrived in #NorthAfrica...but then was it, anywhere? If we consider the criteria of trashing the planet vs keeping paradise and egalitarian living?
@RadicalAnthro Agriculture wasn't the primary cause of hierarchical power structures developing imo
Such a lens paints technology as the driver of social inequality rather than the power structures people created. Many societies did varying forms of farming in an egalitarian way
It kind of goes hand in hand with the development of cities as a static option to living off the land according to the whims of nature.
Plenty of basic tech there, which began to represent stronger defense capabilities, giving cities an advantage.
The social power structures are rather impotent without a physical advantage provided by innovations & scale efficiencies.
Hard to separate these things.
@MalthusJohn @RadicalAnthro True, but why does that mean cities had to be organized hierarchically?
If you mean politically, I think that was well underway before moving wholesale into cities.
Remember that we're talking about 1000s of years of small, slow change, far beyond anyone's memory. Just traditions passed down with verbal stories to back them up.
I think there's a good argument to be made that any society can only be as decentralized as its key information components are. Prior to reading & writing being common, it would be very easy for anyone to amass power simply by being in the sole center of knowledge.
Because the previous paradigm had no checks & balances against centralization of power & wealth (it's naturally provided by a nomadic lifestyle), when they began shifting over, we probably find the first psychopaths leveraging this weakness and getting people to trade freedom for security, as is a well known dilemma.
What starts out as a temporary exception becomes part of tradition & culture after a few generations, and then ramps up from there, each time getting worse.
@annaymone you are not taking account of what happens to women, unless they maintain ability to move to alleviate the evils of settlement which tends to trap them. Yes that does lead to hierarchy.
@RadicalAnthro Could you elaborate on how women are especially trapped by agriculture in a fundamental way? I'm unaware of anything beyond more basic patriarchal social structures that would cause that
@annaymone sorry, this is a big subject. I will respond when I have time. The critical features are the issue of settlement (as against nomadic with lots of bilateral links) and whether or not a woman is married away from her family. Even then (many W African examples) she may retain ability to up and move back home, which actually gives her leverage (eg Igbo sex-strikes). This is especially evident for East Central African matrilineal groups, where women pretty much organize village affairs via 'sororates'. Those are farming groups (Bemba, Bisa, Tonga, Cewa eg)