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In 'Egalitarianism made us the symbolic species', biosocial anthropologist #CamillaPower opposes the idea that just anything goes in our evolution as Homo sapiens. While Graeber and Wengrow say about our speciation that ‘we have next to no idea what was happening’, we can be fairly confident about what wasn’t happening - patriarchy! This hypothesised trajectory of change in ‘dominance’ relations reflects change in brain size through Pleistocene Homo evolution. The very large brain sizes of the period of our speciation are predicted to associate with significant egalitarianism. Our anatomy, psychology and cognition provide evidence for constraints. The evolution of cooperative eyes, intersubjectivity, large brains, a ratchet effect of cultural accumulation and language itself needed stable, protracted periods in sociopolitical contexts of egalitarianism. Gender relations must be pivotal in the processes of increasing levels of social tolerance and aversion to inequity.

#biosocial #anthropology #evolution #brainsize #maternalenergetics #cognition #egalitarian #cooperativechildcare
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.2

In 'Before The Dawn of Everything', archaeologist #IanWatts questions Graeber and Wengrow's premise that searching for original human society 'can only be a matter of myth-making'. He argues, for Graeber and Wengrow, a ‘single human “us” can only be inferred from ~30,000 years ago'. The actual stretch of time when we became all-singing, all-dancing, language-speaking symbolic culture-bearing humans -- in Africa-- is abandoned as unknowable.

The latest archaeological findings and their interpretation suggest pan-African habitual performance of collective ritual, with a uniform signature of red cosmetic usage, from ~160,000 years ago around the end of speciation, grounding symbolic culture’s first shared imaginaries. While #TheDawnofEverything was clearly intended to be collectively empowering, it marginalises evolutionary theory, the archaeology of our speciation and African hunter-gatherer ethnography. Thereby, it resembles the decried ‘sapient paradox’! That is the fairly racist (!) idea that we got human bodies in Africa but had to reach Europe to show intelligence (or interesting archaeology!)

#archaeology #humanorigins #Africa #MiddleStoneAge #sapientparadox

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.3

In 'Seasonality and schismogenesis', social anthropologist #ThomasWidlok draws on longterm fieldwork with Hai//om people of northern Namibia, envisaging an ‘indigenous critique’ of two key themes: oscillatory switches framed by seasonality, and ‘schismogenesis’. He calls these ‘doing seasons’ and ‘doing difference’. Doing seasons without ‘unruly switching’, Hai//om indigenous voice critiques the structuralist/dualist seasonal perspective in #TheDawnofEverything ‘coloured by agricultural folks in the high latitude zones’. Life histories collected from Hai//om seniors also provide the opposite of ‘doing difference’ – that is, ‘undoing difference’, when they describe living with !Xû neighbours as ‘children of one woman’.

#anthropology #schismogenesis #Hai//om #Namibia #indigenousvoice

https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.5

Social anthropologist #ChrisKnight uses another source of indigenous voice – #Amerindian mythology – to interrogate Graeber and Wengrow’s oscillatory model, addressing their key question about ‘how did we get stuck?’ A structuralist binary lies at the heart of these mythic discourses, beating to a lunar cyclical rhythm. Although Graeber + Wengrow pay little attention to indigenous myths, he discerns ‘an uncanny fit’ between their ‘getting stuck’ thesis and a worldwide motif central to myths -- a preoccupation with loss of periodicity and movement between worlds. This is taken to a high degree of elaboration in the #Tucuna story ‘The hunter Monmanéki and his wives’ which opens 'The Origin of Table Manners', Vol 3, Lévi-Strauss’s 'Mythologiques'. The animal wives move through an algebraic sequence of structural oppositions, more and more handicapped by the increasingly absurd demands of patrilocal marriage. The last wife literally flies apart, split into 2 halves. This story's Amazonian voice explains how we ‘got stuck’.

#anthropology #Amazonia #myth #structuralism #Mythologiques #LeviStrauss

https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.6

In 'Cancelling hunter-gatherers for the cause of 21st C urbanism', anarchist anthropologist #JamesvanLanen critiques what he sees as a gendered structure arising in #TheDawnofEverything.This counterposes brutish, masculinist, prestige-hungry hunters to more communal, matriarchal early women farmers, busy creating an ‘ecology of freedom’. A whole array of lifeways of non-intensifying, egalitarian peoples have been ‘cancelled’ from this ‘new history of humanity’. Yet precisely these indigenous peoples bear the most sustainable cultural knowledge, and are most vulnerable to ethnocide from farmer expansion. Paradoxically Graeber + Wengrow end up advocating statist, urban bureaucracies in creating a fallacious prehistoric ‘left/right’ divide.

#huntergatherers #nonintensifying #egalitarian #transegalitarian #farmers #states #bureaucracy #history

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.7

In a poignant coda 'What if...', #DoerteWeig offers a creative intervention, inspired in part by Graeber and Wengrow’s invitation to freedom of form and experiment, in part also by the primarily #sociosomatic experience of #egalitarian living. As a fieldworker who has lived among Central African Forest groups, she asks eloquently what it could mean to gift that knowledge to so many people, to educate whole generations of schoolchildren in what it means to be human.

#egalitarian #huntergatherers #CentralAfrica #education #stories #bodies

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.8