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anarcho_archiver wrote

I think it is foolish for any leftist to speak of any possible human society in utopian terms. So, it's bad for an-prims like me to describe hunter-gatherers as egalitarian utopias. Probably no matter what, there will always be some degree of gender inequality--I think the biological demands of childrearing will always mean women have a disadvantage to men. And we'll always have crime, and we'll always have the problem of some people just being way more likable, popular, or skilled, than others.

But with that all said, simple hunter-gatherer societies do, on average, display a much higher level of egalitarianism than most industrialized nations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2999363/

Our collective judgment, based on many combined years of field research plus the published ethnographic corpus, is that in most foraging societies, variation in material wealth has less effect on well-being than does variation in other forms of wealth, such as health or social connections. This generalization is more likely to hold for mobile low-density foragers (which constitute the great majority of ethnographically described foraging societies—see Tables 1 and ​and2)2) than for sedentary high-density foragers.

But how much wealth inequality actually exists in these populations? The Gini coefficients listed in Table 5 are low compared to contemporary societies, and even to agricultural and pastoral populations (see other papers in this forum); but they are far from negligible. Excluding the low coefficients for weight, the Ginis range from 0.2 to 0.5, and even including weight the α-weighted average is 0.25 (Table 5). This value is the same as the income inequality in contemporary Denmark (0.25), the country with lowest such value in 2007 (UNDP 2007). Thus, to the extent that our measures for this set of foragers are representative, wealth inequality is moderate—that is to say, very low by current world standards, but far from a state of “primitive communism” (cf. Lee 1988).

Personally, I would be thrilled to live in a world where the entire world only experienced as much inequality as there is in Denmark. It wouldn't be a perfect world, but it would be radically different, and better, than this one.

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convo_ripper wrote (edited )

I too would like to live in a world were people experience only as much inequality than Denmark, but I would also like to live in a world were people experience only as much gender inequality than Denmark, and that not most of the hunter-gatherers groups.

Hunter-gatherers often were very patriarchal, a lot more than Denmark, or US, and a lot more than biology could possibly justify. (I personally do not think biology can justify any gender inequality.) And in hunter-gatherers groups were gender were more or less equal, there were always very a strong gender division in labor.

I am o.k. with people saying that hunter-gatherers were egalitarian in an economical sense, and that agriculture caused inequality to appear even if it is not quite true, but saying that hunter-gatherers were gender-equalitarians, and that agriculture caused patriarchy is completely false.

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anarcho_archiver wrote (edited )

  1. I have never said that there is one or more activity that were divided between gender in all hg culture, but that there was gender division of labor in every society; therefore different society can divide different activities between genders.

  2. Delayed-return and immediate-return are not the best way to make the division you want to make, society "with wealth" and society "without wealth".

3 From Women and Men, an Anthropologist's view (translated in french by somebody else and then back in english again by me, if you need the original version, I can find it somewhere.)

(About native of northern Alaska)

After puberty, a girl is seen as a sexual object for every men who desire her. He catch her by her belt in order to show his intentions. If she resist, he can cut her pants with his knife and force her to have a sexual relation with him. Wether the girl was consenting or not, such sexual relation were seen by Inuits as not important. It wasn't a motif for vendetta by her family. [...] Physical and verbal aggression between men is reproved, but sexual aggression, like rape, is not.

Mitiarjuk, in 1966, quoted in 1977 by B. Saladin d'Anglure in "Mythe de la femme et pouvoir de l'homme chez les Inuit de l'Artique central" (Translated from french by me)

The young woman was subjected to the man and to older women up until she has adult children and that she can control her daughters-in-law. Polygyny, a lot more present than polyandry, the exchange of wives, and the greater extra-marital sexual freedom of man than women are other expressions of masculine domination.

Of somewhere else, in Australia:

From The world of the first Australians, of Catherine and Ronald Berndt, page 208 (translated in french by somebody and then back in english by me)

Globally, husbands had more right on there wives than wives on there husbands. He can quit her when he wants without having to give any reasons. She can quit him only by fleeing, that his by taking an other partner, but then the husband have the right to attack her and her new partner. The new partnership isn't seen as a valid marriage before the old husband renounce to his right over his wives or agree to a compensation. [...] Also, a man can have sex with her wive when he wants, with or without her consent. [...] But she cannot do the same thing with him.

These were all immediate-return hunter gatherers, and I can find other example if you need.

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convo_ripper wrote

Delayed-return and immediate-return are not the best way to make the division you want to make, society "with wealth" and society "without wealth".

Sorry, I don't understand this sentence. Immediate-return societies generally don't have wealth, so what division are you talking about?

I have never said that there is one or more activity that were divided between gender in all hg culture, but that there was gender division of labor in every society; therefore different society can divide different activities between genders.

Yeah, and in the context of an egalitarian society, why would this be a big problem?

Thanks for your other sources. I've heard before about Australian (though which aboriginals are you talking about in that excerpt? there are/were several hundred languages spoken amongst indigenous Australians) and Inuit foragers being worse on gender equality. I don't know that I put much store by the Berndt ethnography, as they only began their ethnography after the violence of colonization began, and it looks like they were brought in to discover why so many aboriginal workers were dying. Rates of sexual assault and murder are extremely high amongst indigenous American women, but I would not extrapolate back from that to conclude that pre-colonization indigenous societies were regularly assaulting and murdering women.

It sounds like not all immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are nice places to live, but I don't think you've really shown that foraging societies are not more egalitarian on average. There's always a wide variance in outcomes for any possible configuration human society--like, presumably you're an anarchist of some kind and you don't like states, but some states are still pretty nice (like Denmark), even though on average they're bad and we want to do away with them. And anthropologists have said over and over again that foraging societies tend to be much more equal than non-foraging societies.

Anyway, I'm not utopian about anarcho-primitivism. I'm open to believing that some tribes would turn nasty. I just think that if industrialized civilization fell apart and people went back to foraging (which seems unlikely, given the pace at which climate change is proceeding), most of them would be better societies to live in than what we have now.

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anarcho_archiver wrote (edited )

  1. Very few immediate-return societies have wealth, and they are a lot more alike delayed-return non-state societies. So, Testart's distinction of with and without wealth is, I think, more precise.

  2. Oppressive gender roles are still oppressive if they are almost as oppressive for man than for women. Relative equality doesn't take away the oppressiveness of gender role.

The one about Australian brings general statement about indigenous Australians. Sometime gender relations can be quite stable over long distance. And I don't see how colonialism could have brought these gender relationships, they are not only "more sexual violence" which can be caused by poverty, nor the gender relationship that missionaries would encourage.

I have never said that foraging societies weren't more egalitarian, for I was only speaking of gender relations. And I never saw anything that make me think that forager were better than non-forager on that front.

And we don't have a choice between a random hunter-gatherer society or a random agriculturalist society. Would we go back to being hunter-gatherers, most tribe would be probably patrilineal, and patrilineal hunter-gatherers were practically always very patriarchal. The more gender-egalitarian one were practically always matrilineal and matrilocal.

And the society we live in isn't any agriculturalist society. The generalization of commodity production brought about the idea that gender role are not essential and that activity should be limited by which sex people are.

For the first time since the beginning of humanity, we can see a glimpse of a possible world without gender inequalities and restrictions, and hence the possibility to go there. I wouldn't abandon that for Danemark-level income inequality.

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