convo_ripper

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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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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convo_ripper wrote

Let's see that study in Science by anthropologue Mark Dyble. That publication is very short, four pages, and not very detailed. It tries to explain, with the help of mathematical models why, when individual hunter-gatherer prefer to live with people genetically close to them, the hunter-gatherer communities are quite fluid trought time. They took data from the Agta from Philippines and from the BaYaka from Cameroon, and feed it to their model.

Their model could simulate well the composition of the two hunter-gatherer groups they choose if we assume that men and women have the same influence on the choice of where the couple lives, and is significantly different when we assume that only men have an influence on that question. If we think, like I think, that sexism isn't limited to who chose, between the husband and wife, where the couple live, that study cannot be seen as saying that hunter-gatherers were not sexists. And even if it was, studying only to such groups cannot give us general information on hunter-gatherers in generals.

And these two groups are far from being good representatives from all the hunter-gatherers. There is a general rules in hunter-gatherers societies stoping women from hunting with bows and arrows, and that rules know only one exception. Using that exception, the Agta, as representative of the gender relations that hunter-gatherers had won't work well.

And speaking of the Agta, one can ask why they allowed their women to hunt with bow when no other hunter-gatherer group did. It is because they trade what they hunt with nearby agriculturalist, thus making hunting an abnormally central part of their society. The relatively egalitarian gender relation of the Agta is due to trade with agriculturalists. It can therefore not be generalized to hunter-gatherers from before the neolithic revolution, before they were any agriculturalist to trade with.

For the other group studied, the BaYaka, one can find in less than a minute, another article in the Gardian speaking about them. (I wouldn't quote them, but you've started.)

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/jun/15/childrensservices.familyandrelationships

That article explain why the BaYaka are a very particular hunter-gatherer groups when we look at couple relationship, and therefore cannot be seen as representative of hunter-gatherers in generals.

Picking and choosing the study sample like that would be like me trying to prove that black people have it better than whites in the us by pointing to Obama and to a white homeless, and claiming that all backs are as well of than Obama and all whites as little well of than the homeless guy.

Not only that study claim that all hunter-gatherers were gender-equalitarian without any basis in reality, but it also claim that they were also all monogamous, again without any basis in reality. One can look to Australia, where the Natives lived for a long time without contact with agriculturalists, to see very patriarcal and very polygamous hunter-gatherers.

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convo_ripper wrote

The assumption that ancient hunter gatherers had an egalitarian ethos is because of anprims claims that hunter-gatherering was a stateless, genderless and hierarchyless utopia.

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convo_ripper wrote (edited )

This sentiment is flawed in a pretty complicated way.

Hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and agricultural societies can all exist with different levels of egalitarianism. They can all exist without written language or with varying degrees of written language. They can all hold elders in high regard or not. (Interestingly, egalitarianism and holding elders in high regard are contrary to one another.)

There is a cultural pressure for the Modern Westerner to simplify other forms of society, and to imagine a kind of ladder of social evolution from savagery to barbarism to civilization. The imperialist (along with the Marxist) sees this as positive growth. It is tempting, therefor, to be contrary and re-imagine it as a decline. This is Primitivism: reversing the polarity and refiguring the noble savage as the perfect form of human existence.

However, this way of thinking is fundamentally flawed. There is no ladder of social evolution. What we might think of as the progression of civilization throughout history is the fabrication of 19th Century Western intellectuals attempting to justify imperialism by constructing a reality in which the West was "advanced" and the rest of the world was "primitive". This in itself was a replacement for the earlier religious justification for imperialism in which being "civilized" meant practicing Christianity.

In reality, the world is complex. More elaborate schemes of social organization create the risk of greater oppression and exploitation, but they also allow for the possibility of greater collective problem-solving. Industrial technology gives us the power to drastically improve the lives of people with a wide range of disabilities and illnesses. We're improving our capacity to mitigate plagues, death during childbirth, and death from natural disasters.

There are many problems with the way human societies are currently organized, but to say the solution is to adopt some imagined prelapsarian "primitive" lifestyle is ignorant, shortsighted, and chauvinistic.

There's homophobia in there as a lot of strains of AnPrim writings advocate for procreational sex only, as that's "natural", and there's quite a bit of overlap with the esoterical freak-segment, where there's quite a lot of misogyny and rigid dichotomies between the masculine and feminine. The transphobia is mainly being in opposition to hormone treatment or operating on trans people, because that's only an option with modern medicine and you kind of need civilization for that.

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convo_ripper wrote

Anarcho-Primitivism is a bad trip.

An ableist, ageist, and transphobic world is the necessary conclusion of reversing the technological progression that society has followed. A world without technology would be a survival-of-the-fittest nightmare.

Without agriculture, how are we going to feed the human population? The widespread starvation of the human population and simultaneous depletion of animal populations as desperate people try to feed themselves will be very “green”, I am sure, and not at all an ecological disaster.

Or do you support agriculture like some anarcho-primitivists? Are we cherrypicking technologies now? What about advancements in farming technology that increased crop yields and arable land? If not, see above. If yes, then what technologies with their roots in colonialism are we not keeping?

Without modern medical technologies, how do we care for the physically disabled? How do we combat disease? Is it a good thing not to? Without these technologies, does gender reassignment/correction stop? Without access to antidepressants and psychotropics, are your comrades with mental health conditions who feel these medications improve their QoL just fucked?

Are the rest of us free to live in a society while primitivists survive on the fringes, or does our reliance on the relics of imperialism so offend you that the revolution won’t be over until all of society is ash?

Yes, imperialism is some bullshit. Yes, indigenous peoples and tribal cultures have a right to self-determination. But pushing a return to nature is also a violation of the egalitarian ethics of anarchism. If individuals willingly secede from society to live in a “primitive” state, that’s their prerogative, but the implications of that would be disastrous if applied on a global scale.

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