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‘The world of hunter-gatherers… was one of bold social experiments’ say Graeber and Wengrow, ‘..a carnival parade of political forms’. But did the boldest social experiments of our ancestors - language and symbolic culture - constrain these possibilities?
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Aspects of our anatomy, psychology and cognition that were necessary preadaptations to language - cooperative eyes, intersubjectivity, large brains, a ratchet effect of cultural accumulation - required stable sociopolitical contexts of significant egalitarianism to evolve among our Middle Pleistocene ancestors.
This implies political strategies for minimizing and periodically nullifying dominance relations, through dynamics of day-to-day individualistic counter-dominance with occasional displays of collective reverse dominance. Because of the very high costs for mothers who had to provide high quality nutrition and reliable allocare for large-brained babies, the most telling aspect of this would be gender resistance, establishing gender egalitarianism. Middle Pleistocene populations with more hierarchical tendencies were least likely to have become language-speaking, larger-brained ancestors of Homo sapiens
4 фев 2024
