Transcription
[Music] Hello fellow kids and welcome back to What Is Politics. For the past few episodes, we've been looking at the political left and right. Politics is about who gets to make decisions, and our society is made up of various hierarchies where some people have more decision-making power than others, based on political institutions and differences in economic wealth and cultural status. On the right, you have those people who want to give more power to the people at the top of these hierarchies. And on the left, you have those who want to give more power to the people at the bottom, or who want to get rid of these hierarchies entirely. In other words, the right represents the forces of hierarchy, and the left represents the forces of equality.
If you're new to this podcast and you think that left and right mean anything other than hierarchy versus equality, go listen to episode 5 and then episode 4, and then come back. And don't write me emails about it until you do. Anyhow, last episode, we started doing some political anthropology to understand some of the nuts and bolts of left and right and of human politics. And we saw that even though the terms left and right only pop into our vocabulary with the French Revolution in 1789, the tension between hierarchy and equality has been at the heart of human politics since before we were even anatomically modern human beings. And we saw that until about 12,000 years ago, it was usually equality that came out on top. Before that time, we have every reason to believe that most humans were organized into nomadic hunter-gatherer bands with political, economic, and gender equality. And then after 12,000 years ago, hierarchical societies start appearing everywhere and spreading like wildfire all across the world, until we get to today where almost everyone is part of a hierarchical society. And there are only about a hundred or two hundred thousand people still left as egalitarian foragers. Foraging being another word for hunting and gathering.
And we looked at two different types of hunter-gatherer societies. First, we looked at various societies around the world who practice a nomadic form of hunting and gathering called immediate return foraging. And we saw that every known culture who practices this type of foraging is always extremely egalitarian. And then we looked at the Pacific Northwest Coast cultures who practiced a very different type of sedentary hunting and gathering economy based on fixed salmon fishing territories. And we saw that these hunter-gatherers had developed elaborate political, economic, and spiritual hierarchies with chiefs, nobilities, and slaves. And we saw that what makes immediate return hunter-gatherers so egalitarian, and what made Pacific Northwest Coast society so hierarchical, has everything to do with the relative bargaining power of the various actors in these societies. And we saw that bargaining power itself is a result of the practical realities created by the different types of economies that each type of society practiced. The practical realities of nomadic immediate return foraging are such that there's just no way for anyone to dominate anyone else or to accumulate more wealth than anyone else, which isn't true of the sedentary economies of the traditional Pacific Northwest Coast.
On today's episode, we're going to apply what we learned about hierarchy, equality, and bargaining power to understand why there are so few egalitarian societies left in the world today, and why male dominance and patriarchy are so prevalent in the world. Before I begin, a few people wrote to me after the last episode to tell me that I've been giving you outdated information, and that anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow have recently disproved the whole idea that most humans were egalitarian hunter-gatherers until 12,000 years ago. I'm actually well aware of Graeber and Wengrow's articles on this subject, and while I'm a big admirer of David Graeber, I can tell you that even though I find these articles stimulating, their main claims are not only wrong, but they're rotting our brains. Graeber and Wengrow make two main claims in these articles. First, that people were going back and forth between hierarchy and equality in the Paleolithic era. And second, that the reason that they were going back and forth is because they were just like, trying to figure out new things and experimenting with new social possibilities. Like, the first argument is a matter of interpreting the archaeological and geological record, and the details aren't really relevant to this podcast. Even if Graeber's claim were correct, it wouldn't change anything I'm saying about how hierarchy and equality in human politics work. So I'll address them in a Q&A bonus episode. Basically, the climate was fluctuating too wildly during the Paleolithic for hierarchy to be possible or functional, outside of exceptional microclimates, though this was likely happening more frequently towards the end of the Paleolithic. I'll post an article by Doran Schultzer in the show notes on this. There's also a really interesting and growing body of evidence from human physiology that strongly suggests that humans evolved in an egalitarian context. I'll save that for its own episode, but I'll put in an article by Camilla Power in the show notes that summarizes some of these arguments.
Anyhow, the really awful part of Graeber and Wengrow's articles is their second argument, where they claim that the reason that people move from hierarchy to equality or vice versa, whether in the past or in the present, is because they're just experimenting. This is the heart of their thesis and their political project, and it's making everyone who reads it stupid, and it's taking away our ability to understand human politics. The whole reason that I started doing these political anthropology episodes is to counter nonsense like this. I was actually writing Graeber a friendly email about these articles when he tragically died, so I don't know what his reaction would have been to my critiques, which I'll now be presenting as part of this episode. Unlike Graeber and so many anthropologists and historians and political theorists, what we're doing in this series is that we're looking at hierarchy and equality and other questions about culture, history, and politics through a materialist lens. In other words, we're working on the assumption that people don't just organize into hunter-gatherer bands or kingdoms or republics because they have particular values, or because some particularly clever person decided to become a king or to invent democracy, or because people did a bunch of ayahuasca and thought it would be trippy to do social experiments. We're working on the assumption that people organize into these different configurations because there are material and practical conditions that push us into making certain choices and into accepting certain compromises. And we're also assuming that the values that people have, that we have, are shaped by the same material circumstances that shape our social structures and our political institutions. And we're not just making these assumptions based on some gut feeling or ideology. We're making these assumptions because we see it play out over and over in the anthropological record in so many ways, which we'll see as we go along. And the reason I'm focusing on the anthropological record and small-scale societies like hunter-gatherer bands instead of the historical record in big civilizations is because the political and material dynamics are just so much easier to make out in smaller groups with a limited range of economic activities versus in huge societies with zillions of people doing zillions of different kinds of activities. It's like how you want to learn how atoms and molecules and basic compounds and basic chemistry works before you can figure out what's going on in a giant radioactive toxic waste dump full of different chemicals reacting together in all sorts of ways at the same time.
In Graeber and Wengrow's articles, they look at how some societies from recent times, like the Inuit or the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples or the Nambikwara, shift more hierarchy to more equality seasonally. And they compare these cultures to some archaeological finds which suggest that there were some societies with social hierarchy in the Paleolithic era. And they conclude that ancient hunter-gatherers and recent hunter-gatherers and other societies were and are shifting between hierarchy and equality because they're quote, "self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities." Unquote. No, people shift from more hierarchy to more equality seasonally because people are shifting to different economic activities seasonally. And these different activities create certain practical realities which change the level of relative bargaining power between different people and groups from season to season. Nambikwara chiefs can boss people around in the gardening season when everyone's stuck in one place, but they lose that coercive aspect of their authority in the nomadic hunting season because at that time, people can just move to a different band to avoid an annoying chief. And Inuit men can dominate Inuit women in the summer season because in the summer, the Arctic animals that they hunt disperse in such a way that people live in very small groups of one or two nuclear families where a man can just overpower a woman with no interference. But Inuit men lose much of their patriarchal authority in the winter, which is the time of a massive, concentrated seal hunt, because at that time they're living in large, multifamily dwellings where women can get away from their husbands and where they have male relatives around who can keep their husbands in check. Note that I'm using the exact same examples that Graeber and Wengrow cite in their articles, but to make the exact opposite argument. And I got this stuff from the exact same sources that they put in the bibliography of their articles. Unfortunately, Graeber, like many anthropologists who are educated in the postmodernist dark ages of the humanities, misses all of these material connections. So he just thinks that people are organizing differently because they're experimenting. I'm going to do at least one, if not several, episodes on how academia turns brilliant, beautiful minds into fluorescent, smooth Jell-O. But for now, just think about how ridiculous Graeber's thesis is. People don't just do mad bong rips and then say, "Dude, I have a cool experiment. I'll be the pharaoh, and I'll have all the power and wealth, and you guys will be the slaves, and you can spend your whole life getting whipped and work yourself to death building pyramids that glorify me for all eternity." And the other guys who get to be the slaves are like, "Dude, yes bro." And nobody ever ate a bunch of magic mushrooms and said, "Whoa, I had a great idea. How about if all the dudes get all the authority and power, and then all the chicks have to stay home and make us steaks and clean our underwears? And if you don't like it, we get to smack you around because you're our property." And the women are like, "Awesome, let's experiment with that and see how it goes." And then it went so well that they stuck with it for the last 12,000 years. No, people aren't self-consciously experimenting with hierarchy and equality. What they're experimenting with is which kinds of economic activities and defense strategies and residence patterns work best in different contexts and in different seasons. And those activities and those strategies have consequences on bargaining power, which gives some people the ability to dominate others against their will or not. Everyone wants to have freedom and comfort, and there are often people trying to get freedom and comfort at the expense of other people's freedom and comfort. But there are practical conditions that enable some people to get their way and not others, and that leads to certain compromises being reached as opposed to other compromises. There are times and places where those people who want to dominate win out, and times and places where they can't. Experimentation does happen, but it's about the details of those compromises. It happens when the balance of power starts to shift, and there are periods of instability and opportunity for people to obtain a more favorable compromise. When people with power are experimenting with ways to hold on to that power or expand their power, and when people without power are experimenting with how to grab more power. And when the balance of forces shifts, norms and values and culture shift as well, in order for people to come to terms with the existing order and to smooth over the tensions inherent in both hierarchy and equality. You don't accept to be a slave because you're experimenting. You accept it because someone with much more power than you gives you the option to be a slave or to die. You accept male domination because you're in a situation where you either submit to male authority or you get beaten or killed. You accept to work at a crappy job with miserable conditions because your alternatives are to get evicted or else to take a worse job with crappier conditions. And maybe your culture is feeding you justifications for why you deserve to be a slave or a submissive woman or a poor employee. Or maybe you're inventing your own rationalizations for it so that you can stay sane. But those justifications and those rationalizations emerge as an adaptation to material reality more than they create that material reality.
As people who want to make changes to our current political order, what we want to look at are the conditions that give the pharaoh the power to dominate the slave, or that give men the power to dominate women, or that give the boss the power to dominate his workers. And we also want to look at the conditions that allow for change to happen. And that's what we're doing here now. The idea that material and practical realities shape culture, social structure, and ideology might sound like some high-falutin' fancy school learning, but it's very basic. And we all know this from personal life experience. Last time, I gave the example of office workers versus artists, where office jobs generate cultures where people repress their feelings, while performance art environments encourage people to express their feelings openly. This approach to understanding social phenomena has different names. I just call it materialism, or in our case, when we're looking at politics, you can call it political materialism. But you'll often see terms like historical materialism, cultural materialism, cultural ecology, behavioral ecology, or Marxism. And not Marxism as in socialism or communism, but Marxism as in Karl Marx's way of analyzing social phenomena through the lens of material conditions and the different material interests of different classes of people. Marx didn't invent the materialist approach. Every four-year-old uses it, and you can see it employed in ancient texts from around the world, right through to some of Marx's contemporaries. But Marx articulated it and applied it in a uniquely systematic and forceful fashion to politics and to history.
Now, although materialism is associated with Karl Marx, and many materialist scholars were explicitly Marxist socialists, it doesn't mean that materialist analysis is inherently left-wing or socialist in any way. You can use a materialist analysis for right-wing purposes, just like you can use it for left-wing purposes. For example, you can read a book called Culture and Conflict in the Middle East by anthropologist Carl Philip Salzman, who is my professor at McGill and who is a specialist on nomadic pastoralist societies, meaning societies that live principally from animal herding. His book uses classic materialist explanations of various traits common to nomadic pastoralist cultures, which Arab civilization was originally based on. From this, he derives an argument about conflicts in the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular, that would make any left-winger's head explode. He basically blames the entire conflict on the backwardness of Arab culture and its pastoralist influences. Now, where someone like Salzman uses materialism to advance right-wing ideas, what David Graeber was trying to do with his recent work is that he was trying to do away with materialism in a misguided attempt to advance a particular left-wing political project, a project that I agree with, even though I think he was going about it in exactly the wrong way. Many people argue that egalitarian societies are only possible in small groups, like a hunter-gatherer band, where everyone can police everyone else, or where you can reach consensus without destroying efficiency. These are materialist arguments. And the same people who make these arguments will go on to insist that you can't have equality in larger societies without having some kind of tyrannical political hierarchy to enforce it, and that in turn means that real equality is impossible, because if you have an authority imposing equality from above, that's a political hierarchy. So, according to these arguments, the French revolutionary slogan of "Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty" is an oxymoron. You can have equality or liberty, but not both. Or you can have political equality or economic equality, but not both. These are inherently right-wing arguments. The right is, by definition, always arguing that you can't have more equality, and the left is always arguing that you can.
Now, Graeber is an anarchist socialist who wanted a much more egalitarian world and who was active in trying to make that happen in various ways, like he was very important in the Occupy movement and has been a lifelong activist for all sorts of causes. So, in order to argue against the idea that humans are forever doomed to live in hierarchy by the material realities of civilization, Graeber wants to throw away the whole idea that material realities shape our lives. Instead, he wants to advance the idea that we can just experiment our way out of hierarchical society if we want to, the same way that we supposedly experimented into it. What I'll be telling you today is that even though I agree with Graeber that we're not necessarily stuck with the existing state of affairs, if we actually want to change anything, we can't do it by just dropping a bunch of acid into the water supply and start experimenting with having dessert before supper and having janitors become senators. If we want to change things, we need to understand the realities that we live in in order to figure out how we can work within the existing constraints to alter the balance of power of the various actors and classes and interest groups in our societies.
So, the first question that I want to address is, why is the world today almost entirely hierarchical? Whether you believe Graeber's theory about people going back and forth from hierarchy to equality in the Paleolithic, or whether you believe the standard theory that people are mostly egalitarian, everyone agrees that there was a massive shift to hierarchy starting around 12,000 years ago. At the end of one of Graeber and Wengrow's pieces, they ask the same question: "If there is a riddle here, it is why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, why is it that Homo sapiens, supposedly the wisest of apes, allowed permanent and intractable systems of inequality to first take root?" Well, news flash, we have had the answer to this question since at least the 1960s, if not the 1760s, when various Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau theorized that hierarchy began when people switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, though they didn't really have the correct reasons why. And then again in the 19th century, Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels also arrived at that same conclusion, but also for the wrong reasons. Although they were a bit closer, because they're at least looking at material conditions. Today, we have enough anthropological and archaeological information to know that hierarchy does indeed start spreading around the world after the rise of agriculture, which is first practiced on a continual basis about 12,000 years ago. We also know that the reason why agriculture starts at this time is related to changes in the global climate, which made continuous agriculture possible for the first time around 12,000 years ago. 12,000 years ago marks the beginning of the Holocene era, which is our current geological era. Before that time, in the Pleistocene geological era, which is also the Paleolithic technological era for humans, before that time, we now know that dependence on agriculture was not a viable economic strategy. The climate fluctuated too frequently, and there was not enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or in the soil to make dependable, productive agriculture possible. The consequences of this geological change is that after 12,000 years ago, if a hunter-gatherer population goes through a major crisis, whether it's because of resource depletion, overpopulation, or climate change, instead of collapsing and dying from starvation like they might have in the Pleistocene era, they now have the option of using agriculture to either supplement their diets or else as a basis for their entire economy. And so, over the next couple of thousand years, you have people in different areas around the world being forced by their circumstances into agriculture for the first time.
Note that I say "forced into agriculture." Most people who aren't familiar with the relevant anthropology think that some genius invented agriculture because hunting and gathering was so precarious and unreliable, and that agriculture was a giant leap forward that everyone adopted as soon as they found out about it. But in reality, it turns out that agricultural life is usually a big step downwards from hunting and gathering in terms of standard of living. And we've known this since the mid-1960s. Most recent hunter-gatherers, for example, are familiar with agricultural techniques, but they choose not to engage in them unless they have to, because it's whack. While hunter-gatherers are eating a wide variety of meat, honey, fruits, nuts, and mushrooms, and while they're enjoying lots of leisure time and traveling with their families and friends thanks to their 15 to 40-hour work weeks, which includes fun hunting trips with their pals, agriculturalists are working from dawn till dusk, stuck on a small plot of land, pounding grain into meal over and over for hours and hours, all so that they can eat a diet consisting largely of tasteless glorp like mealy meal, or else bread or jungle potatoes. In terms of stability, food security, and risk avoidance, agriculture and food storage are a magnet for vermin, raiders, and conquerors. And farmers are subject to frequent droughts and famines. Meanwhile, nomadic foragers usually have a lot of alternatives and options when their preferred foods are not available. And in times of famine, it's usually the agricultural people who go and live with their hunter-gatherer neighbors, and not the other way around. And all of this is even more true of early agriculture, where people hadn't yet figured out how to get a balanced diet out of agricultural foods. So when we look at the archaeological record, we see that people who switched from foraging to agriculture for the first time after the Holocene starts had clear signs of malnutrition and worse health than their foraging predecessors had. In areas where there was land perfect for agriculture, like in western North America, people continued to hunt and gather for 10,000 years before finally being pushed into farming. And when Polynesian sailors, who had been agriculturalists for thousands of years, discovered and settled in empty Hawaii and New Zealand, both times they switched from their traditional horticulture, meaning garden agriculture, back to hunting and gathering, and they remained hunters and gatherers for hundreds of years until the populations on those new islands got too high, and they had to revert back to horticulture. The biblical Fall from the Garden of Eden story is thought to be a metaphor for how the ancestors of the ancient Israelites were forced out of their hunter-gatherer life of relative ease and plenty, and into a hard life of agricultural labor. Even the way that Adam and Eve became ashamed of their bodies once they left the Garden of Eden reflects how immediate return forager cultures have a lot of sexual freedom, while sexual shame and repression is a regular feature of their agricultural and pastoral neighbors, for reasons that we'll look at another time, relating to patriarchy and property. If you know your Old Testament, it's great to reread it with anthropological and historical knowledge in mind. Like, if you track what type of economy the Hebrews and the Israelites practiced in different biblical periods, going from foragers to pastoralists and agropastoralists to state societies, you can see how their values and their practices resemble recent people from different parts of the world who practice those same types of economies.
Anyhow, people are only switching from hunting and gathering to agriculture because they have to. And once you have a few cultures living primarily by intensive forms of agriculture, like rice and grain cultivation, it's off to the races. Nomadic immediate return hunting and gathering supports a population of about 0.1 people per square kilometer, and they tend to reproduce slowly to stay in that range. They usually breastfeed their children to some extent until they're about three and a half or four, and the hormones produced by breastfeeding are a natural form of contraception on top of whatever other methods of contraception that they might use. So they usually only have one kid every four years or so. More intensive sedentary foraging economies, like the Pacific Northwest Coast economies, can support populations of about one person per square kilometer. But rice agriculture can support as many as 1,000 people per square kilometer, and rice farmers reproduce accordingly. It's no coincidence that the two most populated civilizations in the world, India and China, have their roots in rice farming. Individual farmers are more productive and successful if they have more kids to do more farm labor for them. And farmer women stop breastfeeding their children at about age one because of the availability of milk from domesticated herd animals. So they crank out babies sometimes almost every year, and this makes them more land-hungry, and their numbers make them more powerful. So they easily take over hunter-gatherer land, and the more land they take over, the more existing hunter-gatherers get squeezed into small territories, and they eventually get forced into agriculture themselves, as there isn't enough land to support foraging anymore. So by about 5,000 years ago, heading into biblical times, agriculturalists are the majority of the world. Before the 19th century European expansion, you still had 20% of the world left foraging. But by the middle of the 20th century, agriculture and industrial civilization supported by agriculture are everywhere, except in the most marginal areas of the world where foragers sometimes still remain.
This explains why agriculture spread everywhere. But why does the spread of agriculture coincide with the spread of hierarchical society? The answer to this is because agriculture presents a lot of the same logistical realities that lead to hierarchy in the Pacific Northwest Coast societies that we looked at last episode, except on steroids. A sedentary economy based on agriculture means that you can store wealth in the form of preserved foods, tools, and other items. And the land itself is also a form of stored wealth. The capriciousness of weather and geography mean that some people are more affected by droughts than others, some lands are more fertile than others, and some farms get attacked more by pests than others. And some people have more children than others. All of this means that unless you have an enforceable redistribution system, which is logistically more difficult in a sedentary context, you will have wealth inequality. And when the resources that you depend on to live come from fixed territories, that makes it difficult for people to just leave and go off to live somewhere else when someone is trying to dominate them, like people in immediate return societies can, because it means abandoning your wealth and your livelihood. All of this means that people with more wealth and more power can leverage that power against people with less, and those with less can be dominated into generating more wealth and more power for those who already have it.
But just because hierarchy becomes possible with agriculture, or with certain types of hunting and gathering, it doesn't mean that hierarchy will automatically just happen. At least not right away. As Graeber likes to point out, early agricultural settlements at the beginning of the Holocene seem to have been egalitarian. We see that the houses are all the same size in these settlements, and we see that the evidence for wealth inequality sometimes only shows up centuries later. This makes sense because egalitarianism is a core value in immediate return forager cultures. And we see today that when people are pushed out of hunting and gathering and into agriculture or wage labor, they try to hold on to those values as much as they can. But we also see that those values and practices clash with the realities and incentives of the new economic activities and living arrangements that they've shifted to. And values shift along with that reality over time, as the balance of power changes and egalitarianism isn't so easy to enforce anymore, or so easy to adhere to. Equality, like hierarchy, needs to be enforced in order to hold together, whether it's by deliberate policy or by natural conditions. There are natural, innate forces within all of us pulling towards hierarchy and towards equality, depending on our interests and our needs and circumstances and our learned and innate proclivities. When equality isn't working for you, you'll tend to want more inequality in your favor. And when you're at the short end of a hierarchy, you'll tend to want more equality. When work is hard and stressful, and there aren't enough resources to go around to make everyone happy, the social mechanisms that enforce egalitarianism start breaking down. Sharing is a lot less attractive when it means that everyone gets an equal, insufficient share, even to people who are brought up with a deep egalitarian ethic. We saw, for example, last episode that fiercely egalitarian Kalahari hunter-gatherers sometimes break out into fights over the division of meat when there isn't enough to go around. Or Colin Turnbull talks about how the Mbuti sometimes hide some of the food that they've been gathering so that they don't have to share it. When times are harder, it becomes much more interesting to make up a bunch of excuses for why you deserve more and someone else deserves less. "I'm so awesome, I work so hard, God loves me. That other person's he's a poopoo face, he sucks, he's ugly, and God hates him, and God wants me to have his share." Look at the Bible story of Jacob tricking Isaac into giving him Esau's inheritance, for example. In this way, egalitarian, redistributive practices and ideology start to strain and eventually break down. If a crisis lasts for a sustained period of time, if you're living in an immediate return hunter-gatherer band, the result of this will be societal collapse, because there are no practical means to enforce any kind of economic or political hierarchy. This is what happened to the Ik people in Uganda, who were pushed off of their lands in the 1960s, right after having survived a drought. Their egalitarian ethos turned into an every man and woman for themselves free-for-all, and their society underwent a horrible collapse until they were able to recuperate and reconstitute as horticulturalists, where they revived some, but not all, of their egalitarian practices and values. But if you're already living in an agricultural settlement, the result of a breakdown in egalitarian practices will be inequality and hierarchy, because in that context, the material reality allows for some people to have more than others without society collapsing. And as people refuse to comply with egalitarian sharing norms and they get away with it, new norms and new practices start to emerge that will reflect this new balance of powers. This is the mechanism for the experimentation that David Graeber is talking about. And in a sedentary context, once you allow some inequality to exist for too long without reeling it in, it will tend to snowball and eventually it'll be impossible to reverse without violence. Because in a sedentary economy, unequal wealth and power give you the power to gain more wealth and more power. If we're not sharing anymore, and your farm has had a bad harvest, but mine does better, I'll lend you money or food to survive. And if you can't pay back your debts, I'll take your farm, and you'll become my laborer, and you'll give all of your surplus to me. Now I'm the wealthiest person in the formerly equal village. And since I have so much surplus, people will come to me whenever they need to borrow. And over time, I end up with more and more land and laborers and wealth, until I'm a king and you're all my slaves, or until you all revolt and kill me. This is a story that's almost as old as agriculture itself. It's why you had regular debt jubilees in biblical times. David Graeber wrote a whole book about it. And it's also why so-called libertarian capitalism is a recipe for feudalism, as we'll see in a future episode.
There's a scary book from 2018 called The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel, where he compiles all the data available about inequality throughout human history and pre-history, and he realizes that since the advent of agriculture, inequality almost always balloons up to the point where you have a small elite living from a maximally exploited population who are living at bare subsistence. And the only way to get rid of that massive inequality is via a giant catastrophe, like a great war or disease or famine, which causes a societal collapse, which reduces everyone to the same level of poverty. Or else, more recently, you've reduced inequality via big revolutions, which often don't end up with the intended results for various reasons that we'll look at another time. Anyhow, this is how equality becomes hierarchy, and it can happen quickly, or it can take centuries. We saw last time that the Pacific Northwest Coast people took 800 years to develop signs of economic hierarchy from when they began their sedentary salmon-based economy. And we see similar periods for the transition to hierarchy in many early agricultural societies that settle down near the beginning of the Holocene.
But even before the advent of economic inequality, you likely had another type of political hierarchy emerging in those early agricultural settlements, and that is gender hierarchy, i.e., patriarchy, aka male domination. Dudes rock, bros before hoes ideology and practice, where men have more decision-making power than women. There are different circumstances that can lead to gender hierarchy, but one of the main sources of gender hierarchy has been patrilocality, where women move to where the husband and his family live when they get married. So let's look at how patrilocality plays out on gender relations and why people choose to adopt it in the first place. In the last episode, I talked a little about the Mbuti hunter-gatherers who live in the Ituri rainforest in the Congo. The Mbuti have a close relationship with their Bantu-speaking horticulturalist neighbors, the Lese. The Lese practice slash-and-burn horticulture, which is still widely practiced around the world today. People in horticultural societies usually do some hunting and gathering as well, and they often keep some domesticated animals. Now, the Lese have a very different relationship to the rainforest than the Mbuti have. Where the Mbuti live in the rainforest, the Lese create villages by cutting down the rainforest in order to plant their crops and to make their villages. The different subsistence patterns of the Mbuti and the Lese result in extremely different social structures and worldviews. The Mbuti see themselves as part of nature and see themselves as one of the many creatures of the forest, and they see the forest itself as their all-providing mother and father, which is a common metaphor among foragers who live in forest environments around the world. In contrast, the Lese see the forest and nature in general as their enemy, a frightening, wild beast full of evil magic that's always threatening their gardens as well as their lives, and which must be constantly tamed by human civilization, which is hierarchically ordered above nature and above lowly animals, including the wild Mbuti. And where the Mbuti are one of the most gender egalitarian societies in the world, their Lese neighbors are one of the most patriarchal. Among central African foragers like the Mbuti, it's not uncommon for a woman to go off and lead a net hunting expedition while her husband stays home with the kids. Meanwhile, among the Lese, while the men hang out most of the day with their buddies in the village square drinking beer and talking about dude's rock, the women are all at home doing most of the farming, raising the kids, and cooking the food, which they normally eat the leftovers of after the men have had their fill. Men do some work, like hunting and slashing out rainforest in order to plant new gardens. Basically, they do any kind of work that's fun or that involves knives and weapons, which women are strictly forbidden from even touching, and which, not coincidentally, makes them less likely to murder their husbands or to overthrow the patriarchy.
Now, the difference in worldview between these two cultures is easy to understand in terms of their relationship to their environments. The Mbuti economy is based on getting whatever they want from nature, while Lese horticulture is a never-ending battle against nature. But their different views on gender are based on something else. In terms of gender ideology, Mbuti men and women complain about each other, but also consider each other to be equals, if sometimes competing equals. Meanwhile, in Lese culture, men are associated with civilization and order and agriculture, and women are associated with nature and dark forces and chaos, kind of like a Jordan Peterson lecture. And the Lese-Jordan Peterson view of gender relations is typical of many agricultural peoples, like the ancient Israelites, who are agropastoralists. Those archetypes of man equals order and civilization versus woman equals chaos and nature aren't universal the way that Peterson makes them out to be, but they are typical of cultures with an agricultural and patriarchal background, which is most industrialized societies, which makes them seem universal if you don't know your anthropology.
Now, gender hierarchy doesn't come into existence because people believe in Jordan Peterson archetypes. People believe in those archetypes because gender hierarchy exists. And gender hierarchy exists because the material conditions that people live in give men power over women. How so? Let's check it out. In any society, we usually want to avoid inbreeding. I say "usually" because there are exceptions, which of course have material origins based on the need to hold onto property and power, but that's for another episode. So, to avoid inbreeding, someone usually needs to move away from their family to get married. The new couple will have some options. They can move to the wife's area, which we call matrilocality, or to the husband's area, which we call patrilocality, or to a new place altogether, like we do in most industrial civilizations, which you call neolocality. Or they'll stay with their respective families and only hook up for some sex and gifts, which is called duolocality. Or there's a funky locality where the couple goes to live with the mother's brother. And when there's no rule, when couples can just go wherever they feel like it, you call that ambilocality. And there are no other rules for post-marital residence practiced by human societies, just these six options. Even though you can imagine a rule where people go live with their mother's sister or father's brother or father's sister, etc., no society has any such rule. And different societies choose one or another of these six patterns, and no others, for specific practical reasons. And then the choice that they make has huge unintended consequences for gender relations. Patrilocality, where men stay with their birth families and women leave theirs to go live with their husband's family, is one solution which almost always results in male domination and patriarchy. Why? And why do most cultures choose patrilocality instead of one of the other options? Strict patrilocality is generally favored when your village or your herd or territory is likely to be raided or attacked on short notice, particularly by neighboring communities. Women can be effective fighters and hunters in some societies, but in general, men are on average better or more reliable fighters, given that they're 15% bigger than women and they're not likely to be out of fighting form for long periods due to being pregnant or having given birth recently. And if you have to fend off a lot of attacks, it makes sense to have many related males who grew up together and who know each other well in your area, as they will tend to make a better snap fighting force than unrelated men who don't know each other well. Bantu horticulturalists like the Lese engaged in a lot of warfare over their land and crops, as well as a lot of feuding, before the 1940s, when the colonial Belgian government and later the Zairean and Congolese governments clamped down on non-state violence. So most likely, patrilocality was originally adopted by the Lese as a practical choice to deal with feuding and warfare. The positive consequence of patrilocality is better defense, which benefits everyone. But it also comes with a big unintended negative consequence for women: male domination. Why? Well, you have these villages of about 100 to 250 people, and almost all of the men are related to each other and grew up together and they know each other. Meanwhile, all the adult women in the village come from a bunch of other villages, and they usually don't know each other very well. If there's a conflict between a man and his wife, the man is likely to get support from his relatives and friends, while the woman won't. Her friends and family live far away, and even her fellow village women don't really know her that well. And since they're also isolated, they don't want to rock the boat and piss off the majority of the village by defending the other outsider. This creates a situation where in any conflict between a man and a woman, the man normally has an advantage. In other words, patrilocality generates a system where men have much more bargaining power than women do.
But why would an initially egalitarian community switch to patriarchy when they switch to patrilocal residents? Why don't their egalitarian feminist values prevent patriarchy from arising? Egalitarian societies actively value and assert their egalitarianism and their autonomy. Children learn at a very young age that anything must be shared with people who want it or need it. When musicologist Michelle Kislyuk gave someone sitting next to her a slice of tomato, he immediately cut it into 16 tiny pieces and gave one to everyone around them, and left her feeling like a hog with the rest of the tomato. And men and women actively value and assert their gender equality as well, making sure that no individual or no gender ever gets too big for its britches. But gender tensions still exist in these societies, just like in any society. And egalitarianism isn't just a preference, it's also necessary for survival. There is no alternative besides band collapse or switching to sedentary agricultural life. This is why egalitarianism is such an important value in the first place. So there are cultural institutions to smooth over gender and other tensions inherent in egalitarian societies. Among the Mbuti, there's a tug-of-war of the sexes ritual that you can read about in Colin Turnbull's books, which is a little tug-of-war game where all the men are on one side and all the women are on the other. The men's side starts winning. A man will run off to the women's side, where he'll then imitate women in a mocking way, raising the pitch of his voice and saying satirically female things. And then when the women start winning, a woman will run off to the men's side and start mocking masculine speech and ideas. This continues until everyone has switched sides, and the women are all acting like caricatures of men on one side, and the men are all acting like caricatures of women on the other side. And then they eventually all collapse into laughter, and nobody wins. And then there are men's myths and women's myths, which are exclusive to each gender, where they make fun of the other gender and assert their own importance. For example, Mbuti women have a story which they share at exclusive female gatherings and events, and which one of them recounted to anthropologist Catherine Townsend. In this story, Chimpanzee, who's a male, wants to marry Tortoise, who's a female, but Tortoise isn't interested. Chimpanzee manages to convince Tortoise to cuddle up and sleep next to him at night, platonically supposedly to keep warm. But then in the middle of the night, he whips out his johnson. Tortoise is prepared for this, and she has a sharp rock ready, and she uses it to slice his wiener right off, and then he bleeds out until he dies. Then the next day, Tortoise goes up to Big Strong Male Elephant, and she tells him that she's stronger than he is. Elephant laughs, and then Tortoise tells him that she can prove it. She'll tie his leg to her leg with a rope, and whoever can pull the other one down wins. So Elephant is like, "Dude's rock," and he ties his end of the rope around his leg. And then Tortoise, who's standing on top of a giant rock in the water with her legs hidden beneath the water, ties her end of the rope to the big rock. So Elephant pulls and pulls and pulls, but he can't get Tortoise to budge until he tries so hard that he trips on himself and falls over and breaks his tusks. And then Tortoise calls him a stupid [ __ ] and beats him up and stabs him to death. [Applause] So the point of the story is that while men might be physically stronger, their arrogance and their stupid libidos are their big weaknesses, and women are smarter, and they can beat any man with their wits and with caution, and if necessary, with a sharp rock. And men have their own stories which they tell each other which denigrate women and flaunt male attributes. And men and women often keep the gender balance via male and female organizations and secret societies, which establish the coalitions that they need to assert their power and keep each other in check. Jerome Lewis talks about how among the Mbangli, the women's organization exiled an excellent hunter because he was too boastful, which is considered a dangerous threat in egalitarian societies. Among Aka foragers, who are closely related to the Mbuti, women sing songs that make fun of men in public, in front of mixed audiences, with lyrics like, "The penis gives birth to nothing but urine," or "The penis can compete, it's already dead. Vagina always wins." And sometimes men have a sense of humor about this, but other times they don't. These performances are often a barometer of gender relations at any given time, depending on what's going on for
Example in periods. When the Akka are living deep in the rainforest where they do their traditional nomadic hunting and gathering, gender relations are usually better. But when they spend time in the villages of their farmer neighbors, gender tensions tend to be higher. Akka men do servile wage labor for the villagers, and sometimes they become resentful of women's autonomy. So sometimes, when women do their male-insulting dances and songs, men will try to interfere by kicking up dust at the performers or by mooning the audience. And you can read all about men and women using song and dance to negotiate and assert their egalitarianism in an article called "The Politics of Eros" by Mourinho Finnegan, or Michelle Kislyak's book "Seize the Dance."
[Music] [Applause]
So you have gender equality and gender cooperation, but you also have tension and competition. And where material conditions don't provide any means for anyone to get a material advantage over anyone else, this competition is effective at keeping everyone in check and maintaining the balance, just like in the tug-of-war game where no one side can ever win. No one side can ever win the real-life tug-of-war; it's always a tie.
But once you're in a situation where you have patrilocal residence, the material conditions are now such that men will almost always win the real-life tug-of-war. And as people eventually become aware of this, it also informs their behavior. Men won't be so stoic about controlling themselves anymore, and women will be afraid to fight back so boldly as before. And thus, egalitarian norms break down, particularly in times of hardship and crisis.
Think about our own society. We know that when people go through periods of unemployment and other hard times, marriages break down. Divorce rates skyrocket, as do incidents of domestic abuse. In an agricultural setting where divorce is difficult or impossible for various practical reasons, people are often stuck in these marriages, and resentments are seething and boiling beneath the surface for years. And even in good times, a lot of agriculture is in and of itself a difficult and stressful condition. In immediate-return foraging, most of the work is somewhat enjoyable. But in agriculture, most of the work that needs to be done is boring and strenuous, and their diet often isn't very rewarding, which was especially the case in early agriculture. So people are not well-nourished, and they're working hard, and they're stuck in the same place all the time. If you've ever had a shitty low-wage job where you're working 60 hours a week and barely able to pay for your dried ramen noodles or for your rent in a crappy, rundown rat-trap apartment in the middle of nowhere, you have an idea of what this feels like.
So imagine that you have a gender-egalitarian early agricultural society that has adopted a patrilocal residence pattern because they keep getting raided by their neighbors. At first, the men and women are sharing their work and other burdens equally, or maybe the men are doing the harder work since they're stronger. Men are pounding cassava leaves all day and digging in the gardens and doing some hunting, and women are doing domestic work and child care and a lot of the gathering, as well as some small-game hunting. And everyone is kind of stressed out and not very well-nourished, and they're frustrated. And one day, during a particularly bad year where everyone is hungry, a husband and wife are bickering about something, and tensions that have been bubbling under the surface for months explode. And the husband does something that would have been unthinkable before: he smacks his wife.
Now, physical altercations between men and women are known to happen in egalitarian forager societies. Among the Akka, it's almost always the women who physically attack men, and never the other way around. And in most egalitarian societies, if a man does lose control and hits a woman, the woman will just hit him back and then some, and the man will restrain his response because if he doesn't, his wife's friends and relatives, male and female, will rush in to back her up, and he'll face other social consequences. But in this case, nothing happens. All of the husband's childhood friends and relatives are around, but none of the wife's are. Plus, all these men are having the same frustrations with their wives and the same arguments and disputes as he's having. Aren't women so annoying with their nagging and demands and needs when we men are working so hard and we're not getting enough to eat or even getting any credit or respect?
The tug-of-war is in full force. Men are more antagonistic to women than ever, and women are more antagonistic to men than ever. But because of the new residence situation, men now have all the power. And over time, once the men start to realize that there's no real consequences for hitting their wives, they don't restrain themselves when their wives hit back. They do it again and more often, and they realize that in any conflict with their wives, they're very likely to be the winner. And the wives realize this as well. And the men leverage this as a threat to win more concessions and more compromises from the women. "You know what? I'm gonna do all the fun work, like the hunting, and I'm gonna go hang out with my buddies, and you can pound cassava all day long and dig in the garden, and don't you dare talk back to me." And if a woman fights back with weapons or poison, all his brothers and childhood bros rush in to stop her and attack her or kill her.
And when there's no one to keep you in check, your worldview and the worldview of people in the same situation as you goes unchallenged and goes off the rails. And soon, rituals and myths and ideology start to reflect this. The male point of view dominates with no response from the women, who just seethe in silence and fear. Women's outbursts are irrational; men's outbursts are justified. Women are chaotic and emotional and unreasonable, and they need to be tamed and controlled by men, just like man needs to control nature. And women are witches who want to poison us and cast dark magic on us, and they must be banned from touching weapons or collecting potentially poisonous berries or mushrooms. And women who are isolated and oppressed with no effective means of asserting themselves often are interested in poisoning the men that rule them and in casting dark magic on them, as it's the only way of escaping them or of retaliating.
And thus, gender egalitarianism falls away, and patriarchy becomes institutionalized. And men teach their daughters that they're polluted and chaotic and that they deserve to work in the gardens all day to make up for the sins of Eve. And women come to believe it as well, to some extent. And if they're not able to assert themselves and express themselves in the exclusive female gatherings, they lose that sense of entitlement to equality that you need to keep fighting for your rights. And they also get rewarded if they comply with patriarchy, which makes them invested in their own oppression.
David Graeber was right to say that people experiment with social forms, and that they make conscious choices. But the choices and the experiments that we make are severely constrained and informed by bargaining power, which is determined by the practical realities of our environment, our economy, as well as our history and our culture. People are constantly pulling and pushing in one direction or another, but bargaining power determines whose vision will prevail, whose experiments will yield results, and who the inevitable compromise will favor. And you can see this if you look around the world, where you'll see that people in very similar situations end up with very similar cultural institutions. We saw last time that immediate-return hunter-gatherers all around the world share many key cultural traits. And you can also see the same thing with other types of societies that live in very similar situations. For example, nomadic pastoralists are always patrilocal and patriarchal because animal herds are always a prime target for raiding. So you'll see all sorts of similarities between traditional nomadic pastoralist societies, whether they're African Maasai, Scandinavian Sami, Mongolians, Bedouin, or ancient Israelites.
Some people, like David Graeber, seem to see this whole line of materialist thinking as extremely disempowering and deterministic to the point where it's practically become a taboo in cultural anthropology departments. Doesn't it suggest that there's nothing that we can do to change our political situation? Doesn't it take away our agency? If material conditions determine our social structures and our political hierarchies, how can we ever improve our lives besides waiting for material realities to change?
The answer is that if we understand our material conditions, we can engage in informed, organized, and concerted action to change those conditions and to change the balance of power. This is why I started this podcast. Materialist analysis helps us figure out why things are the way that they are, and it helps us identify what the obstacles are to the goals that we want to achieve. But it also helps us identify latent bargaining power and how to tap into it in order to get rid of those obstacles and to make political changes happen. And this is what we'll be looking at next time when we look at matrilocal residence and at the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and why women got the right to vote in Europe in the 20th century, and why the Black Civil Rights Movement emerged in the United States after World War II. And we'll look at two situations where huge social changes happened overnight: one by accident and one by decades of deliberate organizing and taking advantage of the right conditions. So we'll be looking at the anarchist revolution in Spain in the 1930s, where you had democratic hierarchy and work-around socialism without a state, and of course, the Great Baboon Revolution of 1986, which is still going strong today.
In the meantime, if this podcast makes you feel more creases forming in your formerly smooth brain, please tell your friends and your social media friends and your parasocial friends about this podcast. Like, if you know someone with a popular podcast or a YouTube show who has some reach, who might give the show a signal boost, that seems to be the main way that people find out about podcasts and YouTube shows these days. So please do that if you can. And please write and review it on iTunes. It takes five seconds and it helps enormously with the holy algorithm of podcast fate. Like and subscribe with the bell on YouTube. Ask me any questions or corrections or criticisms in the YouTube video comments or by email at worldwidescrotes@gmail.com. And send me some of that Patreon money so that I can keep doing this enormously labor-intensive endeavor because it usually takes me so long to produce an episode. I'm currently charging per episode and not per month. I'm going to start doing some interview episodes and other fun stuff, but no matter how many episodes I put out, you won't be charged more than 12 times a year maximum. Make sure to check out the show notes for a full bibliography of everything I talked about in this episode. And until next time, see ya.