In this episode we read and critique the conclusion of Chapter 2 of Dawn of Everything,
“Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of the Noble
Savage”, (previously released in French in 2019 as La Sagesse de Kandiaronk.)
Given that the conclusion of the chapter is a tirade against the
concept of “equality” we first examine what the word equality means in a
political context, and what the term “egalitarian society” implies,
followed by an examination of the history of the anthropological
literature on egalitarian hunter gatherer societies.
We also cover material from Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and On Kings
in order to look at how his treatment of egalitarian societies over his
career routinely ignored 50 years of research on extremely egalitarian
hunter-gatherer societies, a practice which he and Wengrow continue in
this chapter (though they remedy this in the next chapter).
