Thread by @radicalanthro

Reading #TheDawnofEveryThing, the chapter on Wendat statesman Kandiaronk and his influence in provoking the European Enlightenment is a great story! 1/
journaldumauss.net/?La-sagesse-de…

It teaches us a couple of things. First, the hierarchical 18th.C Europeans started talking about equality and freedom because, in their initial imperialist expansion, they encountered real existing societies which were anarcho-communist and egalitarian. This was NOT a MYTH! 2/

Second, which Graeber/Wengrow don't bring out enough, is the relationship of language to egalitarianism, exemplified by Kandiaronk. He was famed for superior sociocognitive linguistic skill! He argued jesuits and New French governor generals under the table in the 1690s 3/

If you live in a society where no one can tell anyone else what to do, to achieve agreement, you have to argue and persuade. Hence the extraordinary linguistic skills of Native Americans. Europeans had to follow orders -- not conducive to developing reasoned consensus argument 4/

This applies as much or even more to the evolutionary emergence of language itself in our ancestral past. It would require a prolonged phase of relative egalitarianism to be established. This constraint nullifies the Graeber/Wengrow proposal that egalitarian origins is a myth 5/

Two evolutionary psychologists who modelled the interplay of egalitarianism, mutual mind-reading, culture and emergence of language were David Erdal and Andrew Whiten (of machiavellian intelligence fame). They called this complex 'deep social mind' 6/
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…

Erdal and Whiten had a brilliant fully Darwinian and dialectic explanation for human egalitarianism, which they termed 'counter-dominance'. Starting with machiavellian intelligence (selection for abilities to negotiate social relations and alliances), 7/

unl.edu/rhames/courses…

Take MI to the extreme where everyone can summon allies to resist being dominated, eventually the best strategy becomes resistance to being dominated, rather than attempting to dominate others. This gives an outcome of rough egalitarianism. The attitude 'don't mess with me'...8/

called 'counter-dominance' by Erdal/Whiten is a very good description of the way hunter-gatherer people actually behave in day-to-day interaction. And Erdal compiled the evidence for that on a cross-cultural database of h-gs 9/

We know that @davidgraeber and @davidwengrow continue to protest they are not interested in original egalitarianism or in telling the story of the origins of social inequality. They want to know 'how we got stuck' (and presumably what to do about it?) 10/

But we seriously doubt it will be possible to work out how we got stuck without understanding the evolution of human egalitarianism. That really was #TheDawnOfEverything -- language, life, laughter...more tomorrow on ritual and reverse dominance

Maybe tomorrow now!
We feel another thread coming on about Africa -- the first place humans did 'bold social experiments' like err...language, ritual, art and gender.