(10/09/2021) Assuming a continuous legacy of political struggle from the earliest stages of human evolution to conflicts over power today, we speculate about the politics of societies in the distant past. We discuss the relationship between risky human migrations and political perception, ancient cities without states and states without cities, confrontation and evasion as two strategies against hierarchy, the monumental architecture of hunter-gatherers, the relationship between abundance and hierarchy from a cross-species perspective, the psychological tendencies evident in certain varieties of social science narratives, the notion of cultural behavioral patterning reflecting the personalities of the people who create new cultures, and the dreamlike beauty of the stone age graves of physically abnormal children. Along the way, we are looking to decouple variables like hierarchy and social complexity, sedentism and agriculture, and egalitarianism and cooperation, charting a course to ask more concretely and precisely about the relationship between technology and hierarchy.
Bibliography for episode 36:
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Epstein, J. M. and Axtell, R. (1996) Growing Artificial Societies: Social Sciences from the Bottom Up. MIT Press.
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See also:
All Power to the Imagination #9: Killing the Priest-King with Adam Green. https://soundcloud.com/nonserviammedia
Black Books: Anarchic Literature https://blackbooks.pub/#anthropology
What Is Politics? #10: David Graeber and David Wengrow “The Dawn of Everything” Critique: The Wisdom of Kandiaronk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJIHWk_M398&t=339s
