In 'Cancelling hunter-gatherers for the cause of 21st C urbanism', anarchist anthropologist #JamesvanLanen critiques what he sees as a gendered structure arising in #TheDawnofEverything.This counterposes brutish, masculinist, prestige-hungry hunters to more communal, matriarchal early women farmers, busy creating an ‘ecology of freedom’. A whole array of lifeways of non-intensifying, egalitarian peoples have been ‘cancelled’ from this ‘new history of humanity’. Yet precisely these indigenous peoples bear the most sustainable cultural knowledge, and are most vulnerable to ethnocide from farmer expansion. Paradoxically Graeber + Wengrow end up advocating statist, urban bureaucracies in creating a fallacious prehistoric ‘left/right’ divide.

#huntergatherers #nonintensifying #egalitarian #transegalitarian #farmers #states #bureaucracy #history

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.7