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Some human sciences still affected by anti-Western, "noble savage" myth propaganda

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C C Offline
Little objectivity to be had in a scientist allowing herself to be socially conditioned by prescriptive output ultimately originating from the humanities (or one's contemporary political and philosophical environment); and then carrying those motivated preferences and cognitive filters over into interpretations of data. While technocracy in STEM context may have its freedom drawbacks, corruption of neutrality rears its head when such a dog is being wagged by factoid, authoritarian elitism that's circuitously descended from Plato's "philosopher kings" concept.
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A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale
https://aeon.co/essays/not-all-early-hum...rian-bands

EXCERPTS: . . . Through research on the !Kung and similar hunter-gatherers, anthropologists now have a clear picture of what society looked like for most of our species’ history. We were mobile. We were egalitarian. We shared. We lived in small bands composed mostly of kin. We had few possessions and weak notions of property. Slavery was unknown. Then, 10,000 years ago: a rupture. The world warmed. Sea levels rose. We started to settle. We domesticated plants and animals. We invented inequality and slavery. Property intensified. War intensified. Societies became larger and more complex. Strangers became neighbours. We built courts. We built governments. We built monuments and bureaucracies and moralistic gods and every other instrument of power exercised in service of order and oppression. Prehistory ended. History began.

This is more than just a theory of prehistory. It’s the modern, scientific origin myth. Yes, we live in mega-societies with property and slavery and inequality but, at heart, we are mobile, egalitarian hunter-gatherers, wired for small groups and sharing. According to the evolutionary social scientist Peter Turchin, this view is ‘so standard that it is rarely formulated in explicit terms’. The archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber described it as ‘the foundation of all contemporary debate on inequality’. This view serves as a narrative of human nature, a symbol of our capacity to establish good societies, and a reminder of just how far we have strayed in the past 10,000 years.

It’s also probably wrong.

[...] The Calusa ruled southern Florida. At the time of Spanish contact, they comprised 50 to 60 politically united villages along Florida’s southwest coast, although their domain extended far beyond that ... How did the Calusa build such a large, stratified society? A reasonable guess would be through agriculture. ...

Turns out, that’s not what happened. The Calusa built a state not through agriculture but through wild game – in particular, fish. The Calusa are exceptional. They developed, as far as anthropologists know, the largest and most politically complex society of any non-agricultural people. But they’re not that exceptional.

For more than a century, anthropologists have known of another set of foragers who developed sedentary and politically stratified societies: the peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Inhabitants of temperate rainforests at the nexus of river and sea, these peoples harvested and stored salmon. They warred and took slaves. They lived in towns, some of which exceeded 1,000 people. Rather than suppressing inequality, they institutionalised it through potlatches – ceremonies in which hosts gained status through distributions of food, furs, slaves and houses.

If hunter-gatherers can build large, sedentary societies, why do we assume that they lived in small bands for most of our species’ history? Surely our ancestors preferred lush spots over the dead-looking Kalahari. And, once in those spots, surely they had the same political savvy to engineer semi-fixed, stratified societies. Yet many leading anthropologists still imagine the 100,000 years preceding agriculture to resemble, with slight variations, the lives of the mid-20th-century !Kung. Why?

One reason is that stratified foragers are unusual. Look at recent hunter-gatherers, and what do you see? [...] But looking at modern hunter-gatherers is misleading. For one, the more we dig through history, the more we encounter foragers who were sedentary and hierarchical. They covered Japan before agriculture. They dotted the South China coast before agriculture. They inhabited the Levant, tracts of the Nile, the beaches of southern Scandinavia, the central plains of Russia, the coasts of the Atacama Desert, and the grasslands of the high-altitude Andes – all before agricultural peoples dominated those regions. Even today, sedentary foragers live in riverine and coastal regions of New Guinea.

Sedentary and hierarchical hunter-gatherers are not unusual. If anything, it’s the profusion of mobile, egalitarian bands that might be the historical outlier. Rather than reflecting ancient ways, these small-scale societies are often products of modern forces. Rather than being untouched, many have been bullied, pacified, employed, enslaved and marginalised by colonial powers and agricultural neighbours.

[...] Even with its gaps, however, the African archaeological record continues to defy our accounts of deep history. For most of the 20th century, researchers assumed that humans underwent a behavioural revolution around 40,000 years ago. Like a golem come to life, we were said to transform from a species that looked like us but lacked our mental charm into a form distinctly and cognitively human. It was then, the story went, that symbolism started, along with fishing, trading, shellfish extraction, pigment processing and anything else moderately impressive. We now know that story is wrong. We know that, by 125,000 years ago, and likely much earlier, people were living on South African coasts, eating mussels, sea snails, even seals and whales. They were crafting intricate tools, securing heat-treated quartzite bladelets to shafts of wood. They were engaging in long-distance exchange and embarking on expeditions to collect decorative red ochre. The history of archaeology has been plagued by what we might call ‘the hubris of modernity’: the impulse to underrate the sophistication of past peoples and to overrate our own.

Why does it matter what the Pleistocene looked like? Because prehistoric societies shaped human nature. Our minds evolved under ancient social conditions. If, until the past 10,000 years, we lived in small egalitarian bands, then those are the environments to which we’re psychologically adapted. Inequality, cooperation with strangers, complex political institutions – all are then alien to our evolved nature.

If, however, we evolved in both mobile bands and large hierarchical communities, then, by nature, we are much more psychologically flexible. We’re egalitarian, yes, but also predatory and hierarchical. We’re prepared to interact with familiar people, yes, but also ready to cooperate with strangers. The idea that human nature was forged in a chaos of sundry social environments might be more distressing than a narrative about small, egalitarian bands. But it explains the breadth of human behaviour and the ease with which we live in modern societies. The world today is unlike anything humans have experienced, yet in terms of their hierarchy, sedentism and political complexity, the societies we’ve built might still be deeply familiar... (MORE - details)
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