Public
- Public
- Network
- Groups
- Featured
- Popular
- People

Conversation

Notices

Embed this notice
Josh Davis (guerillaontologist@social.coop)'s status on Friday, 29-Nov-2024 00:22:33 JST Josh Davis

Here's a "typical Western attitude" that most of us are utterly unaware of: social systems are either hierarchical or horizontal; they either have strong states and laws or they don't.
Actual people, however, living their actual lives in the actual world do not seem to agree with this sentiment, and have never had any problem adapting different ways of interacting at different times of year or different places in the landscape. Political theorists should probably be taking this into account.
In conversation about a year ago from social.coop permalink
Attachments
1. Since in this new evolutionist narrative ‘states’ were defined above all by their monopoly on the ‘legitimate use of coercive force’, the nineteenth-century Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen as evolving from the ‘band’ level to the ‘state’ level roughly every November, and then devolving back again come spring. Obviously, this is silly. No one would seriously suggest such a thing. Still, it’s worth pointing out because it exposes the much deeper silliness of the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with. You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit. (from The Dawn of Everything, by Graeber and Wengrow).
  https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/113/560/748/664/543/326/original/954e97f611253475.png
2. Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them – all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states.
  https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/113/560/756/679/662/651/original/a84c03649fe0a974.png

Public

Conversation

Notices

Feeds