Egalitarian Societies

* Article: Woodburn, James. 1982 ‘Egalitarian Societies.’ Man, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17, no. 3: 431-51.

URL = http://libcom.org/files/EGALITARIAN%20SOCIETIES%20-%20James%20Woodburn.pdf

Abstract

"Greater equality of wealth, of power and of prestige has been achieved in certain hunting and gathering societles than in any other human societies. These societies, which have economies based on immediate rather than delayed return. are assertively egalitarian. Equality IS achieved through direct, individual access to resources; through direct, individual access to means of coercion and means of mobility which limit the imposition of control; through procedures which prevent saving and accumulation and impose sharing; through mechanisms which allow goods to circulate without making people dependent upon one another. People are systematically disengaged from property and therefore from the potentiality in property for creating dependency. A comparison is made between these societies and certain other egalitarian societies in which there is profound intergenerational inequality and in which the equality between people of senior generation is only a starting point for strenuous competition resulting In inequality.

The value systems of non-competitive, egalitarian hunter-gatherers limit the development of agriculture because rules of sharing restrict the investment and savlngs necessary for agriculture; they may limit the care provided for the Incapacitated because of the controls on dependency; they may in principle, extend equality o all mankind." (http://libcom.org/files/EGALITARIAN%20SOCIETIES%20-%20James%20Woodburn.pdf)