Transegalitarian Foraging Societies
Discussion
Ian Morris:
"Brian Hayden has identified some foraging societies as what he calls “transegalitarian,” lacking rigid class structures but nonetheless “having private property, surpluses, prestige objects, and significant socio-economic differences” (Hayden 2014: 643). Anthropologists have long known that foragers lucky enough to find dense concentrations of predictable and reliable resources in otherwise difficult environments tend to become less mobile, settling down to monopolize the oasis of abundance (Dyson-Hudson and Smith 1978). The rich Ice Age burials overwhelmingly come from sites that were superbly placed for ambushing mammoth and reindeer on Europe’s frozen and otherwise forbidding plains, and Hayden suggests that the need for top-down organization—as in the Cheyenne and Shoshone hunts—turned these into niches in which transegalitarian hunter-gatherer societies could evolve. “Aggrandizing” chiefs, as Hayden labels them, often claim to have been touched by the gods. Possibly the pathological Palaeolithic skeletons belong to village idiots/prophets; or perhaps the discovery at Sungir, Dolní Vestonice, and Arene Candide of skeletons of strapping young men with horrific wounds or stone weapons embedded in their bones represent more conventional aggrandizers who coopted visionary hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs in their cause. Maybe the power these men wielded was as transitory as that of a rabbit boss; or maybe some Ice Age societies were unlike anything documented in the ethnographic record (Wobst 1978). Either possibility requires us to recognize that cultural evolution can work in multiple ways, but neither requires us to reject its central premises."