The Long Way Back to Ourselves

2.9

How Inequality Arises, and Why It Always Passes Itself Off as Nature

This episode explains that hunter-gatherer equality was not a default state but active work: Boehm's reverse dominance hierarchy, where groups keep anyone from rising above the rest. It tells of anthropologist Richard Lee, who bought a large ox for Kalahari hosts and was mocked as having brought nothing but scrawny bones, a ritual meant to stop him thinking too highly of himself. It tests this against Graeber and Wengrow's objection that prehistoric societies show more variety than a simple equal-to-hierarchical story allows, and shows how their counterexamples confirm Boehm's mechanism. It ends by showing that mockery and demand-sharing braked an ambitious hunter but fail once one person controls a storehouse others depend on.