The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question. If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social

rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so.

It’s surely no coincidence that the most popular ethnographic films of the post-war era either focused on the Kalahari Bushmen and Mbuti Pygmies (‘band’ societies, which could be imagined as roughly resembling hippie communes); or on the Yanomami or ‘fierce people’ (Amazonian horticulturalists who, in Napoleon Chagnon’s version of reality – but

Scholarship does not always advance. Sometimes it slips backwards. A hundred years ago, most social scientists understood that those who live mainly from wild resources were not normally restricted to tiny ‘bands’. As we’ve seen, the assumption that they were only gained ground in the 1960s. In this regard, our earlier invocation of biker gangs and

his famous argument in The Savage Mind that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of ‘neolithic science’ as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles.

They were ill; but the illness was a direct consequence of being touched by God. As a result, when great calamities or unprecedented events occurred – a plague, a foreign invasion – it was among this penumbra that everyone looked for a charismatic leader appropriate to the occasion. As a result, a person who might otherwise have spent his life as

If, he noted, a Winnebago decided that gods or spirits did not really exist and refused to perform rituals meant to appease them, or even if he declared the collective wisdom of the elders wrong and invented his own personal cosmology (and both these things did, quite regularly, happen), such a sceptic would definitely be made fun of, while his

Such theories might be considered the high-water mark of the reaction against the indigenous critique of European society.

Like many North American peoples of his time, Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation. But by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many in Europe and America had reached the point of arguing that someone like Kandiaronk could never have