Profs & Pints Richmond: Are We Naturally Egalitarian?

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Are We Naturally Egalitarian?” a look at power relationships in humanity’s deep past, with Chris von Rueden, anthropologist and professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/naturally-egalitarian .]

For the overwhelming majority of our history, humans have lived as hunter-gatherers. What we assume about hunter-gatherers underlies our assumptions about human nature and has shaped public policy in our modern societies. Advocates for generous welfare policies or universal basic income, for example, sometimes argue that such measures are in keeping with our inherent egalitarianism, forged in a hunter-gatherer past of equality and sharing.

But just how egalitarian was humanity’s deep past? Be on hand as Professor Chris von Rueden explores the possible answers to that question by drawing from more than a century of anthropological studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers and other subsistence societies, from the Arctic to the rainforests of central Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Amazon, to the deserts of Australia and southern Africa.

He’ll discuss how some hunter-gatherers actually were highly unequal, to the point of practicing slavery, and how such inequality might have been even more prevalent prior to the spread of agriculture. Furthermore, while the majority of hunter-gatherers do successfully limit many inequalities, there is no society completely lacking inequality in terms of property, gender relations, social status, access to leadership, and reproductive opportunity.

Moreover, while hunter-gatherers are frequently generous, the low levels of inequality we see in their societies often results from self-interested motives such as a desire to acquire resources, status, or personal autonomy.

Finally, Dr. von Rueden will connect what he learned about human egalitarianism to the role that it plays in large-scale politics, as expressed in protests, welfare policy, or the lampooning of authority. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A pre-1903 photo of Andaman men and women hunting turtles (Smithsonian Institution National Anthropological Archives / Wikimedia Commons).