First there is the problem of rescuing our pre-historic past and understanding it scientifically, steming from this also follows that the past is in a sense a critique of the present exposing what is felt to be natural as a social product.
The idea of the Noble Savage is lampooned these days for what I think are pretty superficial reasons. The originators of the concept used it as a criticism of "modern" society and while they tended to exagerrate some aspects of newly discovered "primitives" and ignore others, they did not on the whole simply invent - they saw aspects which challenged their thinking and re-ordered their understandings accordingly. More honestly than anthropologists these thinkers of the Enlightenment were explicit about why they looked to the "Noble Savage" as a critique of the nature of man in their societies - they were telling tales and not trying to give full objective accounts of the people they were using as object lessons.
I do think we can grow past using ideal types and accept pre-historic people warts and all and in all their complexities and historic changes. One aspect of this is that such knowledge is an active critique of our own lives - primitive communalism was not a pleasant heaven but niether was it the alienated hell of social life today.
One the whole I very much agree with everything stated below.
Greg Schofield Perth Australia
--- Message Received --- From: "Dennis Breslin" <dbreslin at ctol.net> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 10:05:53 -0500 Subject: Re: Pre-historic human societies
I think debates such as this typically fizzle along ideological lines where competing sides want early human societies to serve as benchmarks for this or that primordial kind of human activity. Certainly, early human societies were stateless as well as egalitarian and were clearly marketless, but foraging societies also were not exempt from power relations nor from organized social inequality or institutionalized forms of social exchange. But since we're treading in the waters of ideal types, evidence can only be partially helpful.
I would contend that early human societies do represent a relative kind of egalitarianism, but one that had to contend with gender, age, kin, etc. as Grant points out. The kind of equality that did exist can serve as a benchmark of sorts, tho the material circumstances that gave rise to it are not really applicable to us now. Organizing people around virtue isn't humans strong suit.
I'm not sure about the primordial nature of the market and I don't think that its productive to equate social exchange with a market. Likewise, a notion like landed property may be in evidence in some cases, but this can blur the distinction between territorial control and property ownership. Group size and resource scarcity play important roles in shaping power, hierarchy, and exchange. The important lesson we can learn is that when faced with conditions of harsh scarcity, humans can fashion a less harsh society. When humans have to contend with the prospect of producing and distributing a surplus, we brutalize one another with something under different circumstances would be called progress.
I don't think 17th century Europeans settlers would have behaved any differently even if they saw foragers and horticulturalists as holding an advanced theory of property ownership.
Dennis Breslin