MATRIARCHIES OF TODAY & THE PAST

 

EQUALITY IS ACHIEVED: 

 

1) through direct individual access to food, water and raw materials needed for tools

 

2) by mobility

 

3) by procedures that impose sharing and prevent accumulation

 

4) by `leveling mechanisms´such as mockery or avoidance that assert egalitarian values and reject authority.

 

Egalitarian hunter and gatherer societies don´t only nurture egalitarianism as an ideology, but do practice and achieve an equality of outcomes, that doesn´t exist in other societies.

And what´s remarkable is that these core features not only appear in Africa, but they are distributed around the world. And that distribution around the globe suggest very strongly that these are features of human sociality that predate our dispersal from Africa, and therefore hold a very important significance for the understanding why we are the way we are.

 

According to the fundamental requisites for achieving and maintaining an egalitarian society, identified by James Woodburn, and exemplified by the RAG- anthropologist Jerome Lewis in his lecture Egalitarian Gender Relation how they are practised by the hunter and gatherer  Batek and Mbendjele-people in the African rainforest