It means that hunter-gatherer bands were not simply equal but guarded their equality on purpose. Nobody was allowed to rule anyone else, a ‘chief’ was a facilitator rather than a ruler, and any attempt to dominate was stopped before it could take hold. The phrase comes from the anthropologist Richard Lee’s work with the !Kung of the Kalahari, and in Therapeutic Shamanism fierce egalitarianism is one of the marks of the healthy, pre-Fallen animist way of life.
Where does the phrase come from? #
From anthropology. Richard Lee, who lived and worked with the !Kung, or Ju/’hoansi, of the Kalahari from 1963, when many of them still lived mainly by hunting and gathering, described them as ‘fiercely egalitarian’, and the description has been quoted widely since.1 The anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who studied how foraging bands held would-be dominators in check, is often named alongside him, and the two are often named together for the phrase. See What did Richard Lee learn from the !Kung about sharing? and What did Christopher Boehm find about how early humans kept power in check?
When Western anthropologists first met hunter-gatherer peoples, they tended to assume hierarchy, because hierarchy was the lens they saw everything through, and expected to find tribes with a leader at the top. What they found instead were bands with no rulers at all. Part of the old confusion comes from lumping two very different kinds of society together. People picture a tribe ruled by a chief because they are thinking of agricultural tribal societies, not hunter-gatherer ones.2 See What is the difference between a hunter-gatherer and an agricultural society?
What does ‘egalitarian’ mean here? #
Equal in power. Nobody stood above anybody else, nobody gave orders that others had to obey, and no one section of society held power over another. There were no permanent leaders or followers: people took the initiative for a time, or were given authority for a time, by consensus and according to the task in hand, and decisions came out of respectful discussion.3 Where a band had someone outsiders called a chief, that person was a facilitator, someone good at holding council, who might make the final decision once everybody had been heard.
Equal does not mean the same. Hunter-gatherer cultures usually had different roles for men and women, though how strictly varied enormously from tribe to tribe, and there was still usually equality and mutual respect between the sexes.4 People had different gifts and skills too, and these differences did not turn into rank. Nor is the claim that foragers owned nothing; it is a claim about power, not property, and the dispute over property is taken up in How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal?
Why ‘fiercely’? #
Because the equality was protected, not just enjoyed. It was not that hunter-gatherers lacked the urge to dominate. Comparing human bands with chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, Boehm found little evidence that humans are simply more egalitarian by nature; many people want power, and most people dislike being dominated.5 The urge was there, and some people were more driven by it than others. Psychopathic traits seem to have genetic markers, with estimates of around one in twenty-five people carrying them, and there is no known reason to think this was any different among hunter-gatherers. What was different was that such behaviour was usually contained by the tribe.6
So the ‘fiercely’ is about how seriously these cultures took the danger. Hunter-gatherer animists, seemingly for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, understood hierarchy as ‘a poison that would lead to catastrophe’, and built their whole way of life with checks and balances against anyone rising to the top. They understood that tolerating dominance would be a disaster, and history has shown how right they were.5 How the checks worked, from teasing to casting out, is set out in How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal? and, for Boehm’s name for it, What is a reverse dominance hierarchy?
Did hunter-gatherers ever fall into hierarchy? #
At times, it seems, and they took it apart again. The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything (2021), gather evidence of earlier peoples who built ranked structures and then dismantled them. The book was presented as overturning the idea that early humans were egalitarian. Read from a Therapeutic Shamanism point of view, it records our ancestors falling into hierarchy now and then, recognising it for what it was, and deliberately undoing it, over and over, until farming took hold and hierarchy got a grip that it has kept ever since. On that reading the book strengthens the case for fierce egalitarianism, since the undoing is exactly what ‘fiercely’ describes. Graeber and Wengrow themselves read their evidence differently, as the next section shows. Even the first city-states may have kept something of the older equality for a while, before much more hierarchical cultures replaced them.7 See Who was David Graeber, and what does The Dawn of Everything say about the Fall?
There are exceptions. Where wild food was so plentiful that people could settle, complex hunter-gatherers such as the peoples of the Pacific North-West coast of America developed chiefs, inequality and slavery without farming. They were rare, which is why anthropologists mean the egalitarian band peoples when they say ‘hunter-gatherers’ without qualification.8
Is the idea disputed? #
Yes. Graeber and Wengrow call Boehm’s case that foragers consciously chose equality brilliant. Even so, they say he is “strangely reluctant to consider its full implications”. If humans are self-conscious political actors, they argue, they should have tried many different social arrangements over our long history, rather than living one way until farming.9
On the other side, the anthropologist Chris Knight, reviewing The Dawn of Everything, says the authors misread Boehm (“this isn’t what Boehm wrote”), and that Boehm pictured early humans trying a variety of political arrangements whilst gradually converging on the egalitarian one, which then spread from band to band.10 The wider argument over how equal hunter-gatherers really were is in Isn’t the Fall just “noble savage” romanticism?
Was equality only between humans? #
No, and this is where Therapeutic Shamanism takes the idea further than anthropology usually does. Original animism is completely non-hierarchical, not only among people but between humans and the other-than-human world, where humans sit at the round table with the Animal, Plant and Stone People rather than above them. The break began with domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this. Humans in effect said to goats and sheep, you may live with us, though we will eat you in the end; to wolves and hyenas, you are dead if we see you; to wheat and rice, you may stay; and to every other plant, you are a weed. That new relationship of dominance over the other Peoples is where hierarchy starts to seep in, and the fall from an animist, egalitarian way of relating begins. See How does animism understand power and hierarchy? and What is the Fall?
What does it mean for Therapeutic Shamanism today? #
It is part of the core. Fierce egalitarianism is one of the near-universal animist teachings that make up Core AnimismCore Animism. The culture-neutral core of animism: the aspects of animist teaching that are (near-)universal rather than specific to any one culture: the Original Instructions, fierce egalitarianism, respectful right relationship with the other-than-human people, equal respect for the masculine and the feminine, treating all as sacred, living as a Leaver rather than a Taker. The parallel of Michael Harner’s ‘core shamanism’, and its necessary root: shamanism is a branch of animism, so a culture-neutral shamanism has to be grounded in a culture-neutral animism, with no borrowed regalia required. More about this, alongside the Original InstructionsOriginal Instructions. The animist roadmap: the stories, principles and templates for living in right, reciprocal, non-hierarchical relationship with self, others and the more-than-human world. A template to be translated to the present, never commandments. More about this, right relationship with the other-than-human people and being a Leaver rather than a Taker. In practice it means power held as power-from-withinPower-from-within. Starhawk’s term for the healthy mode of power, as against power-over. Egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands held power this way; practising shamanism from power-over is ‘just more Fall’. More about this rather than power-over, among people and with the other Peoples, and a steady watchfulness for hierarchy creeping back in, because hierarchical thinking is what people in this culture are raised in and so it feels normal. See What are the Original Instructions?
