I wish to give a little time to class difference in this Chapter on Anthropology because the website encourages practitioners to share power, something that is the norm in hunter-gatherer societies. Because it is the norm – it is not something that people have to be urged to do.
One of the reasons why sharing power is not the norm in our modern society is that class distinction has existed for millennia. That is, we divide ourselves up into different classes that are distinguishable by practices, types of employment, property owned, habits, customs, wealth, education, sometimes even entertainment, sports and hobbies.
We call the mixture of all of these things our culture.
For example in education, highly-formally-educated professionals, because of decades of exposure to particular norms in their culture in respect of all the above, tend towards using different language and having different interests, as well as having different expectations, than people who have little or no formal education, and are exposed to different norms in their culture. Of course, one set of norms is not really superior to the other, but because of the sheer power of Pillars thinking it appears to be.
The relevance of all this to us is that the class that perceives itself to be at the top rung of the culture and education ladder appears to be fearful that its members will somehow be disadvantaged if it shares power.
Getting back to hunter-gatherer societies, many different studies, some of which are mentioned above, revealed that there is little or no class difference, or class distinction in such societies. There may be some elders who have more status than the majority of the people, but there is no upper class, middle class, lower class, educated class etc. as we in the modern technological world are so familiar with.
I propose that one of the main reasons for this is that in nomadic peoples, that rely on hunting and gathering, what we’d recognise in our modern world as academic, logic/linguistic type intelligence (left brain) does not bring that many advantages. Of course it does offer some advantage, but physical prowess, guile, sensory awareness, (sight/smell/hearing), rhythmic awareness and relationship building, would be of equal (or might even be of greater) advantage.
Differences in status (which eventually resulted in what we now know as class distinction) began to emerge about 10,000 years ago when we became farmers. The reason why farming (that is, cultivating and growing some crops over others, and keeping – and then domesticating – certain types of animals) evolved was to ensure certainty in food supply – which would in turn reduce uncertainty in our lives in general.
Of course, this did not happen overnight – it may have taken a hundred generations.
Because emotional matters are our concern, it is interesting for us to consider what feelings people had when the first man (or men – we’ll call them settlers just for convenience) put a fence or some form of barrier around some good, arable, fertile land and said to others ye can’t come in here because this is mine/ours. I am fairly sure one of the emotions felt was anger. Another was probably envy. And the settlers probably felt fear! (I will expand on this theme in the next post).
What farming brought, however, was competition for food.
This is paradoxical – one would imagine that competition would arise from hunting and gathering, a very uncertain activity, where the results of our endeavours are unpredictable, than the far more predictable activity of farming!
In the next post I’ll attempt to unpack this paradox.