Discourse and gibbons

[Ronald Kephart]

Yesterday I finished up a somewhat wandering message on what seemed like a
pessimistic note:

> ... I have to wonder whether this ideal [of social inequality] is achievable
> given the primate roots of inequality.
>
At the time I was unsatisfied with this ending, but too tired to continue.
So, I just want to follow up on my own post by calling attention to what I
consider to be the up side of my observation.

In my opinion, any view of "social equality" that sees it as an effortless
return to some pristine former state of human social organization is doomed.
Social ranking is a part of our nature, as primates, and especially as
hominoid primates, and it has almost surely functioned to reduce
within-group conflicts by helping define relationships between individuals.

But, with language and culture, we can imagine a human society in which
people are equals. We even have documented cases of societies within which
this ideal forms a part of the folk model: the !Kung are one such, and
Carriacou where I've done my field work was another (tho the latter is
changing with more intensive penetration of US-style capitalism). The point
is that in all such cases, the people have to *work* at it by creating
cultural rules such as "insulting the meat" or redistributive food-sharing.
A friend of mine argues that the !Kung are more culturally *advanced* in
this regard than, say, we here in the US, because we *say* people are equal
but we really do little work to bring the ideal into reality. We prefer the
old, easy, primate way, and in this sense it is us who are the "primitives."

--
Ronald Kephart
English & Foreign Languages
University of North Florida
http://www.unf.edu~rkephart/