What Does Equality Actually Mean?
In chapter 4 of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow tackle three massive questions about human societies: what does it mean to be equal, what does it mean to be free, and when did our social worlds actually shrink? This lecture covers the first part of “Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property (Not necessarily in that order)”—a chapter that lives up to its parenthetical warning by scattering big ideas about egalitarian societies across ethnography, archaeology, and political philosophy.
The Ethnographic Record: More Than Time Machines
Graeber and Wengrow begin by clarifying what the ethnographic record can—and crucially, cannot—tell us about the past. They reject the problematic practice of treating contemporary societies as “living fossils” that show us what humans were “really like” in earlier periods. The Yanomami studied by Napoleon Chagnon or the Kalahari groups documented by Richard Lee are as thoroughly modern as anyone else; their societies are not evolutionary throwbacks.
But the ethnographic record still matters immensely. It expands our archaeological imagination. Without cultural anthropology, we could never have conceived of Nuer prophets who gain authority through physical anomalies, Kwakiutl police who double as seasonal clowns, or Inuit communities that periodically suspend marriage bonds entirely. As the authors put it, anyone proposing such arrangements based purely on archaeological evidence “would probably be instantly written off as kooks.” Ethnography proves that human social arrangements are far more creative—and strange—than material remains alone could suggest.
When the World Was Bigger: Ice Age Social Networks
One of the chapter’s most counterintuitive claims challenges our assumptions about social scale. Graeber and Wengrow argue that for most of human history, people’s social worlds were actually larger than they are today. During the Ice Age and early Holocene, a much higher proportion of the population regularly traveled vast distances, shifting between groups, participating in far-flung clan networks, and maintaining relationships across thousands of miles.
Even today’s hunter-gatherers demonstrate this cosmopolitanism. Studies of Kalahari groups reveal people constantly moving between bands, with friendship—not just kinship—serving as a primary organizing principle. These aren’t “kin-ordered bands” in any simple sense; they’re fluid networks of relationships maintained across enormous territories through shared clan systems and religious practices. You might not speak the language of the next group, but you’d know which clan to approach for hospitality.
The emergence of smaller, more “parochial” cultural units—the diverse societies we see in places like Papua New Guinea—came later, possibly within the last 3,000-10,000 years. The mechanism? New food storage and preparation technologies tied people to specific places and cuisines. When you wake up to fish stew every morning, you start seeing yourself as fundamentally different from people who eat berry porridge—different enough that fish stew for breakfast might seem physically repulsive to outsiders. These culinary distinctions echoed through clothing, drugs, hairstyles, courtship rituals, and kinship organization, creating the bounded “cultures” that anthropologists would later document.
What Does It Mean to Be Equal?
The question of equality leads Graeber and Wengrow into thorny conceptual territory. When we call hunter-gatherers “egalitarian,” what exactly are we claiming? That everyone has the same opportunities? The same outcomes? The same standing before the law or the gods?
They note that since Rousseau and Adam Smith, Western thinkers have tended to measure equality objectively through material possessions—how much stuff people own. By this metric, immediate-return hunter-gatherers appear egalitarian almost by default: if you’re constantly mobile and can’t accumulate surplus, material inequality becomes impossible.
But this raises uncomfortable questions. Does genuine equality require the elimination of all material surplus? Anthropologist James Woodburn, working among groups like the Hadza, distinguished between “immediate-return” societies (where you gather and eat the same day) and “delayed-return” societies (where you hunt, process, and store food over time). He argued that only immediate-return societies achieved true egalitarianism—not just between social classes but between genders as well. In delayed-return societies, hierarchies inevitably emerged.
If Woodburn is right, we face a bleak conclusion: “any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers.” Unless we can somehow return to immediate-return subsistence—or invent Star Trek replicators—we’re stuck with inequality. Graeber and Wengrow clearly find this pessimistic view unacceptable, given the historical evidence for diverse social arrangements that combined material complexity with various forms of autonomy and freedom.
Formal vs. Substantive Freedoms
This leads to perhaps the chapter’s most personally resonant distinction: between formal freedoms (rights you theoretically possess) and substantive freedoms (things you can actually do). The American flag PowerPoint automatically supplies when you type “freedom” captures the problem perfectly. Yes, American citizens formally have the right to travel wherever they want and never obey arbitrary orders from superiors. But these freedoms come with asterisks: provided you have money for transport and accommodation; unless you need a job.
The catch-22 is obvious to anyone who’s experienced it: you’re free to travel, but you need money to do so. To get money, you need a job. With a job, you can’t actually travel. Your formal freedom exists without substantive possibility.
Graeber and Wengrow argue that the Hadza, the Wendat (from the Kandiaronk debate), and other societies labeled “egalitarian” were primarily concerned with substantive freedoms—not abstract rights, but actual possibilities. They cared less about “the right to travel” than about actually being able to do so. This reframing shifts the entire debate: equality isn’t just about material distribution, and freedom isn’t just about formal rights. Both require examining what people can substantively accomplish within their social arrangements.
The Problem of Objective Measurement
Throughout this section, Graeber and Wengrow wrestle with how to objectively assess claims about equality. If a society tells you “we’re all equal before the gods” while some members are enslaved to others, should you believe the ideological claim or the material evidence? How do we measure equality across societies that may prioritize different values—legal equality, religious equality, economic equality?
The authors acknowledge this methodological challenge without fully resolving it. They note that farming emerged about 6,000 years before recognizable state societies, suggesting that agricultural surplus alone doesn’t automatically produce hierarchy. Some farming societies never developed states at all. But they save detailed examination of these questions for later chapters, content here to establish that both “equality” and “freedom” require more nuanced analysis than material determinism allows.
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