Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Leninsky Av., 32a, Moscow, 119334, Russia [artemova.olga@list.ru]

Abstract. The author assumes that aspiration for equality represents one of the most ancient achievements of human cultures. A pursuit of justice and desire to eradicate root causes of conflicts must have stimulated an empirical search for various means of restraining dominant individuals or groups as well as elaboration of various modes of behavior intended to eliminate competition and put all individuals or groups concerned in equal positions. Those strategies have been familiar to members of quite different societies, including modern urban ones, but they have been mostly used temporally and only in specific social settings. However, in some hunter-gatherer societies studied ethnographically, people always tended to consciously follow such strategies. At the same time, a number of hunter-gatherer cultures described in ethnographies were able to build up effective mechanisms of social differentiation. Egalitarian or non-egalitarian relations of hunters and gatherers studied ethnographically cannot be extrapolated to the past ages of Europe or any other part of the world, but it should be admitted that Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic hunters were able to develop both egalitarian and non-egalitarian social systems. The author argues that achievement of social equality may have been possible only as an outcome of persistent long-term efforts of many generations of determined people. She also suggests that, in order to understand how people came to complexity, productive economies, states, and civilizations, academic researchers would need to assume that the start must have been a non-egalitarian one, and that the initial forms of inequality must have been principally dissimilar from those which were observed ethnographically among the later non-egalitarian hunter-gatherers including the so-called ‘complex’ ones. The paper is intended to stimulate awareness of our preconceptions about human social evolution and to challenge the orthodoxy of an essentially egalitarian start of human history.

Keywords: hunter-gatherer societies, equality, inequality, egalitarianism, ethnography, archeology, social evolution, egalitarian and non-egalitarian social systems.

Received 05.02.2020, revised 13.03.2020, accepted 15.03.2020.

DOI: 10.31600/2658-3925-2020-1-64-91

For citation: Artemova N. Yu. Equality as a human categorical imperative. Prehistoric Archaeology. Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. 2020 (1), 64-91 (in Russ.). DOI: 10.31600/2658-3925-2020-1-64-91

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