On Wealth Transmission and Egalitarianism

The article “Wealth Transmission and Inequality among Hunter‐Gatherers” by Eric Alden Smith, Kim Hill, Frank W. Marlowe, David Nolin, Polly Wiessner, Michael Gurven, Samuel Bowles, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Tom Hertz, and Adrian Bell sets out to make some standardized measurements of wealth transmission and inequality among the Hunter-Gatherers of the 20th century. NOT the necessarily 21st century, but more on that in a bit. They surveyed wealth measurements of five different Hunter-Gatherer societies, the Ache, the Hadza, the Ju/’hoansi, the Lamalera, and the Meriam. They outline the modern history of each group and then outline the way that they express “wealth” in their culture.

The conclusion that Smith et al. comes to is that each group showed a tendency of inequality in their transmission of wealth. This was proved by the calculation that in every group’s information they surveyed children of “wealthier” parents were more likely to be wealthy when they grew up and have access to types of wealth. They also conclude that egalitarianism amongst Hunter-Gatherers is misleading. This is because while the difference of wealth between groups is less than agricultural societies, it is not non-existent. Smith et al. believes that anthropologists needs to drop their views of Hunter-Gatherers as egalitarian and that there needs to be more studies on their wealth management systems.

First this article starts out with a statement that I can only call negligent since it seems to imply there are no more foraging Hunter-Gatherers in the world “If our species is some 200,000 years old, then the strictly hunting‐gathering phase occupied well over 90% of its history; societies relying primarily or even exclusively on foraging persisted in various parts of the globe well into the twentieth century.”(Smith et al. 2010:20) This is obviously not true, in fact they site a group of hunter-gatherers well known for being a foraging group even today (in the twenty-first century) the Ju/’hoansi one of the groups in the Kalahari Desert. It is possible they meant to imply that there were groups that were not in constant contact with other societies until late in the 20th century. However even this has been proven to be inaccurate, as groups have been contacted before and just let alone even to this day. (Fundação Nacional do Índio Report 2007)

Secondly even Smith et al. determine that their data just isn’t enough to really prove their conclusions, however they still make the claim that anthropologists still to this day believe that Hunter-Gatherer groups are peaceful egalitarian people and they are somehow disproving this fact(Smith et al 2010:31). Since there are numerous articles out on just wealth, social stratification amongst foragers, hunter-gatherer interactions and inequality in foraging hunter-gatherer groups this also seems dated. (Renouf 2003, Spielmann 1994). Overall this article reads like it was written in the early 1980s instead of at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.

Resources Cited
2007 Fundação Nacional do Índio Report on Brazil.

Smith E.A., Hill K., Marlowe F.W., et al.
2010 "Wealth transmission and inequality among hunter-gatherers". Current Anthropology. 51 (1): 19-34.

Spielmann, K. A. and J. F. Eder
1994 Hunters and farmers: Then and now. Annual Review of Anthropology 23: 303-323

Renouf, M. A. P.
2003 Hunter-gatherer interactions: mutualism and resource partitioning on the Island of Newfoundland. Before Farming 2003/1(4).