Social Inequalities Forum
Feb 14, 2023 from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room 105, Leibnizstr. 1, 24118 Kiel
Social Inequality Forum.
Title "Subsistence Production, War, and Leadership in New Guinea (and Beyond): The Roots of Social Inequality?”" by Paul Roscoe (The University of Maine).
Abstract:
The polities that populated New Guinea at the time of European contact offer a useful theatre for probing the roots of social inequality, in particular political inequality. They embraced a variety of subsistence regimes, from hunting and gathering through horticulture to agriculture; they were all either episodically or permanently at war with at least one of their neighbours; and they displayed diverse leadership forms from egalitarian bands through Great-Men and Big-Men communities to petty chiefdoms. An analysis of polities from more than a hundred New Guinea language groups indicates that subsistence productivity and war were important in determining this political variability and in driving the development of gendered leadership and patriarchy. As a brief coda, the results of this analysis are extended to understanding the emergence and development of political centralization in northern and central coastal Peru.
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The program of the Social Inequalities Forum of the Winter Term 2022-23 can be downloaded here.