The intensification of industrialism and the spectacle of capitalist production have led to the expansion of surveillance and management over the entirety of the biotic and abiotic. Luckily, the world is not entirely tame, and hopefully never can be, no matter the desires of capital to standardise the world. The forces of standardisation confront the impulse for wildness and anarchy in an ongoing struggle. This article takes critiques of the top-down state’s attempts to dominate and manage the planet found within political theory, such as the work of critical theorists, Situationists, Autonomous Marxists and Green Anarchists, and puts them in dialogue with insights found within hunter-gatherer studies. Hunter-gatherer cultures provide some of the most meaningful and successful examples of how to actively confront state formation, and thus can provide crucial insight for political thinking and movements which seek to do the same. This article endeavours to address a gap in most academic work in political theory which only centres statist and industrial politics, ignoring or erasing hunter-gatherer societies from its imagination. As a result, many of the supposed ‘solutions’ that political theory offers to address our socio-ecological crises merely expand the spheres of control and domination, rather than providing liberation.

This paper focuses on the production, sharing and transformation of knowledge among the Raute, a nomadic hunter-gatherer community from Nepal. This paper has three primary aims: 1) to explore how Raute children acquire knowledge; 2) to examine the influence of cultural norms, values and beliefs on the transmission of foraging knowledge; and 3) to analyse recent shifts in everyday learning practices. I demonstrate that Raute knowledge transmission is informal, with children learning from parents, alloparents, elders and peers through imitation, teaching, play, participation and storytelling. Unlike the more egalitarian learning systems observed in other hunter-gatherer societies, Raute learning is structured by age hierarchies, with parents exerting significant control and sometimes enforcing harsh discipline. Additionally, I argue that trade relationships with sedentary communities, mediated through begging, proverbs and blessings, introduce external influences that reshape Raute knowledge systems. Despite the Raute’s emphasis on cultural secrecy and their rejection of formal schooling, these interactions contribute to the loss of traditional skills, such as clothing manufacture, while younger Raute adopt new languages, foods and technologies. This analysis adds to our growing understanding of hunter-gatherer learning diversity and processes of culture change.

Prehistory has always been of great fascination to children. As funny and amusing as educational media might be, it often carries contemporary stereotypes and biases since the deep past provides ‘forms of critical imagination’ that are products of present capitalist culture ( Pitcher 2022 :18). Once absorbed, these stereotypes are difficult to change or correct. Communicating the past to younger generations is both challenging and crucial for historians and archaeologists. This study focuses on how the Stone Age is conveyed to primary school children (6–12 years old), with a focus on Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherer societies. It explores English and Italian materials, examining differences and similarities between these cultures and languages. More specifically, the paper includes children’s books from Italy, the United Kingdom and Ireland (2013–2023) as well as educational resources from museums, schools and universities of these countries. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were undertaken of visual and textual media. The research is framed within a feminist theoretical framework, exploring depictions of gender roles in the analysed material. Even if the Stone Age is such a distant period, the way it is portrayed to children is of great importance, and a better dissemination of it means that a better understanding of the present could play a role in creating a better world ( Henson 2016a :2). Similarities between Italian and English sources were identified in the depiction of male dominance, occasional female empowerment, hunting prominence and climate change. However, Italian sources tended to emphasise stereotypical depictions of gendered division of labour. In contrast, English sources included post-humanist theories and presented prehistoric times as a survival challenge. Overall, the discussion has highlighted the interdependence of archaeological interpretations and contemporary issues.

Reassessing conventional evolutionary beliefs on the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies, this research explores overlooked dimensions of social organisation, addressing aspects such as social inequality and its contestation through the conscious manipulation of space within fortified settlements in West Siberia. Academic discourse often marginalises emerging economic imbalances in hunter-gatherer societies as mere preconditions for farming and social stratification. However, this research confronts such oversimplified narratives that typically distinguish between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers. Drawing on Graeber and Wengrow’s (2021) critique of these classifications in The Dawn of Everything , the study advocates for a nuanced perspective on social inequality and the diverse societal responses to it. The case study of fortified hunter-gatherer settlements in West Siberia challenges perceptions of human history, showing foragers building fortifications for over eight millennia. Global archaeological evidence usually connects such structures in foraging communities to surplus economies and socio-political inequalities. To investigate whether the fortified sites in Siberia can also be correlated with socio-economic differentiation, I employ a standard statistical approach based on the Gini index, while critically scrutinising its application to archaeological contexts. The study assesses changing patterns of social inequality in this region over time. Its findings reveal architectural adjustments as responses to societal changes, potentially fostering denser cohabitation to strengthen communal solidarity amidst rising social inequalities. Despite Graeber and Wengrow’s (2021) criticism of the Gini index, this inquiry empirically resonates with their concept of societal self-awareness and flexibility, highlighting the agency of people as ‘architects’ of their own social arrangements and enriching our understanding of societal dynamics in the past.

A prominent theme of The Dawn of Everything is Graeber and Wengrow’s effort to knock down what they believe is the ‘Edenic’ original human innocence component of ‘modern social theory’. To support this position, The Dawn of Everything relies on examples from numerous materially and administratively complex societies. Here I suggest that Graeber and Wengrow are motivated to associate anyone advocating for human arrangements which are less materially or administratively complex as effectively right-wing in psychological and political outlook. Although Graeber and Wengrow never directly say this, it is a theme which can be discerned throughout The Dawn of Everything . They promote a model that anything other than progressivist thought is not only ‘childlike’ and ‘primitive’, but also that such ‘primitivist’ tendencies are effectively politically right. Driven by this logic, The Dawn of Everything attempts to situate a prehistoric left/right divide, with certain hunter-gatherers representing the right and settled agriculture societies representing the left. They do this mainly through their total avoidance of ever making any distinction between two separate adaptations that were alternative to evolving urban civilisation and its politics. One of these adaptations is what Graeber and Wengrow refer to as the ‘heroic societies’. The other is that of people pursuing small-in-scale, non-resource-intensified subsistence lifeways, for the agent-based purposes of maintaining actual autonomy.

First Nations in Canada engage in a form of mixed economic production that includes the complementary integration of subsistence (eg hunting, fishing, gathering, sharing) and wage-earning sectors. The flexibility of mixed economies has long enabled First Nations to optimise the use and allocation of household assets (eg time, labour, income) during times of economic and ecological change. In this study, we relied on the disaggregation of household (N=1268) data to measure the extent to which First Nations households in the Peace River region of British Columbia and Alberta engage in the mixed economy. We found that 24% (N=303) of First Nations households participate at an above average level in wage-earning and subsistence harvesting and are involved in relatively dense food sharing networks. These households are in the most optimal position to respond to economic or ecological changes by exploiting the range of household assets at their disposal. Conversely, 29% (N=368) of households participate in both wage-earning and subsistence harvesting at below average levels and are largely excluded from food sharing networks. These households may be most sensitive to even modest exposure. The results of this research offer a fine scale analysis of household characteristics that can be used by First Nations governments for targeted interventions to alleviate household exposure to economic and ecological change. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

The San consist of various groups distinguished by language, locale and cultural practices. Focusing on the !Xun San living in Ekoka, a village originally established by a missionary organisation in the heartland of the Ovawambo agro-pastoral people, this paper aims to clarify how the !Xun, the extreme minority in the region, have been reorganising their relationships with various actors including the Ovawambo after Namibia gained independence. The results show that the Ovawambo play an important role in providing the !Xun with opportunities to engage in wage labour, which is the main source of their income, and various food materials. In addition, the land shortage problem that the Ovawambo experience has become increasingly serious after independence. Against the backdrop of these circumstances, the Ovawambo have overused the cooperative farm which was initially created for the San, and thus damages to the San’s crops have frequently occurred, largely caused by the Oshiwanbo livestock. Nonetheless, the !Xun have not shown consistent opposition to the Ovawambo’s use of their land. Ironically, the cooperative farm, which was established and run by the missionary organisations about half a century ago for the purpose of promoting food self-sufficiency among the San, is facilitating the !Xun’s engagement in labour for the Ovawambo. While advocating poverty reduction for the San and their integration into the nation-state, the government is actually strengthening the policy of assimilating the San into the Ovawambo. In such a situation, the !Xun seek a better lifestyle by reorganising the reciprocal relationship with the Ovawambo through using the cooperative farm and food materials provided by the Namibian government. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

The theme of primordial androgyny is fundamental to male initiation rites and related myths in both Melanesia and Amazonia. The same theme also plays a central role in Australian and African hunter-gatherer rites and myths. Following Chris Knight’s treatment of these myths and rites, along with the model developed by him, Camilla Power and Ian Watts for the origins of human culture, this article argues that primordial androgyny – along with the related themes of the differentiation of primordial wholeness and the opening up of a sealed container or womb – are fundamental to male endeavours in Melanesian, Amazonian and Australian cultures to appropriate the powers of the womb and thereby undermine the egalitarian social system that these powers once supported. Even in their most abstract cosmological manifestations, these themes can be related to the basic ritual acts of male menstruation in these societies. However, amongst African hunter-gatherer societies, the social and religious functions of these themes are dramatically different, reflecting social structures in which attempts to build a gender hierarchy are constantly countered by egalitarian cultural institutions. Following an argument variously elaborated by James Woodburn and Camilla Power, I conclude by suggesting that the myths of egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies such as the Bushmen, who have no authoritarian religious structures, should be analysed in terms of an ongoing interaction between authoritarian and egalitarian cultural forces – that mythic motifs that in Amazonia and Australia underpin male authority are also present in Bushman culture but there they inform institutions that sustain egalitarianism.