Friedrich Engels famously described civilization as a “world-historical” catastrophe for women, since it subjugated them within a patriarchal system, burying their agency inside male-dominated households and excluding them from the historical structures of the last ten millennia. In this episode, we consider the foundations of patriarchy, and ask how human beings may have crafted their societies before the emergence of post-Neolithic patriarchal structures. Drawing on the pioneering work of Sara Hrdy and Gerda Lerner, we try to unpack the dynamics of sex and gender across the Palaeolithic/Neolithic divide to ask how and why the subordination of female reproductive agency became an integral feature of the rise of civilization.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com

The experience of the Huron, an Iroquoian-speaking indigenous people of the Eastern US and Canada, provides an example of what I term “exogenous market logic” and shows how markets can function, not within, but at the boundary of society. In this episode, we delve into the details of how the Huron (or Wendat) emerged as a distinct society in land between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. Drawing from the work of the eminent anthropologist Bruce Trigger, we trace the evolution of indigenous cultural, social, political and economic practices over many thousands of years, culminating with a turn toward sedentism enabled by the adoption of horticulture. In particular, we explore how the shift in social logic from a patrilineal to a matrilineal system was a major impetus for the development of a distinct “national” identity. Along the way, we’ll discuss the famous Dunbar number, the importance of prestige activities, the logic of conflict, and even the social importance of organized sports!

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com

At the halfway point of the course, we pause to consider the meaning and power of paradigms, what it means to live inside of a paradigm, how they have shifted in the past, and what we can and should do to help change our paradigm going forward.

The concept of paradigm shift comes for the work of Thomas Kuhn, in his book the Structures of the Scientific Revolution.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com

In this episode we explore the truly mind-blowing exchange system prevalent in the Trobriand Island complex off the East coast of Papua New Guinea, known as the Kula Ring. This elaborate trading system, long invisible to outside eyes, was described at length by the legendary Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who spent years embedded inside the local tribes to discover how the overlapping complexities of the trading scheme operated to create political and social outcomes for the Islanders. His resulting book, Argonauts of the South Pacific, remains a classic of anthropology, while his approach to ethnographic research transformed the entire methodology of the field. We explore some of the features of Trobriand society, its economy, social rules, and the Kula Ring itself, drawing on the insights of Polanyi and Marx (see Episode 9) to help explain how the trade in seemingly insignificant, non-utilitarian objects serves to cohere an entire society.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com

In this episode, we offer a very abbreviated review of two key ideas that will inform subsequent discussions in the course. The first is Karl Polanyi’s idea, sketched out in his famous work, The Great Transformation, that prior to the Industrial Revolution, markets were always embedded in human relations. The second is Karl Marx’s similarly celebrated concept of “the fetishism of the commodity,” which is the concluding section of the opening chapter of his epic (and largely unreadable) work Das Kapital.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com

In this episode, we look at the civilizational complex that emerged in the Andean river valleys of North Central Peru (commonly called the Caral-Supe Civilization). The set of culturally-linked settlements that sprang up, prior to the emergence of agriculture, along the river valleys in what is today Peru, while not widely known, is a remarkable example of a so-called “pristine” civilization – that is the rise of a sophisticated cultural and social complex without any known outside influence. Beyond its social and cultural forms, however, we will explore the idea that the Andean River Valley Civilization was enabled by some kind of developed political system, one that could make feasible sedentary communities through the coordination of a logistically-complex food supply system. We also consider how this example reminds us of the basic fact that a world of Palaeolithic coastal or littoral communities, now vanished due to sea level rise, may well have been central to our human journey.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com

In this episode we look at the startling distinctions in the lives of far northern Inuit communities, as explored by the famous French ethnologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his book Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo. Using the concept of antinomies, we explore the sharp contrasts of architecture, authority, ownership, ritual life, and even sexuality that characterises Inuit life in the Summer and Winter seasons. The lecture explores the claims for what Mauss called “social technology in making a society viable, and ask what we can learn from this experience looking forward.

To see the images referred to in this lecture, visit the podcast website.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com

In this lecture, we explore several examples of how “primitive” peoples have come up with extraordinary cultural responses to overcome the challenges of environmental instability and uncertainty. In so doing, we consider the possibility that Palaeolithic people developed technological responses to solving the problems that their communities would have faced, and thus used social innovation in ways that challenge how we think about our own modernity as exclusive to ourselves.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com

In this lecture, we explore the fascinating essay written by the eminent American Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society.” (A version of the text can be found here.) By exploring Sahlins arguments in favour of a “primitive” economic confidence, we also go some way to resolving the problem left outstanding in the previous lecture regarding the so-called “Sapient Paradox.” Sahlins essay forms the first chapter to his more general study, Stone Age Economics.

Works referenced in the lecture include J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society; Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization; and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. For a good historical overview of Proto Indo-European, see David Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com

In this lecture, we explore the question raised by the eminent British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in his book Prehistory: the Making of the Human Mind, which he terms the “Sapient Paradox”: why the intelligence of homo sapiens does not seem to have made itself manifest for the first 150k years of our history. We also consider the significance of the way we have divided our past into both a “prehistory” and a “history.” The temperature record during the Quaternary Glaciation can be viewed here (Wikipedia).

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rolfstromolsen.substack.com