Short answer: hunter gatherers/immediate return societies strongly tended towards egalitarianism, but not because they had some noble ideology of equality. Their material conditions and social logics made hierarchy very hard to sustain.

Let me break that down:

1) “Immediate return” = stuff spoils fast

If your caloric capture window is like 24-72 hours, you literally cannot store value / power for long.

• you can’t stockpile food

• you can’t accumulate capital

• you can’t buy loyalty with resources

So the resource basis for lasting hierarchy never has time to congeal.

2) leveling mechanisms

Anthropologists talk about this a lot: because arrogance or dominance would threaten group survival, there are constant micro-practices of flattening anyone who gets too big.

Examples (from Richard Lee, Woodburn, James Scott, etc):

• mockery of good hunters so they don’t “think too much of themselves”

• immediate redistribution after a kill

• gossip as social control

• “reverse dominance hierarchies” (the coalition of the whole to suppress the upstart)

They don’t have no power dynamics. They have constant counter-power dynamics.

3) politically: “egalitarian” doesn’t mean “everyone’s the same”

It means:

• no durable offices

• no coercive authority

• no monopoly on violence

• no mechanisms for internal stratification to last

Elder influence might exist. Gendered roles might exist. But if someone tries to convert influence into rule, they get slammed.

So, are they egalitarian?

Saying “they were egalitarian societies” is probably slightly too idealizing.

Better formulation:

Immediate-return hunter-gatherers have strongly egalitarian tendencies, because their subsistence ecology makes hierarchy structurally brittle.

As soon as you go delayed-return—storage, agriculture, property, infrastructures that stabilize yield over time—hierarchy becomes much easier to maintain.

The real key:

Egalitarianism isn’t a moral preference.
It’s an ecology shaped by time.

If you can’t turn time into capital, you can’t turn capital into power.

So egalitarianism here is a dynamic equilibrium kept alive by the poverty of durable surplus and continual cultural enforcement.

Not a utopia.
A different ontology of what control even is.

You said:

Can you give me a short list of references that empirically support this fact.

ChatGPT said:

Here are some good empirical references that support the claim that many immediate-return / band hunter-gatherer societies tend toward egalitarian social organisation:

1. High mobility explains demand sharing and enforced cooperation in egalitarian hunter‑gatherers (Lewis et al., 2014) — uses agent-based modelling plus ethnographic data to show that demand-sharing and mobility are key to maintaining egalitarian resource distributions in hunter-gatherer bands. PMC

2. Wealth Transmission and Inequality Among Hunter‑Gatherers (Gurven et al., 2012) — uses quantitative data on several forager societies to show that intergenerational wealth transmission is low and wealth inequality modest in these groups. PMC

3. Egalitarian social organisation among hunter‑gatherers (Lewis, 2019) — focuses explicitly on immediate-return hunter-gatherers, arguing that their subsistence ecology enforces economic and political egalitarianism.

4. Status does not predict stress: Women in an egalitarian hunter‑gatherer society (Von Rueden et al., 2023) — examines the Hadza and finds little correlation between status and physiological stress, supporting the view of a relatively flat social structure. PMC

5. The Play Theory of Hunter‑Gatherer Egalitarianism (Gray, 2014) — though more theoretical, it draws on ethnographic work to argue that forager societies actively cultivate egalitarian norms (via “reverse dominance” etc) as part of their culture. OUP Academic

If you like, I can pull together 10–15 full references (books + articles) with annotations, so you can pick ones relevant for your synthesis.

How did hunter gatherers/immediate return foragers treat gay people, was there much homophobia. What about other types of prejudice?

ChatGPT said:

short answer first:

No — there is no good evidence that “homophobia” as we understand it was a structural feature of immediate-return hunter–gatherer societies.

details:

immediate-return radical egalitarian societies (Hadza, Mbuti, Ju/’hoansi, Inuit pre-mission) tend to have:

• low hierarchy

• low coercive authority

• very small group size

• flexible roles

• extremely high tolerance of personality variation

this doesn’t mean “everyone was perfectly nice” — it means the conditions that breed rigid categories + policing of sexual identity weren’t structurally stable: there’s no priesthood, no scripture, no caste, no lineage corporate property that must be “kept pure,” etc.

evidence we actually have:

• there are explicit ethnographic cases of same-sex practices and/or nonbinary genders in foragers (e.g. some Inuit groups, some Australian Aboriginal groups, certain North American hunter–gatherer societies where berdache/two-spirit roles existed)

• there is zero primitive accumulation; no inheritance of land, cattle, money → no tension around “passing on the line”

• marriage is not a sacralized institution in most immediate return contexts → sexual partnership is often fluid and not policed

so the conditions for homophobia (as a policing of reproductive futurity and lineage continuity) were pretty weak.

BUT:

prejudice can exist without “categories.”

hunter–gatherer people absolutely insult, gossip, shame, exclude, and play favorites. they have status games. but:

• differences are individuated

• insults are about specific persons, not about “types”

e.g.: “he is lazy,” “she eats too much meat,” “he is always angry,” rather than “all gay people are bad.”

what did they not have?

they basically did not have:

• mass group stereotypes

• essentialized racial categories

• fixed caste or class

• institutionalized misogyny enforced by law

• ideological traditions justifying subordination

what they did have:

• preference for kin / closer allies

• suspicion of outsiders (but that’s tribal, not racial)

• personal feuds

• sometimes gender constraints (but mostly around foraging specialization + life history, not metaphysics)

so what is the precise anthropological answer?

• we have good evidence of tolerance of same-sex attraction and gender variance in multiple foraging societies.

• we do not have evidence of systematic, doctrinal homophobia in immediate return contexts.

• prejudice tends to be individual and relational rather than categorical.

the deeper analytic point

homophobia requires:

1. conceptual abstraction of people into “types”

2. large group identity

3. institutional mechanisms to enforce norms

4. investment in reproductive futurism / lineage

immediate-return societies systematically suppress (1)–(4).

therefore: homophobia in the modern ideological sense was not likely to be a thing.

people might not have liked a particular person. but the logic “your sexuality is wrong as such” is an artifact of agricultural, pastoral, and later literary–literate stratified systems.

(once you have livestock, bridewealth, inheritance, patrilines → then sexuality gets moralized as a resource management problem.)

You said:

Can you provide a few empirical references that validate the point that there is no good evidence that “homophobia” as we understand it was a structural feature of immediate-return hunter–gatherer societies.

ChatGPT said:

Nice — here are compact, empirical references you can use to support the claim that immediate-return hunter–gatherer societies do not show evidence of systemic, institutional “homophobia” of the kind that emerges with stratified, property-based societies. For each item I give a one-line note on why it’s relevant.

Key references (with short notes)

1. J. Woodburn — “Egalitarian Societies” (1982).
   Why it helps: classic theoretic/ethnographic account of immediate-return hunter–gatherers showing the social conditions (no accumulation, limited hierarchy) that undercut institutionalized categories and penalties that would produce structural homophobia. jstor.org

2. Richard B. Lee & Richard Daly (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (entry on social organization & sexual/gender practices).
   Why it helps: comparative ethnographic summary of many foraging groups (Hadza, Ju/’hoansi, etc.), useful evidence on flexible kinship, marriage and sexual norms in immediate-return groups. ia803108.us.archive.org

3. Gilbert H. Herdt (ed.), Same Sex, Different Cultures: Exploring Gay and Lesbian Lives (1997).
   Why it helps: cross-cultural collection showing abundant ethnographic cases where same-sex desire and non-binary gender categories are integrated into small-scale societies — undermines the idea that homophobia is universal. (Good synthetic treatment of ethnographic cases.) Taylor & Francis+1

4. Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman (1991).
   Why it helps: detailed ethnographic biography of a well-documented Native American “two-spirit” role — shows institutionalized gender/sexual roles in many small-scale societies that are not condemned in the modern-homophobic sense. archive.org+1

5. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas & Sabine Lang (eds.), Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality.
   Why it helps: collection and discussion of the berdache/two-spirit literature showing how colonialism and Christianization transformed previously more integrated social roles into targets of stigma — evidence that much homophobia in these contexts is a colonial import. si.edu+1

6. G. Healey et al., “Inuit parent perspectives on sexual health communication…” (2014, BMC Public Health / PMC).
   Why it helps: recent empirical work on Inuit communities documenting how colonial institutions (residential schools, missionization) changed attitudes toward gender/sexual variation — again supporting the argument that modern homophobia is often a later imposition. PMC+1

Short note on interpretation / how to use these sources

• Use Woodburn and the Cambridge encyclopedia (Lee/Daly) to justify the structural argument: immediate-return societies lack the economic/institutional bases (accumulation, descent-based property, institutionalized patriarchy) that make systemic homophobia stable. jstor.org+1

• Use Herdt and Roscoe for the ethnographic, cross-cultural evidence that same-sex practices and gender-variant roles are present and often socially recognized in many small-scale societies (i.e., homophobia is neither universal nor inevitable). Taylor & Francis+1

• Use Two-Spirit collections and contemporary studies (Jacobs et al., Healey) to show that where homophobia appears in these societies today, it frequently maps onto contact with colonialism, Christianity, state schooling, and modern social stratification — supporting the claim that structural homophobia is a later development. si.edu+1