‘Primordial’ social harmony and the political power of language

According to various scholars, immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies have institutions that actively counter the acquisition of individual political power and property, thereby maintaining the egalitarian structure and concomitant prosociality of their societies – once property becomes institutionalised, differences in status, authority or rank can become culturally entrenched, creating a differentiated, hierarchical society. This article argues that language has the power to differentiate and structure the human world, creating categories, divisions and modes of evaluation within a cosmology that can be exploited, due to the arbitrary and conventional nature of language, to manipulate and subjugate people. In order to optimise the resulting potential for political power, wealth and privilege, members of the privileged elite need to be capable of treating other humans as inferior and deserving of exploitation, subjugation and abuse. A powerful obstacle to this potential is the developed egalitarian prosociality that, according to many scholars, would have evolved during the Pleistocene to meet the challenges of surviving in a particularly harsh ecology, and which would have created the conditions in which language could evolve. This obstacle is arguably overcome through cosmologies that transform an existing egalitarian cultural tradition to achieve a radically different sociopolitical purpose. Focusing on rites of inversion and liminal states in immediate-return hunter-gatherer cultures as well as others, and building on the theories of scholars in various disciplines, it is argued that this political power offered by language is countered through ritual and art to sustain egalitarian structures or, in the case of hierarchical societies, to infuse their normative social structures with a sense of humanity/prosociality derived from the communitas experienced during liminal ritual states.