This is a welcome and long due systematic investigation into egalitarianism, conventionally characterized in terms either of equity in resources access or status, and/or of preferences for fairness and equality. “Egalitarian” societies do indeed show inequality across multiple domains, with foragers exhibiting Ginis of material wealth parallel to those of disposable income for Denmark, Norway and Finland (Borgerhoff Mulder et al., Reference Borgerhoff Mulder, Bowles, Hertz, Bell, Beise, Clark, Fazzio, Gurven, Hill, Hooper, Irons, Kaplan, Leonetti, Marlowe, Naidu, Nolin, Piraino, Quinlan, Sear, Shenk, Smith and Wiessner2009). They also manifest levels of reproductive skew no lower than other societies (Ross et al., Reference Ross, Hooper, Smith, Jaeggi, Smith, Gavrilets, Zohora, Ziker, Xygalatas, Wroblewski, Wood, Winterhalder, Willführ, Willard, Walker, von Rueden, Voland, Valeggia, Vaitla, Urlacher, Towner, Sum, Sugiyama, Strier, Starkweather, Major-Smith, Shenk, Sear, Seabright, Schacht, Scelza, Scaggs, Salerno, Revilla-Minaya, Redhead, Pusey, Purzycki, Power, Pisor, Pettay, Perry, Page, Pacheco-Cobos, Oths, Oh, Nolin, Nettle, Moya, Migliano, Mertens, McNamara, McElreath, Mattison, Massengill, Marlowe, Madimenos, Macfarlan, Lummaa, Lizarralde, Liu, Liebert, Lew-Levy, Leslie, Lanning, Kramer, Koster, Kaplan, Jamsranjav, Hurtado, Hill, Hewlett, Helle, Headland, Headland, Gurven, Grimalda, Greaves, Golden, Godoy, Gibson, Mouden, Dyble, Draper, Downey, DeMarco, Davis, Crabtree, Cortez, Colleran, Cohen, Clark, Clark, Caudell, Carminito, Bunce, Boyette, Bowles, Blumenfield, Beheim, Beckerman, Atkinson, Apicella, Alam and Borgerhoff Mulder2023). Particularly valuable is the authors’ unhitching of egalitarianism from an exclusively foraging lifestyle – egalitarianism can take many forms even among foragers, and other production systems can be associated with relatively equal outcomes (e.g., Gurven et al., Reference Gurven, Borgerhoff Mulder, Hooper, Kaplan, Quinlan, Sear, Schniter, von Rueden, Bowles, Hertz and Bell2010). Equally useful is the framing of their contribution within misreadings of the ethnographic record that persist until today – the notion of our ancestors as noble egalitarians or the contrasting view that any kind of egalitarianism is a tawdry myth: they trace elements of truth and fanciful imaginings in both positions.

The authors go on to offer a new framework for understanding egalitarianism focusing on individual motivation rather than equity of outcomes, or what the authors call an “individual-orientated, process-first definition.” While I question the value of entirely replacing a definition based on outcome (inequality in access to resources, power or rank) with one based on more inferential judgments regarding motivation and process, I fully accept that this new framework can usefully outline the plural processes underlying the maintenance of equality. Furthermore, focusing on the processes arising from individual motivational structures nicely tethers our understanding of egalitarian social systems to a theoretically defined set of assumptions from behavioural ecology. Strangely the authors do not explicitly present their framework as evolutionary, referring only to “individual motivations” when clearly they see them as strategies and preferences shaped by natural selection under diverse socioecological conditions. All in all, however, a great contribution.

The relative utility of different kinds of definitions (here based on “outcome” versus “process”) will of course depend on the purpose for which the definition is deployed. As someone interested in addressing inequality my colleagues and I prefer to start with a quantified measure of material wealth (and its association with relational wealth, e.g., Redhead et al., Reference Redhead, Maliti, Andrews and Borgerhoff Mulder2023). But that does not render other approaches invalid, and I draw the authors’ attention to an obviously coincidental yet strikingly parallel investigation into the mechanisms underlying “levelling” in (primarily nonhuman) hierarchies (Papageorgiou et al., Reference Papageorgiou, Borgerhoff Mulder, Brosnan and StraussIn press) where we similarly focus on the diverse mechanisms whereby the power of dominant individuals can be restrained by subordinates, either purposefully or as an epiphenomenon of other behaviours.

I do have a question though for the authors regarding the role of ideology. They are correct in recognizing that egalitarian societies do not necessarily result from preferences for equity, and indeed that outcomes do not always nicely align with ideologies, preferences and motivations, as evidenced for example in Boehm’s (Reference Boehm1999) and Blurton Jones’ (Reference Blurton Jones1984) work. But ideologies, together with the preferences and motivations they support, can also serve to conceal outcomes.

Pastoralists, for example, are classically portrayed as egalitarian (Schneider, Reference Schneider1979) on account of their multiple institutions that allow for the redistribution of wealth as a form of insurance against the loss of livestock capital from theft, drought, and disease. Yet this ideology of egalitarianism and autonomy persists alongside sharp economic inequalities in material wealth (Borgerhoff Mulder et al., Reference Borgerhoff Mulder, Fazzio, Irons, McElreath, Bowles, Bell, Hertz and Hazzah2010). While communal feasting, needs-based sharing, and cattle loaning partnerships do indeed buffer the receiver from destitution and insure the giver against future misfortune, they do not produce the material equity with which they have been credited. If anything, they serve to distract families going through hard times with the hope that things will get better because “we all help each other out.” In fact destitute households often simply drop out of the pastoral economy (Sieff, Reference Sieff1999), often adopting a new ethnicity (see Waller & Sobania, Reference Waller, Sobania, Fratkin, Galvin and Roth1994 for a historical survey of such dynamics in East Africa). In short, as Waller (Reference Waller, Anderson and Broche-Due1999) concludes, formal egalitarian ideologies may be essential to the preservation of actual inequality, while inequality is a guarantee of community survival.

Pennington and Harpending (Reference Pennington and Harpending1993) noted a similar disjunction between ideology and behaviour where, among Herero, female offspring show higher survival and receive better care than males, even though the Herero strongly deny favoring girls. In Harpending and Pennington’s (Reference Harpending and Pennington1991, p. 351) words “(c)ultural beliefs are statements that informants make to each other (and to anthropologists); that is, they are beliefs that are broadcast to others,” more like advertising than motivations that guide behaviour. While I appreciate that the “processes” that Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden rely on are more than mere beliefs, my point is simply that ideologies should not be disregarded when plumbing the nature and variability of egalitarian systems; nor should we ignore their potential for disguising inequities.

My question then is this. How might the preferences of people living in “egalitarian populations” intersect with the outcomes? How might underlying ideologies and norms conceal the inequalities that typically exist in at least some domains of life in egalitarian populations? Or more generally, what is the role of emic ideology in the authors’ framing? These are questions the authors side-step, quite reasonably, on the basis of the poor alignment of ideology with outcomes. But I think this is a question that must ultimately be answered by scholars promoting definitions based on process rather than outcome, and indeed by behavioural ecologists more generally. We must recognize that norms and ideology can be powerfully deployed to obscure unpleasant facts.

I suppose I am really asking whether the authors see any hint of Marxian false consciousness (the internalizing of an ideology antithetical to self-interest) in “egalitarian” societies? Or maybe they think that the self-interested motivation underlying egalitarianism actually precludes the need for any such obfuscatory ideologies. If that is the case, perhaps it is the absence of any such obfuscating ideology that defines egalitarianism (though such a definition feels rather “polyanna-ish”)! With their broad ethnographic knowledge, the authors may have some insights.