The intimate kinship basis of minuscule hunter-gatherer communities extends to non-humans, who are often regarded as kin of sorts rather than as different sorts of persons. This paper addresses the limits of approaching their worlds from the binary terms “egalitarian” and “hierarchical.” These concepts impose onto their communities economic and political modern issues, moreover the premise that society is constitutive of commensurate individuals who can be compared and evaluated and thus be regarded as equal (or not). It is here argued that hunter-gatherers demonstrate more-than-human “kinship communities” constitutive of multiply-connected and incommensurate heterogeneous members engaging in skillful connection-work.
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We are based at University College London but for the moment, all our talks are ZOOM webinars.