Pre-colonial inequality in Aboriginal Australia

Abstract

In her paper, “Monopolisation of knowledge, social inequality and egalitarianism: an evolutionary perspective” (2016), Olga Artemova argues that precolonial Australian Aboriginal societies offer us an unusual non-economically based model on which social inequality can be established. This is through a complex religious system controlled by elderly men that prolonged the reaching of full adulthood for males. I am sympathetic to her general argument and agree with her that the Australian system of inequality had some distinctive features in which the role of religious knowledge was central. However, the evidence is that there were underlying economic interests at work in the system but such were the system’s entailments that they made it impossible for the inequality to become hereditary.