From equality to inequality
Subtitle: social change among newly sedentary Lanoh hunter-gatherer traders of Peninsular Malaysia
By: Csilla Dallos
Series: Anthropological horizons
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Toronto
Language: eng
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9781442642225; 9781442611221
Subjects: Autochtones; Conditions sociales; Changement social; Social change; Indigenous peoples; Social conditions; Inégalité sociale; Equality
Description: "The egalitarian society once enjoyed by the Lanoh hunter-gatherers of Peninsular Malaysia is quickly changing. Throughout a year of ethnographic fieldwork among the Lanoh, Csilla Dallos studied and interpreted social change in order to better understand the processes leading to inequality and the concurrent development of social complexity within a community.

From Equality to Inequality provides rich empirical data on the factors within a community that significantly affect the development of inequality, including the effects of sedentism, integration, leadership competition, self-aggrandizement, marginalization, and feuding kinship groups. In this case study, Dallos argues that in order to understand emerging inequality, anthropologists and social scientists need to revisit current conceptions of politics in small-scale egalitarian societies. Offering a new model of developing social inequality that is congruent with the principles of complexity theory, From Equality to Inequality is a sterling example of how anthropological practice can further our general understanding of human behaviour."--pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

In English; Includes some text in Malay.
Table of contents: title: Equality, inequality, and changing hunter-gatherers; title: Interethnic trade and social organization of pre-settlement Lanoh; title: The changing context of interethnic relations : from power balance to power imbalance; title: Withdrawl from contact and the development of village identity; title: Leadership competition, self-aggrandizement, and inequality; title: Pre-settlement organization, village integration, and self-aggrandizing strategies; title: Understanding equality and inequality in small-scale societies.