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Social Science Cultural

From Equality to Inequality

Social Change among Newly Sedentary Lanoh Hunter-Gatherer Traders of Peninsular Malaysia

by (author) Csilla Dallos

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2011
Category
Cultural
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781442611221
    Publish Date
    Apr 2011
    List Price
    $51.00
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781442642225
    Publish Date
    Apr 2011
    List Price
    $100.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442661714
    Publish Date
    Apr 2011
    List Price
    $41.95

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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.

About the author

Csilla Dallos is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at St. Thomas University.

Csilla Dallos' profile page