Is Inequality Universal?

Ethnographic characterizations of pastoralists as egalitarian have recently been contested on the grounds that new studies have demonstrated a widespread inequality in livestock ownership, thus proving that the notion of pastoral egalitarianism is a myth. This revisionist rejection of the egalitarianism of pastoralists appears difficult to sustain after examination of the literature. Ethnographic accounts show a wide range of pastoral societies, some more hierarchical and some quite egalitarian, and this variation was well recognized by at least 1940. “Egalitarian” is used in the literature to characterize pastoral tribesmen primarily in a political rather than an economic sense. Differences in livestock ownership were recognized by ethnographers characterizing the peoples they studied as “egalitarian”, but these differences were known not to cause either social stratification or economic class differentiation. To suggest as the revisionists do that all societies and cultures are characterized by inequality removes the power from the conceptual continuum “equality ⟷ inequality” and obscures the real differences from society to society and time to time.