This is becoming ridiculous. I'm not about to dedicate half my mornings to giving you a crash course in anthropology when I'm not even convinced you have any interest in the subject beyond what it has on offer to support your cultural biases. — Pseudonym

I don't remember enrolling in moral outrage 101.

1. Your citations and examples are not drawn from nomadic hunter-gatherers, they are drawn from indigenous tribes, there's a difference. Many indigenous tribes are agriculturalists or pastoralists. I'm talking about the lifestyles of nomadic hunter-gatherers. — Pseudonym

The Hadza happen to be semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, and so are Eskimo, but if I've not addressed hunter-gatherers specifically enough then it's your fault for not naming a specific group with which I can do an apples to apples comparison with a contemporary western society.

My claims in that regard are;

Hunter-gatherers have more egalitarian forms of government than western civilisations. Each individual has more autonomy and is less likely to be forced into anything they don't want to do. — Pseudonym

Living in an egalitarian environment isn't the same as having more freedom or being free from coercion or being free from violence, it more or less means that no individual has extra power or authority. The Hadza abide and enforce their own cultural institutions through third-party punishment where the most common means of preemptively resolving a possibly violent conflict is for a band to split and form separate camps. If neither party wants to budge then there might be a problem.

You generally require a group to survive in regions such as the Hadza occupy, and survival necessitates daily hunting and foraging, which makes all individuals beholden to the norms of Hadza groups. Lacking any formal institutions which preserve justice (having only informal institutions and sanctions such as third party/collective violence done upon individuals who transgress norms) is as binding as it is liberating; there are no formal laws or authority above you or anyone else, and as such maintaining the right reputation is critical for your own protection. The fact that the Hadza have a territory large enough to permit the splitting of groups is a necessary environmental reality which allows for the violence avoidance of group-splitting in the first place. Resource scarcity or overpopulation which could threaten this mechanic might lead to catastrophe.

Each Hadza male has access to poisoned arrows, and the possibility of being shot in one's sleep or ambushed on a hunt is very real to the Hadza. Disputes over women and other transgressions can lead to fatal conflict, and even if the killer is known to the group there may be nothing done about it. That reality makes it less possible for one Hadza male to try and dominate others and disincentives confrontation (thereby preserving their egalitarianism). Among the !Kung people (also hunter-gatherers), a group specifically known for it's egalitarianism, disputes over women have at times so often proven fatal that betrothing girls as young as eight was done to prevent them from arising in the first place. The Hadza and !Kung might be extraordinarily egalitarian compared to other groups (especially us), but they actually have to walk a very fine line of somewhat rigid survival practices required to endure the environment and their unique sets of cultural norms and practices which maintain them. Hunter-gatherers do not seem to be safer from violence or injustice, nor more autonomous in the sense of having more freedom (everyone just has the same amount of it). Egalitarian societies almost by definition don't have sadistic leaders (a point I was applying to all human groups in general), but shit happens. It's true that agrarian culture and the social/wealth/power stratification/population density it leads to also tends to lead to more brutal violence (hunter-gatherers can usually just split up and move away), but it is indeed a myth that hunter-gatherers are completely free from the ubiquitous human problems of violence and injustice

Sources:
"Conflict, Violence, and Conflict Resolution in Hunting and Gathering Societies" (Lomas, 2011)
Egalitarian Societies (Woodburn, 1982)

I recommend reading the article by William Lomas as it very directly addresses the issue we seem to be having: I'm not adhering to the old school primitive savage stereotype that portrays all hunter-gatherers as violent and backward; I'm rebuking the newer stereotype that portrays all hunter-gatherer society as better than western culture by virtue of innate peace and harmony with nature, or in terms of degrees of freedom or freedom from coercion.

They have lower rates of suicide than western civilisations which I take to be about the clearest measure of whether the people are happy or not. — Pseudonym

Suicide and suicide trends aren't necessarily a measure of a civilization's merits. But also, citation please.

They do not exploit their children, force them into marriages, commit war crimes, have sadistic leaders, torture people, kill anyone for ritualistic or superstitious reasons, nor waste their time on non-productive activities to the extent Western civilisations do — Pseudonym

Different groups do different things. #Notallhuntergatherers, sure, but I have yet to see the shining example of a morally flawless hunter-gatherer society that has higher standards of justice than the contemporary west. Ritualized killings, violence, and comparative equivalents amounting to crimes against humanity (war-crimes), have at times been practiced by different hunter-gatherer groups. The line is quite blurry as to what constitutes a true hunter-gatherer society, so if you could name your standard that might help advance the discussion. Many Amazonian groups practice tribal warfare involving stark levels of violence (surprise attacks in villages involving the beating, rape, and murder; torture). The Yanomami people for instance dabble in agriculture, so perhaps you wouldn't accept them as an example of an imperfect hunter-gatherer group? Western presence in the Amazon region may be one of the root causes of exacerbated violence among the Yanomami (by causing resource scarcity and anxiety among groups mainly), but it also shows how fragile indigenous societal systems can actually be. When the Hadza people inevitably face enough loss of livable territory that allows them to avoid conflict by moving away (or some other crisis which forces settlement such as population growth) then they too will experience rising levels of inter and intra-group violence as their existing conflict resolution mechanisms are strained or no longer function. They'll have to create more formal means of keeping the peace and determining what is just in given conflicts. They might need to begin farming which will entail an overhaul of their cultural interpretation of "property". Failures will occur.

They are not facing starvation, working all the time to get food, struggling to feed everybody any more than western civilisations. — Pseudonym

It's somewhat true that no matter how good we get at producing food, population size can always grow (or shrink) to meet our ability to feed them. Unsurprisingly in general it is resource scarcity in environmental conditions which plays a significant role as a determinant of cultural adaptations and regulating population size. Relative food scarcity among the Hadza makes food sharing an optimal strategy, which can explain why their social sanctions enforce sharing meat as a norm.

Perhaps what you truly think is a disaster is agriculture in and of itself? Agriculture means settlement, property and wealth stratification, which leads to conflict and disproportionate power, and occasionally abuses of that power or warfare over land. We could stay in environmental homeostasis as egalitarian hunter-gatherers, but we would need to accept different sets of rights, different living conditions, different risks/burdens, and different rewards.

They do not suffer from industrial diseases, heart disease, cancer, or any of the top ten causes of death to the extent Western cultures do. — Pseudonym

78% (pg. 21) of Hadza die from illness and disease though, and they live shorter lives on average. The Hadza have remarkably low levels of death from violence with homicide being responsible for only 3% of deaths, but in the west homocide is responsible for less than 1% of deaths. In addition, diseases with chronic and treatable symptoms can be much more successfully managed in the west using modern medicine.

If you wish to combat any of those claims you would need an example from a nomadic hunter-gatherer Community and evidence that it occurred more frequently than in Western civilisation, preferably from more than one source to eliminate bias. — Pseudonym

The Hadza, the !Kung, and Eskimo groups are three examples of nomadic hunter-gatherers which are far from perfect and statistically live less long, die more often due to violence, and have significantly higher child mortality rates, and the two latter groups additionally practice infanticide. Foraging horticulturalists like the Yanomami might be total disasters like the west though, as far as you're concerned. Clarification?

You have used the terms "backwards", "bored" you and accomplishing nothing". You've exaggerated negative traits without any attempt to quantify their frequency. You've made negative presumption about both lifestyle and motive without evidence. — Pseudonym

This is another misrepresentation (yawn). It's not presumptuous to say that reasons for infanticide are "backwards" (and I applied that observation to "minimalist groups and tribes of all orders"). The exact statement was "Infanticide is a word not heard often heard these days, but minimalist tribes and groups of all orders have practiced infanticide for all sorts of backwards reasons". From the Eskimos to ancient Greece, there are examples of many different types of groups practicing infanticide, including for reasons of superstition. In the contemporary west infanticide is viewed as a high crime, and that was the contrast I was pointing out.

P.S. I said "nothing else to bother accomplishing" in reference to the gambling habits of the Hadza people, and while there was some tongue in cheek with this statement, I did actually substantiate it. Hadza males spend most of their time in camp gambling, far more time than they spend gathering food and other necessities. "Boredom" is not a pejorative.

These are pejorative terms and actions for cultural traits which you show little understanding of or willingness to understand. You've taken the first negative description that comes along and generalised it at least to the extent that you feel capable of concluding it occurs more than it does in Western civilisation. At the very least that is an uncomfortable degree of bias in favour of your own culture, at worst it is racism. — Pseudonym

Yes, I know, I'm a bad person and I should feel bad, bla bla bla...

As I've already explained with citations, infanticide is an environmental adaptation which does occur more frequently among many peoples living traditional ways of live in harsh environments than it occurs in the contemporary west. Early death by violence and disease are well understood to be more frequent in non-western nations, with child mortality rate being an especially significant benefit that the contemporary west has over every other time and place. Child marriage and betrothal is not uncommon for a host of reasons among many indigenous groups, and though it may be their cultural norm and serve adaptive functions, it's still something that the west has laudably discontinued.

Modern medicine, electricity, running water, and education do not all come standard in the west. They are denied to huge swathes of the population, cannot be sustained using the technology we have. What planet are you living on where you think running water modern medicine and electricity are 'standard' benefits? Have you ever been to a third world country? — Pseudonym

There's some ambiguity in the term "western world" but I thought that we were referring to first world nations who have adopted contemporary western technology and standards, where food, medicine, and education are actually guaranteed human rights. We can indeed sustain these things given our steady technological improvements, and one day they might be available in every nation...