Are you sure about this, or are you treating a "noble savage" fantasy as if it were fact?
I've read some early settler accounts of Australian Aboriginals, and they would beat the living shit out of the lower-status members of their society (especially women) on a regular basis.
Sometimes the beatings would be followed up with rape, and the perpetrators would get away with it Scot free because they were high-status.
I'm not sure if you're Aussie, but please understand that problems like domestic violence and incest/rape still exist in Aboriginal communities to a large extent.
There are also an army of "nice" middle class, urban white people performing the most mind-bending mental gymnastics possible to shift the blame away from the perpetrators and onto white society in general (who, to be fair, brutally mistreated the Aboriginal population for the better part of two centuries during a colonial campaign of conquest).
To me, within that context, the more interesting question is not whether or not there were economic/mating pressures on aboriginal populations that lead to the brutal behviour, but why a middle-class 21st century professional is looking to excuse it.
I don't know that it's relevant that the Aborigines are violent. Nor, I admit in hindsight, was my reply about modern people also being violent. I intuited that your comment was irrelevant, but didn't do a good job of putting that into words.
The question was whether the proverbial dishes could get done without violence, and if the Yanamamo do it then the answer is "yes", it is possible, regardless of whatever Aborigines or modern people do. I don't think that white guilt over the treatment of Aborigines is relevant to that question, either.
I'm a bit familiar with the Yanamamo. I had a class that focused on them specifically. I know that they have graduations of violence, mostly to do with mating, which can boil over between villages, but I don't remember there being any economic coercion, men and women do their different jobs without any punishment/violence that I can recall.
(A discussion like this could morph into the idea of "women's work", asking why do the Yanamamo men hunt and the women work. But societies using money have the same concept of women's work, so that would be a separate conversation form money vs no-money societies.)
Until someone shows me different, I think the the Yanamamo comment is right, based on my knowledge of them they don't use economic coercion that I know of to proverbially get the dishes washed.
Regarding the aborigines, the impression I got from the accounts was that these acts of violence were more about dominance than strict economic coercion. I get where you're coming from in that regard.
I would be interested to hear what an anthropologist has to say, but until then it seems like your evidence is stronger.
As I said, there are societies where women gather berries and men hunt. There aren't really "lower status members" of those societies. Including the Aboriginal Australians who lived this way. As the book Dark Emu shows, some Aboriginals lived as hunter-gatherers, some as farmers. The aboriginal farmers did not live this way, and certainly may have had lower status members who were mistreated.
I should point out some people have qualms over portions of Dark Emu, but generally not over this. Even a critic of this point like Ian Keen admits there was some form of farming by some Aboriginals.
This sounds like the classic punishment of being sent to your room without dinner, right? Removing the basic necessity of food is about as coercive as it gets. Even in civilized society we feed prisoners, give food to the hungry, etc.
It's easy to imagine paradise in cultures we don't understand but reality is rarely that pretty.
In the Amazon loggers and miners, often illegally, encroach on indigenous areas and kill members of the hunter-gatherer bands. Yes, the bands sometimes react in a "famously violent" response to these massacres.
I don't really see the connection in how these 50 person bands act together with their "famously violent" response to outsiders who are killing them.
Also the people I am speaking if are living in bands, not tribes.
So from the drawing of cave paintings in El Castillo onward through the next 30,000 years, all humans lived like this. You could say it is human nature. Then class-divided society spread - 2000 years ago the modern Stockholm area was a classed society, whereas 200km north were hunter-gather bands. By modern day, hunter-gatherer areas have dwindled to remote areas.
The urge to have large numbers of people all under one grouping seems to be the impetus of a ruling class or ruler, from Alexander the Great to modern times. There are signs of hunter-gatherer bands in relations of mutual aid with other bands, for marriage and other things. One of the earliest pieces of literature, instructions of shuruppak, instructs rulers to get new slaves from far away lands.
(To reiterate a point from before - there is no evidence of class societies before 10,000 years ago. It is possible some tried to be a non-working ruling class, but the methods of production of migratory hunter gather bands made this difficult, and over a span of time impossible. Whereas with the rise of agriculture 10000 years ago, we have a mass of evidence of class societies.)
I would completely reverse this... a society divided into classes is a precondition for agricultural society (for practical, not social reasons).
In the period of early civilization, convincing people to work 16 hours in the fields or in the mines is very difficult if they have any other viable option, including migrant hunter/gathering. Therefore, it is necessary to create a class of people that have no other viable options, either by slavery or other forms of inequality. The social structures surrounding inequality evolved as a method of maintaining this practical class stratification.
Indigenous Americans practiced warfare, rape, slavery, and cannibalism no different than other peoples around the world.
The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat.
There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt. If you don't go out and get food, you don't eat, unless you are gifted food as the young, old and infirm are. There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach.
Of course in civilized society, there are a class of rentier heirs who do not work, who have a relationship with those who do work, of expropriating their surplus labor time. Obviously this is done with coercion and punishment.