There is no general statement to be made here -- some tribal organisations are hierarchical other's aren't (including the ancestors from my fathers side as recent as 100 years ago). For decades now western ethnographers and cultural anthropologists seem to have projected their dissatisfactions of their own world onto their subjects -- which is something more insidious than the frank judgements you get to read in first-hand encounters during the early modern period. This has reached a certain pitch in current years by the overt activism of modern X-studies.
> today's hierarchy was invented by the modern Christian church.
On the contrary, the Church was responsible for destroying the hierarchical structure of my father's people via colonialism. Just to repeat: I am trying to point at a strange phenomenon that one notices in modern western academia: it is precisely the unaddressed universalising, really, Christian beliefs of, say, a current professor of cultural studies coupled with a dissatisfaction with her own culture that leads her to attribute what is considered good under her ideological commitments onto the natives and the other way round. For example, the idea that all men are equal would be flat out 'devilish' to my father's people even 100 years ago.
> today's hierarchy was invented by the modern Christian church.
On the contrary, the Church was responsible for destroying the hierarchical structure of my father's people via colonialism. Just to repeat: I am trying to point at a strange phenomenon that one notices in modern western academia: it is precisely the unaddressed universalising, really, Christian beliefs of, say, a current professor of cultural studies coupled with a dissatisfaction with her own culture that leads her to attribute what is considered good under her ideological commitments onto the natives and the other way round. For example, the idea that all men are equal would be flat out 'devilish' to my father's people even 100 years ago.