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Labor is interestingly fungible even when the activities are varied. I think a profession emerges when work makes you as much as you make work. That generally means second-order tool-making I think. Shaping other humans is one kind. Making tools to make tools is another.
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the way I think about it is in proto-communities, everybody has more or less the same methodological knowledge, and there isn't any cleavage until the group gets sufficiently large
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That's an interesting conjecture. may know the actual answer. I can think of the counter case of shamanic knowledge being a sort of distributed knowledge base of "magical rumors" so to speak. Much like meme-making today isn't quite a profession.
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Sarah: so no fully cleaved off roles until early states? The way I always heard it is basically what Dorian said: that the first specialized role in forager-type societies was shaman. I figured that would also be the first to cleave into its own profession.
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