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The importance of primitive determinations in explaining the formation of stratified societies

 The importance of primitive determinations in explaining the formation of stratified societies has only been recognized in anthropology relatively recently in the works of Carneiro, Kolata, Demarest, and some others, although it is implicit in the work of Durkheim, and previously, in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. Ideology is not a superstructure added to the economic infrastructure (forces and relations of production), but the fixing of economic relations in identity narratives, their evaluative interpretation, from which the different social persons and the actions of the group arise. Narratives of primitive determination, or ideology, can be protocolized into effective techniques for identity control, but they are not for this reason something secondary, an epiphenomenon of an imaginary nature added to the reality of economic relations: there cannot be stable economic determinations without a primitive determination that interprets them, however basic it may be, however, close it may be to the system of primary emotions.

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