French anthropologist Pierre Clastres offers a kind of riposte to Rousseau's "innocent"/unimaginative savage
Graeber / Wengrow summarize his ideas, 73: "What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they're actually more imaginative than we are? We find it difficult to picture what a truly free society would be like; perhaps they have no similar trouble picturing what aribtrary power and domination would be like. Perhaps they can not only imagine it, but consciously arrange their society in such a way as to avoid it."
This is, in some ways, the thesis of Dawn of Everything
also this, 112: "Pierre Clastres [...] proposed that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so"
113: Clastres observed groups that "had self-consciously organized in such a way that the forms of arbitarty power and domination we associate with 'advanced political systems' could never possibly emerge"