Social scientists similarly find it useful to adopt shorthand categories whose imperfections they understand. They face the added complication that changes among societies can be reversed, whereas changes in age classes can’t. Farming villages may revert to small hunter-gatherer bands under drought conditions, whereas a 4-year-old will never revert to being a 3-year-old. While most developmental psychologists agree on recognizing and naming the broadest categories of infant/child/adolescent/adult, social scientists use numerous alternative sets of shorthand categories for describing variation among traditional societies, and some scientists become indignant at the use of any categories at all. In this book I shall occasionally use Elman Service’s division of human societies into four categories of increasing population size, political centralization, and social stratification: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. While these terms are now 50 years old and other terms have been proposed since then, Service’s terms have the advantage of simplicity: four terms to remember instead of seven terms, and single words instead of multi-word phrases. But please remember that these terms are just shorthand useful for discussing the great diversity of human societies, without pausing to reiterate the imperfections in the shorthand terms and the important variations within each category each time that the terms are used in the text.
The smallest and simplest type of society (termed by Service a band) consists of just a few dozen individuals, many of them belonging to one or several extended families (i.e., an adult husband and wife, their children, and some of their parents, siblings, and cousins). Most nomadic hunter-gatherers, and some garden farmers, traditionally lived at low population densities in such small groups. The band members are sufficiently few in number that everyone knows everyone else well, group decisions can be reached by face-to-face discussion, and there is no formal political leadership or strong economic specialization. A social scientist would describe a band as relatively egalitarian and democratic: members differ little in “wealth” (there are few personal possessions anyway) and in political power, except as a result of individual differences in ability or personality, and as tempered by extensive sharing of resources among band members.
Insofar as we can judge from archaeological evidence about the organization of past societies, probably all humans lived in such bands until at least a few tens of thousands of years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago. When Europeans began, especially after Columbus’s first voyage of AD 1492, to expand around the world and to encounter non-European peoples living in non-state societies, bands still occupied all or most of Australia and the Arctic, plus low-productivity desert and forest environments of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. Band societies that will frequently be discussed in this book include the !Kung of Africa’s Kalahari Desert, the Ache and Siriono Indians of South America, the Andaman Islanders of the Bay of Bengal, the Pygmies of African equatorial forests, and Machiguenga Indian gardeners of Peru. All of the examples mentioned in the preceding sentence except the Machiguenga are or were hunter-gatherers.
Bands grade into the next larger and more complex type of society (termed by Service a tribe), consisting of a local group of hundreds of individuals. That’s still just within the group size limit where everyone can know everyone else personally and there are no strangers. For instance, in my high school of about 200 students all students and teachers knew each other by name, but that was impossible in my wife’s high school with thousands of students. A society of hundreds means dozens of families, often divided into kinship groups termed clans, which may exchange marriage partners with other clans. The higher populations of tribes than of bands require more food to support more people in a small area, and so tribes usually are farmers or herders or both, but a few are hunter-gatherers living in especially productive environments (such as Japan’s Ainu people and North America’s Pacific Northwest Indians). Tribes tend to be sedentary, and to live for much or all of the year in villages located near their gardens, pastures, or fisheries. However, Central Asian herders and some other tribal peoples practise transhumance—i.e., moving livestock seasonally between different altitudes in order to follow the growth of grass at higher elevations as the season advances.
In other respects tribes still resemble large bands—for instance, in their relative egalitarianism, weak economic specialization, weak political leadership, lack of bureaucrats, and face-to-face decision-making. I’ve watched meetings in New Guinea villages where hundreds of people sit on the ground, manage to have their say, and reach a conclusion. Some tribes have a “big man” who functions as a weak leader, but he leads only by his powers of persuasion and personality rather than by recognized authority. As an example of the limits of a “big man’s” powers, we shall see in Chapter 3 how the ostensible followers of a leader named Gutelu of the New Guinea Dani tribe succeeded in thwarting Gutelu’s will and launching a genocidal attack that split Gutelu’s political alliance. Archaeological evidence of tribal organization, such as remains of substantial residential structures and settlements, suggests that tribes were emerging in some areas by at least 13,000 years ago. In recent times tribes have still been widespread in parts of New Guinea and Amazonia. Tribal societies that I’ll discuss in this book include Alaska’s Iñupiat, South America’s Yanomamo Indians, Afghanistan’s Kirghiz, New Britain’s Kaulong, and New Guinea’s Dani, Daribi, and Fore.
Tribes then grade into the next stage of organizational complexity, called a chiefdom and containing thousands of subjects. Such a large population, and the incipient economic specialization of chiefdoms, require high food productivity and the ability to generate and store food surpluses for feeding non-food-producing specialists, like the chiefs and their relatives and bureaucrats. Hence chiefdoms have built sedentary villages and hamlets with storage facilities and have mostly been food-producing (farming and herding) societies, except in the most productive areas available to hunter-gatherers, such as Florida’s Calusa chiefdom and coastal Southern California’s Chumash chiefdoms.
In a society of thousands of people it’s impossible for everyone to know everyone else or to hold face-to-face discussions that include everybody. As a result, chiefdoms confront two new problems that bands or tribes did not. First, strangers in a chiefdom must be able to meet each other, to recognize each other as fellow but individually unfamiliar members of the same chiefdom, and to avoid bristling at territorial trespass and getting into a fight. Hence chiefdoms develop shared ideologies and political and religious identities often derived from the supposedly divine status of the chief. Second, there is now a recognized leader, the chief, who makes decisions, possesses recognized authority, claims a monopoly on the right to use force against his society’s members if necessary, and thereby ensures that strangers within the same chiefdom don’t fight each other. The chief is assisted by non-specialized all-purpose officials (proto-bureaucrats) who collect tribute and settle disputes and carry out other administrative tasks, instead of there being separate tax collectors, judges, and restaurant inspectors as in a state. (A source of confusion here is that some traditional societies that have chiefs and are correctly described as chiefdoms in the scientific literature and in this book are nevertheless referred to as “tribes” in most popular writing: for instance, Indian “tribes” of eastern North America, which really consisted of chiefdoms.)
An economic innovation of chiefdoms is termed a redistributive economy: instead of just direct exchanges between individuals, the chief collects tribute of food and labor, much of which is redistributed to warriors, priests, and craftsmen who serve the chief. Redistribution is thus the earliest form of a system of taxation to support new institutions. Some of the food tribute is returned to the commoners, whom the chief has a moral responsibility to support in times of famine, and who work for the chief at activities like constructing monuments and irrigation systems. In addition to these political and economic innovations beyond the practices of bands and tribes, chiefdoms pioneered the social innovation of instit
utionalized inequality. While some tribes already have separate lineages, a chiefdom’s lineages are ranked hereditarily, with the chief and his family being at the top, commoners or slaves at the bottom, and (in the case of Polynesian Hawaii) as many as eight ranked castes in between. For members of higher-ranked lineages or castes, the tribute collected by the chief funds a better lifestyle in terms of food, housing, and special clothing and adornments.
Hence past chiefdoms can be recognized archaeologically by (sometimes) monumental construction, and by signs such as unequal distribution of grave goods in cemeteries: some bodies (those of chiefs and their relatives and bureaucrats) were buried in large tombs filled with luxury goods such as turquoise and sacrificed horses, contrasting with small unadorned graves of commoners. Based on such evidence, archaeologists infer that chiefdoms began to arise locally by around 5500 BC. In modern times, just before the recent nearly universal imposition of state government control around the world, chiefdoms were still widespread in Polynesia, much of sub-Saharan Africa, and the more productive areas of eastern and southwestern North America, Central America, and South America outside the areas controlled by the Mexican and Andean states. Chiefdoms that will be discussed in this book include the Mailu Islanders and Trobriand Islanders of the New Guinea region, and the Calusa and Chumash Indians of North America. From chiefdoms, states emerged (from about 3400 BC onwards) by conquest or amalgamation under pressure, resulting in larger populations, often ethnically diverse populations, specialized spheres and layers of bureaucrats, standing armies, much greater economic specialization, urbanization, and other changes, to produce the types of societies that blanket the modern world.
Thus, if social scientists equipped with a time machine could have surveyed the world at any time before about 9000 BC, they would have found everybody everywhere subsisting as hunter-gatherers, living in bands and possibly already in some tribes, without metal tools, writing, centralized government, or economic specialization. If those social scientists could have returned in the 1400s, at the time when the expansion of Europeans to other continents was just beginning, they now would have found Australia to be the sole continent still occupied entirely by hunter-gatherers, still living mostly in bands and possibly in some tribes. But, by then, states occupied most of Eurasia, northern Africa, the largest islands of western Indonesia, most of the Andes, and parts of Mexico and West Africa. There were still many bands, tribes, and chiefdoms surviving in South America outside the Andes, in all of North America, New Guinea, and the Arctic, and on Pacific islands. Today, the whole world except Antarctica is divided at least nominally into states, although state government remains ineffective in some parts of the world. The world regions that preserved the largest numbers of societies beyond effective state control into the 20th century were New Guinea and the Amazon.
The continuum of increase in population size, political organization, and intensity of food production that stretches from bands to states is paralleled by other trends, such as increases in dependence on metal tools, sophistication of technology, economic specialization and inequality of individuals, and writing, plus changes in warfare and religion that I’ll discuss in Chapters 3 and 4 and in Chapter 9 respectively. (Remember again: the developments from bands to states were neither ubiquitous, nor irreversible, nor linear.) Those trends, especially the large populations and political centralization and improved technology and weapons of states with respect to simpler societies, are what have enabled states to conquer those traditional types of societies and to subjugate, enslave, incorporate, drive out, or exterminate their inhabitants on lands coveted by states. That has left bands and tribes in modern times confined to areas unattractive or poorly accessible to state settlers (such as the Kalahari Desert inhabited by the !Kung, the African equatorial forests of the Pygmies, the remote areas of the Amazon Basin left to Native Americans, and New Guinea left to New Guineans).
Why, as of the year of Columbus’s first trans-Atlantic voyage of 1492, did people live in different types of societies in different parts of the world? At that time, some peoples (especially Eurasians) were already living under state governments with writing, metal tools, intensive agriculture, and standing armies. Many other peoples then lacked those hallmarks of civilization, and Aboriginal Australian and !Kung and African Pygmies then still preserved many ways of life that had characterized all of the world until 9000 BC. How can we account for such striking geographic differences?
A formerly prevalent belief, still held by many individuals today, is that those regionally different outcomes reflect innate differences in human intelligence, biological modernity, and work ethic. Supposedly, according to that belief, Europeans are more intelligent, biologically advanced, and hard-working, while Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans and other modern band and tribal peoples are less intelligent, more primitive, and less ambitious. However, there is no evidence of those postulated biological differences, except for the circular reasoning that modern band and tribal peoples did continue to use more primitive technologies, political organizations, and subsistence modes and were therefore assumed to be biologically more primitive.
Instead, the explanation for the differences in types of societies coexisting in the modern world depends on environmental differences. Increases in political centralization and social stratification were driven by increases in human population densities, driven in turn by the rise and intensification of food production (agriculture and herding). But surprisingly few wild plant and animal species are suitable for domestication to become crops and livestock. Those few wild species were concentrated in only about a dozen small areas of the world, whose human societies consequently enjoyed a decisive head start in developing food production, food surpluses, expanding populations, advanced technology, and state government. As I discussed in detail in my earlier book Guns, Germs, and Steel, those differences explain why Europeans, living near the world region (the Fertile Crescent) with the most valuable domesticable wild plant and animal species, ended up expanding over the world, while the !Kung and Aboriginal Australians did not. For the purposes of this book, that means that peoples still living or recently living in traditional societies are biologically modern peoples who merely happened to inhabit areas with few domesticable wild plant and animal species, and whose lifestyles are otherwise relevant to this book’s readers.
Approaches, causes, and sources
In the preceding section we discussed differences among traditional societies that we can relate systematically to differences in population size and population density, means of obtaining food, and the environment. While the general trends that we discussed do exist, it would be folly to imagine that everything about a society can be predicted from material conditions. Just think, for example, about the cultural and political differences between French and German people, not obviously related to the differences between France’s and Germany’s environments, which are in any case modest by the standards of worldwide environmental variation.
Scholars take various approaches towards understanding differences among societies. Each approach is useful for understanding some differences among some societies, but not appropriate for understanding other phenomena. One approach is the evolutionary one discussed and illustrated in the preceding section: to recognize broad features differing between societies of different population sizes and population densities, but shared among societies of similar population sizes and densities; and to infer, and sometimes to observe directly, changes in a society as it becomes larger or smaller. Related to that evolutionary approach is what may be termed an adaptationist approach: the idea that some features of a society are adaptive, and that they enable the society to function more effectively under its particular material conditions, physical and social environment, and size and density. Examples include the need for all societies consisting of more than a few thousand people to have leaders, and the potential of those large societies to generate the food surpluses required to support leaders. This
approach encourages one to formulate generalizations, and to interpret changes of a society with time in terms of the conditions and environment under which the society lives.
A second approach, lying at the opposite pole from that first approach, views each society as unique because of its particular history, and considers cultural beliefs and practices as largely independent variables not dictated by environmental conditions. Among the virtually infinite number of examples, let me mention one extreme case from one of the peoples to be discussed in this book, because it is so dramatic and so convincingly unrelated to material conditions. The Kaulong people, one of dozens of small populations living along the southern watershed of the island of New Britain just east of New Guinea, formerly practised the ritualized strangling of widows. When a man died, his widow called upon her brothers to strangle her. She was not murderously strangled against her will, nor was she pressured into this ritualized form of suicide by other members of her society. Instead, she had grown up observing it as the custom, followed the custom when she became widowed herself, strongly urged her brothers (or else her son if she had no brothers) to fulfill their solemn obligation to strangle her despite their natural reluctance, and sat cooperatively as they did strangle her.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Page 3