Thoughts on the Evolution
of Social Inequality: A Paradigmatic Analysis
Ben Fitzhugh
University of Washington
Published in Alternatives to Social Evolution, edited by N. Kradin. Archaeological Insititute of the Russian Far East: Vladivostok. 2000 (Published in English and Russian)
Introduction
"The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgement leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other." (Kuhn 1970:77)
"Normal science can proceed without rules only so long as the relevant scientific community accepts without question the particular problem-solutions already achieved. Rules should therefore become important and the characteristic unconcern about them should vanish whenever paradigms or models are felt to be insecure." (Kuhn 1970:42)
"Ironically, there is no poverty of theory but an undisciplined plethora of them -- ontologies perhaps, predilections certainly -- that clamor for attention and support in archaeology... We are impoverished instead in the means to evaluate rigorously competing theories against the material record and so determine which among them provide more satisfactory accounts." (Shott 1998)
American anthropology is in a state of theoretical crisis. Unlike most mature scientific disciplines anthropolologists seem unable even to agree on the structure of our discipline or the most important research questions to ask, let alone the best way to develop theory and increase our understanding of the human world. How is productive research possible in such an intellectual climate? In the early 1960’s, philosopher Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific disciplines periodically pass through "revolutionary" changes in theory (1970). According to Kuhn, these changes occur when a dominant paradigm or theoretical framework fails to account for empirical observations and when a better paradigm is developed. In contemporary american anthropology (including ethnology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology), we seem to be in a perpetual state of "revolution" with proponents of different paradigms deeply entrenched and unable to investigate the objective merits of alternative views.
This paper seeks to challenge disciplinary entrenchment through a logical critique of several competing paradigms. To make this problem tractable, I will focus specifically on the issue of the social evolution of hunter-gatherer societies and compare models from the theoretical paradigms of cultural ecology (Steward 1955), Marxism, practice theory (Ortner 1994), and evolutionary ecology (Smith and Winterhalder 1992a). Because the empirical data for testing alternative models of social evolution is necessarily time transgressive, the focus of this paper is primarily archaeological.
Following Kuhn (1970), a scientific paradigm is a logically coherent theoretical framework that makes sense of a wide range of phenomena and that has not yet been found empirically unsound and been replaced by better theory. While empirical evidence is generally accepted as the ultimate test of a theory’s usefulness, paradigms are often so broad that they can rarely be tested directly (Kuhn 1970:77). In the case of archaeology (and american anthropology more generally) this means that the decision to work within one of several competing paradigms is difficult and often influenced as much by loyalty to academic traditions, mentors or colleagues as by theoretical utility.
Critical evaluation of the logical premises and assumptions of conflicting paradigms can highlight weaknesses of each and might even save researchers from a career of allegiance to a potentially flawed paradigm. Evaluation can lead to the rejection of some paradigms in favor of others and even the synthesis of useful and logically consistent elements of competing frameworks, which would otherwise remain antagonistic. This paper attempts such a critical evaluation of the four paradigms listed above. These paradigms are commonly applied to questions of social evolution by american archaeologists.
Complex Hunter-Gatherers
Archaeologists and ethnologists have been interested in social evolution for over a century but particularly in recent decades (e.g., Alekseev 1963; Ames 1981, 1985, 1994; Bender 1978, 1990; Braidwood 1952; Childe 1950; Drennan 1991; Flannery 1972; Fried 1967; Friedman 1982; Godelier 1978; Halstead and O’Shea 1982; Harpending 1980; Johnson and Earle 1987; Kirch 1984; Kus 1981; Lesser 1952; Maschner and Patton 1996; Morgan 1964 (1877); Randsborg 1981; Service 1962; Shennan 1993; Shnirelman 1992; Terrell 1978; Yengoyan 1991;Yoffee 1979). One popular theme in archaeological studies of social evolution is an attempt to explain the general tendency for increasing social and political complexity apparent in many cases around the world. Attention to variation in the political organization of hunter-gatherer societies such as the Florida Calusa, California Chumash, and Alaskan Tlingit have shown that non-agricultural societies can be significantly complex and even socially stratified (Arnold 1991, 1995, 1996; de Laguna 1979; Emmons 1991; Fitzhugh 1996; Marquardt 1992; Widmer 1988). Little agreement has emerged, however, about how to explain the development of these unusual social configurations from simpler antecedents.
Unfortunately, the development of successful explanatory models is hindered by disagreement at the paradigm level. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between theoretical paradigms concerning social evolution in general and the evolution of complex hunter-gatherers in particular. The analysis to follow compares the four paradigms of cultural ecology, Marxism, practice theory and evolutionary ecology.
In Figure 1, I have classified these paradigms into a simple two dimensional matrix. The matrix identifies two dichotomies that mark major divisions in anthropological explanations of cultural change. The first dimension, arrayed across the top separates those frameworks that give explanatory priority to ecological variables and those that focus on social variables. This divides the cultural and evolutionary ecologists from the Marxists and practice theorists. The second dimension, on the vertical, divides those most concerned with group level explanations (methodological collectivists) and those who prefer indiviual level explanations (methodological individualists). This dichotomy groups cultural ecology and a variety of Marxist orientations as distinct from evolutionary ecology and practice theory.
Figure 1 Causal priority and analytical level in anthropological perspectives on social evolution
Dichotemy 1: Nature vs. Culture
The dichotomy between ecological priority and social (symbolic, ideological) priority in the division across the top of Figure 1 reflects what I believe is a pervasive (and dubious) dichotomy between nature (biology) and culture (ideology) that is deeply ingrained in the history of Western philosophy (Weingart 1997). Ecologically oriented approaches are invariably driven by the belief that evolutionary change is directed by basic biological propensities for survival and reproduction conditioned by environmental contexts. Social approaches inevitably reflect a belief that human social organization and its change is produced by symbolic cultural systems whose existence and structure are distinct from and irreducible to biological, reproductive, or ‘ecological’ dimensions. There can be no hope of resolving differences between paradigms whose fundamental disagreement lies at such a philosophical level. However, it may be possible to find a middle ground that recognizes a role for both ecological and social variables.
As animals in a world of limited resources and environmental hazards, humans could not have escaped the processes that explain the evolution of other species and ecological communities. It is therefore reasonable to seek an evolutionary and ecological approach to our research. At the same time, we are cultural beings, engaging in symbolically constituted social networks and adaptating to our surroundings through symbolic filters of language and thought.
A step towards the integration of our biological and cultural dimensions is the realization that symbolic capacities and formation of meaning (ideology) provide a unique context for adaptation and evolution. We try to adapt to symbolic/cultural environments just as we do physical ones. This claim will only be testable if we model social and cultural environments according to their selective dynamics and develop hypotheses about how people might use cultural tools (language, ideas, symbols) to compete for survival resources and reproduction.
Dichotomy 2: Collectives and Individuals
The vertical axis of Figure 1 addresses differences of opinion about the appropriate scale of social evolutionary analysis. Historically, scholars have sought explanations of long term social change at the level of the groups most visible over sustained periods of time (methodological collectivism). Biologists once looked at the evolution of species in this way (see Myer 1982:251-297), and social scientists have likewise favored social groups, societies, cultures, or polities. To proponents of the collective approach, the observation that individuals make up social groups, actually produce the social behavior, and generate the cultural practices and ideologies of interest is often overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant (e.g., Durkheim 1938; Kroeber 1952; Spencer 1967; see Giddens 1984:207-221).
Methodological individualists by contrast argue that we need to understand the motivations and actions of individuals if we want to understand how larger groups and social structures are formed and transformed (see Elster 1982, 1985, Giddens 1984). Unfortunately for those committed to group level analysis, attempts to identify mechanisms of social change without reference to individuals has consistently proved to be problematic. The critique of group level explanations differs in biology and the social sciences although the developments have been parallel (Smith and Winterhalder 1992b). In biology, attempts to explain group level observations as products of group selection (Wynne-Edwards 1962) have been soundly rejected on the grounds that most group phenomena can be explained as aggregate effects of individual selection (Williams 1966) or less (e.g., genes: Dawkins 1976). In social science, methodological individualists reject the assumption that group properties are ‘greater than the sum of their parts.’ Instead they seek to identify the ‘microfoundations’ of these properties by focusing on individual activities and decision-making processes (Smith and Winterhalder 1992b:39). Importantly, the levels of selection controversy in biology is a theoretical problem while methodological individualism in the social sciences contains no explicit theoretical rationale. Methodological individualism is taken merely as the most productive strategy for isolating those social constructs that do not require group-level explanations.
To see how these dichotemies differentiate the particular paradigms of cultural ecology, Marxism, practice theory and evolutionary ecology, we turn now to look at these frameworks in more detail, especially in the way that they approach the issue of hunter-gatherer social evolution.
Paradigms in socio-cultural evolution
Cultural Ecology
Cultural ecologists, following Julian Steward (1955), Leslie White (1959), Lewis Binford (1962) and others view culture as a system of coherent rules, roles and strategies that help social collectives adapt to localized environmental parameters. Of particular interest are the bottlenecks generated by unpredictable or infrequent shortages or other environmental crises. It is in these moments of crisis that cultural practices are often seen as making a difference between survival or extinction.
Cultural ecological approaches generally adopt the "adaptationist" or "group-functional" assumption that social groups are adaptive units. According to this view, societies are coherent entities with evolved rules of conduct. The rules stipulate different roles or statuses (hunter, mother, shaman, chief, etc.) to be enacted by individual participants of the culture. Collectively, the roles are assumed to function as the working parts of the cultural whole much like parts of a machine. Each role is thought to be crafted by natural selection to meet the survival needs of the cultural group as a whole (e.g., Minc 1986). Cultural ecology appears to make sense of the observation that societies are made up of people contributing to the continuation of the society in various ways.
Unfortunately, cultural ecologists have run into trouble defining the boundaries of social units and have been unable to identify mechanisms that would account for the development and accurate transmission of adaptive information (rules) at the group level. Where do the rules come from, how are they reinforced so that they remain "functional" and effective through generations when they may never be needed?
The group-functionalist claims of cultural ecology might be justified with the development of a theory of group selection (Whallon 1989). In 1962, the biologist Wynne-Edwards proposed a model of group selection that was incorporated into cultural ecological thinking (e.g., Rappaport 1968) almost as quickly as it was rejected by the biological community (Williams 1966). The refutation of his model on theoretical and empirical grounds set the stage for the strong individual-level bias in modern biological theory (Myer 1982). The established biological view today is that individual-level selection is normally stronger than group-level selection (see Lewontin 1970). Recently theoretical biologists have proposed conditions that could lead to group-level selection (Wilson 1989). According to these models, group-level selection would be potent only when the relevant variation between groups is greater than the variation within groups. In small to medium scale human societies, with relatively fluid group membership and absence of institutional control over technological and strategic developments, the conditions for group selection would rarely be met. Other difficulties make group selection unlikely for larger scale societies (but see Dunnell 1989 for an argument supporting the emergence of group-selection in complex societies).
Models of the evolution of complex hunter-gatherers from this tradition have tended to see stratification as an unintended outcome of group adjustments that improve efficient decision making when growing populations encounter increasing exposure to subsistence risk and uncertainty (e.g., Ames 1985, see also Johnson 1982). From this perspective, inequality and stratification are tangential to the evolution of more complex adaptive social organizations. Internally differentiated groups are still primarily cooperative entities.
Cultural ecology seems to be unable to account for the evolution of socio-political complexity because it takes a group-level view of adaptation without a convincing explanation for how such adaptations are developed and maintained through natural selection. Despite this problem, I derive a number of ideas from this perspective useful for explaining social evolution. The theory of risk management has been particularly important in cultural ecology, and it is a theory that can contribute important insights into the analysis of human decision making and social evolution.
Marxism
According to Marxist approaches, social change comes from the ongoing development and resolution of conflicts in social and economic relations. Contemporary applications of Marxist theory vary considerably from each other and from Marx’s original formulations. The assumptions of this paradigm that are relevant to this discussion include: 1) economic interests are inherently divisive and prone to conflicts; 2) conflicts are manifested between social groups or classes, divided by differential access to the means of production; and 3) competition for control over the means of production inevitably leads exploitation that can only be resolved through revolution (dialectical synthesis). Marxist social scientists often see these contests playing out in structural and ideological shifts in society (Friedman and Rowlands 1978, McGuire 1992).
Marxist models of the evolution of stratified hunter-gatherers have often looked to the role of surplus production and instances in which surplus could be alienated from a portion of the producers (e.g., Testart 1982). Inequality is already assumed to be a potential of competition, dormant until significant axes of differentiation are made available. The rising elite then is seen as transforming an ideology of egalitarianism into one legitimating differences. Rarely are mechanisms proposed by which such a transformation might occur, but the tendency following Marxist theory is to model competition between interest groups, be they men vs. women, elders vs. youth, or rich vs. poor (e.g., Meillassoux 1981).
As Jon Elster (1985) has pointed out, Marx himself was inconsistent in assigning the primary agency of history to individuals or groups. However, Marx’s insistence that collective social consciousness drives competition and social transformation has left most marxist social scientists firmly rooted in group-level explanations, but with little hope for identifying mechanisms of group transformation. Thus, like cultural ecology, Marxist analysis has tended to suffer from an ambiguous notion of agency (causality).
Nevertheless, the Marxist focus on social competition is a welcome addition to the cultural ecological focus on social cooperation. It is the tension and interplay of these two opposing strategies - competition and cooperation at various scales - that seems to hold the key to much socio-political evolution (see Boone 1992, Clark and Blake 1994).
Practice Theory
Having concluded that the group-level explanations of both cultural ecology and Marxism are analytically problematic, a paradox is evident. Long-term change seems to require an explanatory framework at its macro-scale, but attempts to devise analytical units and mechanisms appropriate to this task remain elusive.
This problem is at the core of recent writings in practice theory (Ortner 1994) that seek to deal with the relationship between individual agency and social structure. Giddens’ classic theory of structuration is a model in this attempt (1984). With the writings of Giddens, Bourdieu and others, practice theory identifies a series of mechanisms for social change grounded at the level of individual behavior (agency or action). People have interests, values, and beliefs that are shaped by their culture and unique individual circumstances. These combine to provide both constraints and opportunities as individuals pursue their own interests.
To more fully understand how humans pursue their interests, we need a theory capable of specifying the nature of those interests and how they are pursued. For humans, this entails a theory of culture that addresses the nature of symbolic interaction. The theories of Bourdieu on symbolic economies (e.g., 1991) and his followers (e.g., Tedlock and Mannheim 1995) argue that human language is the medium through which culture is produced and modified. Each utterance and dialog provides a context for renegotiating meaning and value and for recreating and changing culture. Individuals use language to maneuver, to create opportunities, make allies, and trivialize rivals. Language is an inherently political medium and it is through language and symbolically motivated action that people change culture and ideology, create institutions, dominate, resist, and acquiesce. Iterated across large populations, social change is the outcome of more limited individual goals and behaviors.
Unlike cultural ecology and Marxism, practice theory provides a mechanism for social behavior and its role in the construction and change of social institutions. It imputes a competitive mechanism (self-interest) at the individual level, and so avoids two of the most serious drawbacks of the other frameworks so far discussed. It does not, however, attempt to generalize about the underlying motivation for action. Agents are said to be self-interested, but those interests are derived exclusively from their inherited and negotiated system of symbolic values. This point makes it difficult to use this framework to explain similarities between societies that are historically (and therefore culturally) unrelated.
This is a potentially critical shortcoming for the explanation of evolving social stratification. Some archaeologists avoid this problem, however, with the assumption that power, prestige and wealth are common motivators of human action (e.g., Clark and Blake 1994; Hayden 1994, 1995).
Clark and Blake have written one of the classic works in this relatively young genre (1994). They see the process of evolution to inequality driven by "aggrandizers," individuals who, because of their inherently dominant personalities, seek to turn the forces of nature, technology, and labor power to their own personal benefit in accruing prestige. Aggrandizers emerge in contexts of high population density where stable and intensifiable resources allow them to compete for prestige by attracting followers and prestigious allies. Followers in turn sacrifice their equality in return for the privilege of being part of an aggrandizer’s faction, and because of the generosity he exhibits towards them.
Clark and Blake’s model is sophisticated and intriguing, but suffers in two ways. First, by proposing that resource abundance is a necessary condition for the emergence of inequality, the authors have to assume that the subordination of non-aggrandizers occurs out of choice not obligation. There is nothing to compel non-aggrandizers from remaining autonomous except the possibility that they would miss some opportunities to share in the aggrandizer’s success. But if that success is more costly than autonomy to subordinates, as it surely must have become under conditions of inequality, there would appear to be nothing to bond groups of unequal individuals together. Missing from Clark and Blake’s model is a theoretical rationale for the reduction in egalitarian leveling mechanisms that are apparently so common in foraging societies (c.f. Boehm 1993; Lee 1990; Woodburn 1982). To accept Clark and Blake’s model, we have to assume that egalitarian mechanisms are already largely abandoned or dysfunctional when aggrandizers begin to pursue self-appreciating strategies.
My second objection is that the motor of change is really situated in different personality types (aggrandizers and non-aggrandizers). Hayden has expressed this assumption most clearly when he has suggested that aggrandizer personalities are relatively rare and will be regular components of co-residential groups, only when they grow to exceed a given population density (Hayden 1995:20). The real drive behind change then is getting population density to the point that personality differences can play a driving role in structural change. In Hayden’s models we find little justification for the assertion of critical personality differences. Such an assumption leaves the agents of Hayden’s model stripped of their ability to make decisions when confronting unique social and environmental problems. It seems unrealistic to assume that individuals do not have strategic flexibility to choose either to pursue or to shun prestige competition and to resist or accept subordination depending on their understanding of the opportunities and outcomes of different behaviors. In other words, the personality-type models are unsatisfactory because they do not consider the role of strategic choice in socio-political evolution.
In sum, practice theory provides a particularly compelling view of how culture is created and modified. It establishes the microfoundations of cultural dynamics by looking where individuals actually produce it... in symbolic communication. It runs into difficulty, however, when this dynamic view of cultural process is confronted with the need to explain cross-cultural parallels. Practice theorists appeal to individual creativity and the inheritance of cultural traditions (Bourdieu’s habitus), or they posit their own culture-bound values to enervate their actors (e.g., wealth, power, prestige). Neither provides sufficient grounding to explain the general trends that seem to underlie human social evolution in the development of stratified or non-egalitarian hunter-gatherers. Practice theory seems to suffer from an unwillingness to look behind meaningfully constituted behavior for underlying tendencies or trends that apply cross-culturally. This unwillingness is in part a reaction against the perceived determinism and materialism of ecological, evolutionary, and to some extent Marxist approaches (Brumfiel 1994).
Evolutionary Ecology
Human evolutionary ecology is an outgrowth of evolutionary biology and human ecology. It is a field of study that tries to explain human behavior and organization in terms of individual strategies for maximizing reproductive fitness in variable ecological contexts. It assumes that people, like other animals maintain a range of flexible behavioral strategies and that people take motivation from evolved propensities to be reproductively competitive (Smith and Winterhalder 1992b, Winterhalder and Smith 1992). Evolutionary ecology solves the dilemma of practice theory by assuming that human self-interest will tend to produce reproductively beneficial consequences for individuals, while at the same time maintaining critical attention to the issue of flexible adaptation to variable physical, social, and presumably symbolic or culturally produced environments. The expectation of phenotypic flexibility in the face of ecological variation saves evolutionary ecology from the biological determinism of more extreme forms of sociobiology (Sahlins 1976).
Evolutionary ecology has the advantage of a strong theory of change complete with a well tested set of mechanisms applicable across the natural world: Darwinian evolution. Organisms can be expected to have evolved propensities to pursue reproductive advantage. Although many find the assumptions and orientation of evolutionary ecology unreasonably reductionistic for humans (Sahlins 1976), it is just this constitutive and explanatory reductionism that gives it comparative analytical strength (see Winterhalder and Smith 1992:14-15).
Despite the complicating effects of a symbolically mediated world, a great deal of human behavior is clearly adaptively oriented (i.e. towards survival and reproduction). Related to the issue of hunter-gatherer complexity and the incomplete nature of practice theory models, evolutionary biology is capable of explaining why in some circumstances some individuals might seek prestige and others not. Specifically, where self-aggrandizement is likely to increase reproductive fitness, it is expected to occur, where it would have negative consequences it should not.
Evolutionary ecologists who have entered the debate on the evolution of inequality and stratification have done so from two directions. Some have sought to identify the ecological contexts that encourage unequal access to the resources and opportunities that support survival and reproduction (e.g., Boone 1992, Vehrencamp 1983). They have argued that social asymmetry requires competition over limited or variable quality resources where the best resources can be more or less exclusively controlled. They show that the resource environment has to be uneven and good patches must be controlled and defensible. In such cases, those in poor quality areas of the landscape have an interest in trading labor for increased security, often at a significant disadvantage.
The second approach has been to reverse the question and ask why any groups have ever been egalitarian. Our nearest primate relatives all have some form of status hierarchy, what makes some mobile hunter-gatherer bands so unique (Boehm 1993)? The answer seems to reside in the structure of the resource environment relative to the success rates of individual foragers. Where hunting and gathering is unpredictable and results in too much food one day and too little another, sharing will enable individuals to survive shortfall (Smith 1988; Winterhalder 1986). Also, when the hunt is overproductive, begging and theft will often be tolerated. Sharing and tolerated-theft tend to work against the concentration of resources for selfish (reproductive ends) and encourage the development of egalitarian social orders (Hawkes 1992). As groups shift their dietary focus increasingly to smaller resources of greater predictability and stability, individuals are better able to manipulate surpluses to competitive ends (see Blurton Jones 1987, Hawkes 1992).
In another set of approaches, somewhat beyond the framework of this paper, several evolutionary theorists have taken up the question of symbolic communication and how it modifies evolutionary processes. These include the work of Boyd and Richerson (1985, Richerson and Boyd 1992), and others (e.g., Cvalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Durham 1991). Boyd and Richerson have asked how the transmission of practices, beliefs, and values between non-related individuals can set up evolutionary processes analogous to biological evolution... and how these same processes can come in conflict with biological goals. Their research offers a promising avenue for exploring the emergence and evolution of cultural systems and ideologies. It retains the expectation that individuals are the primary agents of change and that reproductive predispositions should still guide much of human decision making; however, it also accommodates the "emergence" of symbolic systems of meaning that can be entirely self-referential and without clear adaptive advantage.
Whatever the emergent quality of culture, patterns of culture change seen over long time periods and with salient cross-cultural parallels need to be explained with reference to processes less ideosynchratic than the emergence of historically contingent ideological systems. A simple expectation that most individuals will act in such a way as to survive, reproduce, and insure the greatest survivorship of their offspring adds a powerful mechanism to the political competition of practice theory and Marxism. It also gives us reason to take a second look at the cooperative nature of social groupings that forms the core of traditional cultural ecology.
One of the most significant contributions to cultural ecology in recent years has been a focus on environmental variability and the strategies people often use to reduce risks associated with these fluctuations. Risks can be characterized by the amplitude and frequency of recurring hardships over time and across space. Cooperative relationships are often developed that allow people to share resources and information, thereby reducing their susceptibility to environmental fluctuations (Halstead and Oshea 1989, Minc 1986, Whallon 1989).
While cultural ecologists seek to show how cooperative strategies yield benefits, evolutionary ecologists try to define the practical limits of cooperation ("collective action"). They ask, for example, how large a cooperative group might become before it gets too large to be useful to individual participants (because free loaders can erode the benefits of cooperation; Smith and Winterhalder 1992b). They also ask when individuals are likely to be risk averse and when they might actually seek out risks (Winterhalder 1986). Again this gives us a tool of greater precision than the assumption that people should always be risk reducing.
The concept of risk is important for modeling the evolution of social complexity among hunting and gatherering groups because the motivation for some people to become subordinate to other people is expected to develop only when riskiness is unequally distributed across a population.
James Boone (1992) has developed the basic elements of an evolutionary ecological model of social inequelity as follows. The critical step in the emergence if inequality must be that which alienates some members of a community from equal opportunities for survival and reproduction through limits on the availability of quality foods, positions of authority, and prestigious status roles. We can assume that potential subordinates will rigorously defend their autonomy and equality from attempts at their subjugation unless they have a compelling reason to accept subordination. For example, people might accept diminished status if they find themselves in situations of high ecological risk. Individuals, families, clans, or villages with more stability and security and with the potential to produce beyond their needs on occassion might be willing to share some of their surplus with less secure neighbors. In return the needy neighbors could be expected to contribute labor or capital resources (such as raw materials or other storable or high quality resources) on a more regular basis.
Such unequal exchange could only develop where more secure individuals are able to defend their surplus. In times of hardship, disadvantaged members of the community must find it in their best interest to trade labor or tribute for security instead of seeking to take resources by force from more affluent neighbors. If resources are not defendable, we would never expect to see the development of a social landscape of unequal vulnerability.
In this way, a patron-client relationship might evolve between people living in a relatively unproductive environment punctuated by productive and defensible resources. The resource landscape has to be uneven and there have to be enough people competing for those resources to allow for the exclusion of some of that population from high quality resource patches (or the materials and knowledge of how to be productive in a given environment).
Unequal access to material resources and the social and technological knowledge that make a difference in resource production seems to underlie the evolution of inequality. But there are host of ways that economic asymmetry could develop. Hayden has outlined many of these (e.g., 1995). In some circumstances defense of productive sites could be decisive; in others, accumulation of surpluses and their selective reinvestment in social alliances might be the key to social differentiation. However it is established, the evolutionary ecological model suggests that non-egalitarian hunting and gathering populations should arise where risks are unevenly distributed across the landscape and where some individuals are forced to make due on less than optimal conditions while still seeking to maximize their survival and reproductive potential under the constraints of their situation.
The evolutionary ecological model outlined above is general in scope and allows for a wide range of variation in the ways hunter-gatherers might become increasingly complex. In most cases, population growth, social and physical circumscription, sedentism, defense of resource locations and residential territory, and control of resources through storage will be involved in the reorganization of risks. Highly mobile foragers living in low population densities and with the option to move to other areas or other bands as necessary can maintain more or less equal exposure to risks. Only when some people can prevent others from equal access to the best resources will the social landscape become unequally risky, thereby supporting the development of inequality (Boone 1992).
This model accommodates the insights of practice theory in recognizing that socio-cultural evolution occurs in a dynamic social and symbolic context, in which the actions and beliefs of individuals generate novel adaptive circumstances and unique opportunities for social competition. Specific variation in the paths towards increasing complexity might derive from differences in the ideologies and responses of individuals to given opportunities and constraints, although this is not expected to diminish the general cross-cultural similarities that derive from shared socio-ecological conditions and evolved propensities. In some cases, we might expect the most effective reproductive strategy in a cultural environment to be a conservative, self-effacing, and cooperative one. In others, some individuals may be able to negotiate superior positions of power, prestige and/or wealth that may or may not translate into higher reproductive fitness. A good percentage of many people’s lives are spent trying to increase security by reducing risk and uncertainty. This compels them to pursue cooperative strategies and sometimes accept unequal relationships.
Conclusion
Social behavior is inherently strategic, and competition and cooperation are alternative social strategies employed to meet both culturally and biologically inherited goals. Humans pursue these goals in a world of symbols and through a variety of proximate motivations. The pursuit of wealth, power, and prestige may be common proximate means to these ends in some circumstances and for some people. In other contexts, cooperation and self-effacement may be more beneficial. And these strategies should become nested, where for example, it becomes important for aggrandizers to cooperate with kin and others to compete against rival families, villages, or clans.
While traditional cultural ecology and Marxism are largely superceded by more individually oriented perspectives in this analysis, both traditions have played important roles in challenging us to think about cooperation and competition, structure and agency. Practice theory leads us to consider the mechanisms by which humans generate a social and ideological edifice and the proximate motivations that guide decisions to compete or cooperate with neighbors. Evolutionary ecology in turn provides a set of basic biological and ecological models that allow us to look underneath symbolic systems and ask how humans use their symbolic, social, and physical surroundings to ultimate advantage. By seeking common ground between these two paradigms (practice theory and evolutionary ecology), we should be able to advance the field of social evolutionary studies farther and faster than reproducing the approaches of each in isolation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 8th Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, Aomori Session, Aomori, Japan, October 22, 1998. I am indebted to the organizers of the CHAGS conference, Aomori session for providing a wonderful opportunity for the sharing of ideas on the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, and for their very generous support of conference participants. The editors of this volume deserve praise for organizing an ambitious international exchange of theoretical ideas. I am pleased to have been invited to participate. Laada Bilaniuk, Don Grayson, Eric Smith, and Julie Stein each provided valuable suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. I take full responsibility for any errors or omissions.
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