Egalitarian Society

Discussion

Christopher Boehm:

""Egalitarian society" has become one of anthropology's best-known sociopolitical types (see Fortes and EvansPritchard 1940; Middleton and Tait 1958; Service 1962, 1975; Fried 1967). The central idea has been that in such societies political leadership is weak and ranking and stratification among adult males are absent or muted (see also Flanagan and Rayner 1988, Knauft 1991). For scholars focusing on political evolution and on state origins in particular, this "type" in a sense was an expedient invention, providing a baseline for diachronic analysis (see Mitchell 1978, Schneider 1979, Cashdan 1980). Thus, "egalitarian society" was originally defined chiefly in terms of what was known about the smallscale nomadic foraging societies that so obviously contrasted with centralized polities. An important point agreed upon early on was that a readily recognized air of "equality" prevailed among adult males and at best leaders had little authority or economic advantage.

In explaining egalitarian society, Fried (1967:34) stressed "leveling mechanisms," in particular ones that might be called automatic: external factors that were likely to inhibit hierarchy and that operated independently of people's intentions. His early focus was on hunting bands, and he explained leveling in terms of the exigencies of a nomadic life in which a highly cooperative small group was unable to accumulate much material wealth. Over several decades, other societal types were recognized as exhibiting similar political patterns and were similarly explained in terms of local environmental, economic, demographic, and social-structural features. Analyses of individual egalitarian societies or specific subtypes ranging from nomadic foragers to sedentary horticulturalists have produced an impressive list of automatic leveling mechanisms.

This list applies

(I) to nomadic hunter-gatherers (see Gluckman [1965:4-5] on nonspecialized economic production; Cashdan [1980:II6] and Slobodin [1969:194] on how nomadic subsistence limits material accumulation; Salzman [1979] on effects of scattered and unpredictable resources; Layton [1986:24-28] on dispersed food supply and territorial behavior; Fried [1967:33-34] and Woodburn [1982:440] on uncentralized redistribution systems for large-game meat; Sharp [1958:5-6] and Tonkinson [1988:151] on complex ego-based dominance-submission networks that prevent the emergence of hierarchy at the group level; Turnbull [1965a:228] on constantly changing band composition and its negative effect on the development of authority and control; and, among recently sedentarized foragers, Knauft [1987:466, 477] on witchcraft-type killing as a sanction that facilitates an equitable distribution of females);

(2) to horticulturalists (see Forge [1972:533-34] and Mitchell [1978:9] on competitive redistributive systems based on exchange; Godelier [1982:4] on unavoidable cyclicity in "big-man" careers; and Mitchell [1988] on leveling effects of gambling); and

(3) to pastoralists (see Schneider [1979] and Black [1972:621] on the economic vagaries of cattle-holding; Burnham [1979] on the leveling effects of nomadism and flexible local groups; and Kluckhohn [1966] on the leveling effect of witchcraft accusations). The causal assumptions here seem logical and the leveling effects potentially powerful, but none of these mechanisms provides the basis for a general theory of leveling in traditional societies of small scale-"bands" and "tribes."

Not all or even most egalitarian people are foragers or even nomads. Nor, obviously, are they all gamblers or involved in "big-man" trading competition or pastoralists; nor is their group composition always dynamic. Aside from being by definition less politically centralized and less socially stratified than people who live in chiefdoms, the main thing they seem to share is that their local groups are relatively small and they have egalitarian ideologies; but none of the arguments makes small size or an egalitarian ethos causally responsible for egalitarian society.

Thus, over several decades of study, anthropologists have developed no unified theory for explaining egalitarian behavior."

(https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf)