Reverse Dominance Hierarchy and State Formation

Contextual Quote

"The main feature of social organization that seems to correlate with reverse dominance hierarchy is a relatively small, locally autonomous community. It is true that material constraints such as scattered resources do sometimes place absolute limits on scale, but such conditions are present only in a minority of cases that are not typical of our natural history from Cro-Magnon on. By contrast, I have suggested that smallness of scale may be a predictable side effect of egalitarian behavior because such behavior keeps groups subdividing, while small, intensively cooperative groups remain able to unite effectively and control their leaders. In short, there could be an important functional symbiosis here that might be useful in helping to explain why human groups seem to have remained minuscule for so many millennia."

- Christopher Boehm [1]

Discussion

Christopher Boehm:

"I have made the case that egalitarian behavior arises from dislike of being dominated. At the individual level, this might be called "love of autonomy," but I have chosen to approach it in terms of group values (or ethos) and political coalition formation. Individual dislike of being dominated, reflected in the ethos and reinformed by it, is transformed by small communities into what amounts to social policy. I think it is accurate to call the result a "reverse dominance hierarchy" (Boehm 1984, 1991) because, rather than being dominated, the rank and file itself manages to dominate. So-called acephalous societies and even incipient chiefdoms have reverse dominance hierarchies. By contrast, authoritative chiefdoms, kingdoms, and primitive states are not committed to such egalitarian ideals (even though they recognize and deal with power abuse), and therefore they have dominance hierarchies that are "orthodox" in that they follow a pattern shared with our closest phylogenetic "cousins," the African great apes. Compared with both African great apes and other humans at the strong chiefdom level or higher, human groups committed to egalitarian behavior have gone in an opposite direction. They have done so because followers discovered that by forming a single political coalition they could decisively control the domination proclivities of highly assertive individuals, even their chosen leaders. This political direction was somehow reversed after the invention of agriculture, and an "orthodox" version of social dominance hierarchy reappeared. This argument is highly relevant to theories of state formation. To understand the earlier phases of political centralization, I believe it will be necessary to examine what is happening with simple foragers (Knauft 1991), complex hunter-gatherers (e.g., Price and Brown 1985; see also Paynter 1989), various types of "tribesmen" (Sahlins 1968), and both incipient and authoritative "chiefdoms" as the next stage beyond "egalitarian society" (Service 1975), keeping in mind the potentially explosive political tension that would appear to be inherent in any reverse dominance hierarchy."

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