Scaling Up of Human Institutions
Discussion
(from a critique of the Dawn of Everything)
Gary Feinman:
"In general, I do not observe humanity’s history to follow a strict progressive or linear course. A broad-brush trend, but one that has often been reversed (Feinman 1998), is the scaling up of human institutions and affiliations. Surely, the framing of new questions must encompass the expansive growth of human networks of cooperation and collective action. Knowledge of human history and its various “dawns” requires understanding how people got things done, and for our species that is social (Kowalewski and Birch 2020:30): affiliations, institutions, networks, and polities. New questions should investigate the diverse ways they were/are organized, as well as the factors that contributed to their relative degrees of sustainability. And yet, despite a scattershot of examples, it is in this key fundamental dimension that this book seems thin. The most persistently referenced means by which larger affiliations were seen to form was schismogenesis, a culture-historical process in which groups were seen to identify and define themselves in diametric opposition to their neighbors. Yet readers are left largely in the dark when it comes to the parameters, social mechanisms, boundaries, scales, and dynamics at which such oppositions are argued to have been manifested, beyond vaguely inferenced environmental parameters and specific historical events.
Rather than just investigator preference, a more convincing and empirically grounded foundation might be the recognition that humans can be both unprecedented cooperators and highly selfish (Blanton and Fargher 2016; Feinman 2013). As a consequence, human cooperation tends to be situational and contingent. The key question then becomes what factors promote different degrees and forms of cooperation, and a key point of contention concerns scale. The authors (278–97) basically dismiss a raft of interdisciplinary research and empirical findings that repeatedly illustrate that human organization and leadership generally shift and differentiate as the density of interpersonal interaction increases (e.g., Fletcher 1995; Hill and Dunbar 2003; Holland-Lulewicz et al. 2022). Although Graeber and Wengrow are on more solid footing when they argue that domestic human groupings also may be fragile and that small human aggregations may not be restricted to close kin, these arguments do not refute the repeated observation that when human groupings in sustained close contact exceed certain demographic thresholds, organizational adjustments take place (Feinman 2013, 2021). Modes of leadership, political offices, and institutional arrangements can be created in widely different forms and involve lesser or higher degrees of economic stratification (even at comparable sizes), but past or present, some kind of supra-household institution emerges if these aggregations are sustained, even for the Bronze Age historical context that the authors draw on to make their case (e.g. Hofmann et al. 2019).
Perhaps this line of argument seems esoteric and a matter for specialists, but sharing the book’s passion for seeing lessons in the past for the present and future, I think not. Given their anarchistic mistrust of human institutions and bureaucracies (Appadurai 2022), Graeber and Wengrow aim to dismiss any necessary links between scale and the loss of personal freedom. Freed of constraints on human cognitive capacities and the demands of scale, the authors tout governance through self-organized, domestic autonomy that is not so far off from a kind of libertarian ethos (513). But at great scale, an overabundance of individual freedom and independence may be antithetical to economic equity (Blanton et al. 2021). Might it be more cautiously realistic to recognize that in today’s world, cooperative governance and institutions are essential, these political associations take many forms, and to keep them equitable requires the persistent investments and participation of the citizenry?"