a professional police force, cities, money, distinctions between rich and poor, and many other political, economic, and social institutions. Did all of those institutions arise together, or did some arise before others? We can infer the answer to this question by comparing modern societies at different levels of organization, by examining written accounts or archaeological evidence about past societies, and by observing how a society's institutions change over time. Cultural anthropologists attempting to describe the diversity of human societies often divide them into as many as half a dozen categories. Any such attempt to define stages of any evolutionary or developmental continuum—whether of musical styles, human life stages, or human societies— is doubly doomed to imperfection. First, because each stage grows out of some previous stage, the lines of demarcation are inevitably arbitrary. (For example, is a 19-year-old person an adolescent or a young adult?) Second, developmental sequences are not invariant, so examples pigeonholed under the same stage are inevitably heterogeneous. (Brahms and Liszt would turn in their graves to know that they are now grouped together as composers of the romantic period.) Nevertheless, arbitrarily delineated stages provide a useful shorthand for discussing the diversity of music and of human societies, provided one bears in mind the above caveats. In that spirit, we shall use a simple classification based on just four categories— band, tribe, chiefdom, and state (see Table 14.1)—to understand societies. Bands are the tiniest societies, consisting typically of 5 to 80 people, most or all of them close relatives by birth or by marriage. In effect, a band is an extended family or several related extended families. Today, bands still living autonomously are almost confined to the most remote parts of New Guinea and Amazonia, but within modern times there were many others that have only recently fallen under state control or been assimi-ated or exterminated. They include many or most African Pygmies, southern African San hunter-gatherers (so-called Bushmen), Aboriginal Z 6 8 • GUNS, GERMS,and steel table 14.1 Types of Societies Band Tribe Chiefdom State Membership Number of dozens hundreds thousands over 50,000 people Settlement nomadic fixed: 1 fixed: 1 or more fixed: many pattern village villages villages and cities Basis of relation– kin kin-based class and resi– class and ships clans dence residence Ethnicities and 1 1 1 1 or more languages Government Decision making, 'egalitarian' 'egalitarian' centralized, centralized leadership or hereditary big-man Bureaucracy none none none, or 1 or many levels 2 levels Monopoly of no no yes yes force and information Conflict resolu– informal informal centralized laws, judges tion Hierarchy of no no no-> para– capital settlement mount village Australians, Eskimos (Inuit), and Indians of some resource- poor areas of the Americas such as Tierra del Fuego and the northern boreal forests. All those modern bands are or were nomadic hunter-gatherers rather than settled food producers. Probably all humans lived in bands until at least 40,000 years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago. Bands lack many institutions that we take for granted in our own society. They have no permanent single base of residence. The band's land is used jointly by the whole group, instead of being partitioned among subgroups or individuals. There is no regular economic specialization, except by age and sex: all able-bodied individuals forage for food. There are no formal institutions, such as laws, police, and treaties, to resolve conflicts within and between bands. Band organization is often described as FROMEGAHTARIANISM TO KLEPTOCRACY • 169 Band Tribe Chtefdom State Religion Justifies kiepto– no no yes yes —no cracy? Economy Food production no no-*yes yes-*intensive intensive Division of labor no no no— yes yes Exchange reciprocal reciprocal redistributive redistribu- (' tribute') tive ('taxes') Control of land band clan chief various Society Stratified no no yes, by kin yes. not by kin Slavery no no small-scale large-scale Luxury goods no no yes yes for elite Public architec– no no no —yes yes ture Indigenous lit– no no no often eracv A horizontal arrow indicates rhat the attribute vanes between less and more complex societies of that type. 'egalitarian': there is no formalized social stratification into upper and lower classes, no formalized or hereditary leadership, and no formalized monopolies of information and decision making. However, the term egalitarian' should not be taken to mean that all band members are equal n prestige and contribute equally to decisions. Rather, the term merely means that any band 'leadership' is informal and acquired through qualities such as personality, strength, intelligence, and fighting skills. My own experience with bands comes from the swampy lowland area ew kumea where the Fayu live, a region known as the Lakes Plains. ere, I still encounter extended families of a few adults with their dependent children and elderly, living in crude temporary shelters along streams traveling by canoe and or. foot. Why do peoples of the Lakes Plains Z 7 O •GUNS,GERMS, AND STEEL
