abilities, to each according to his needs”—have failed.
There could be no states until there was food production (beginning only around 9000 BC), and still no states until food production had been operating for enough millennia to build up the large, dense populations requiring state government. The first state arose in the Fertile Crescent around 3400 BC, and others then arose in China, Mexico, the Andes, Madagascar, and other areas over the following millennia, until today a world map shows the entire planet’s land area except for Antarctica divided into states. Even Antarctica is subject to partly overlapping territorial claims by seven nations.
Types of traditional societies
Thus, before 3400 BC there were no states anywhere, and in recent times there have still been large areas beyond state control, operating under traditional simpler political systems. The differences between those traditional societies and the state societies familiar to us are the subject of this book. How should we classify and talk about the diversity of traditional societies themselves?
While every human society is unique, there are also cross-cultural patterns that permit some generalizations. In particular, there are correlated trends in at least four aspects of societies: population size, subsistence, political centralization, and social stratification. With increasing population size and population density, the acquisition of food and other necessities tends to become intensified. That is, more food is obtained per acre by subsistence farmers living in villages than by small nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers, and still more is obtained per acre on the intensive irrigated plots cultivated by higher-density peoples and on the mechanized farms of modern states. Political decision-making becomes increasingly centralized, from the face-to-face group discussions of small hunter-gatherer groups to the political hierarchies and decisions by leaders in modern states. Social stratification increases, from the relative egalitarianism of small hunter-gatherer groups to the inequality between people in large centralized societies.
These correlations between different aspects of a society aren’t rigid: some societies of a given size have more intensified subsistence, or more political centralization, or more social stratification, than do others. But we need some shorthand for referring to the different types of societies emerging from these broad trends, while acknowledging the diversity within these trends. Our practical problem is similar to the problem faced by developmental psychologists discussing differences among individual people. While every human being is unique, there are still broad age-related trends, such that 3-year-olds are on the average different in many correlated respects from 24-year-olds. Yet age forms a continuum with no abrupt cut-offs: there is no sudden transition from being “like a 3-year-old” to being “like a 6-year-old.” And there are differences among people of the same age. Faced with these complications, developmental psychologists still find it useful to adopt shorthand categories such as “infant,” “toddler,” “child,” “adolescent,” “young adult,” etc., while recognizing the imperfections of these categories.
Social scientists similarly find it useful to adopt shorthand categories whose imperfections they understand. They face the added complication that changes among societies can be reversed, whereas changes in age classes can’t. Farming villages may revert to small hunter-gatherer bands under drought conditions, whereas a 4-year-old will never revert to being a 3-year-old. While most developmental psychologists agree on recognizing and naming the broadest categories of infant/child/adolescent/adult, social scientists use numerous alternative sets of shorthand categories for describing variation among traditional societies, and some scientists become indignant at the use of any categories at all. In this book I shall occasionally use Elman Service’s division of human societies into four categories of increasing population size, political centralization, and social stratification: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. While these terms are now 50 years old and other terms have been proposed since then, Service’s terms have the advantage of simplicity: four terms to remember instead of seven terms, and single words instead of multi-word phrases. But please remember that these terms are just shorthand useful for discussing the great diversity of human societies, without pausing to reiterate the imperfections in the shorthand terms and the important variations within each category each time that the terms are used in the text.
The smallest and simplest type of society (termed by Service a band) consists of just a few dozen individuals, many of them belonging to one or several extended families (i.e., an adult husband and wife, their children, and some of their parents, siblings, and cousins). Most nomadic hunter-gatherers, and some garden farmers, traditionally lived at low population densities in such small groups. The band members are sufficiently few in number that everyone knows everyone else well, group decisions can be reached by face-to-face discussion, and there is no formal political leadership or strong economic specialization. A social scientist would describe a band as relatively egalitarian and democratic: members differ little in “wealth” (there are few personal possessions anyway) and in political power, except as a result of individual differences in ability or personality, and as tempered by extensive sharing of resources among band members.
Insofar as we can judge from archaeological evidence about the organization of past societies, probably all humans lived in such bands until at least a few tens of thousands of years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago. When Europeans began, especially after Columbus’s first voyage of AD 1492, to expand around the world and to encounter non-European peoples living in non-state societies, bands still occupied all or most of Australia and the Arctic, plus low-productivity desert and forest environments of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. Band societies that will frequently be discussed in this book include the !Kung of Africa’s Kalahari Desert, the Ache and Siriono Indians of South America, the Andaman Islanders of the Bay of Bengal, the Pygmies of African equatorial forests, and Machiguenga Indian gardeners of Peru. All of the examples mentioned in the preceding sentence except the Machiguenga are or were hunter-gatherers.
Bands grade into the next larger and more complex type of society (termed by Service a tribe), consisting of a local group of hundreds of individuals. That’s still just within the group size limit where everyone can know everyone else personally and there are no strangers. For instance, in my high school of about 200 students all students and teachers knew each other by name, but that was impossible in my wife’s high school with thousands of students. A society of hundreds means dozens of families, often divided into kinship groups termed clans, which may exchange marriage partners with other clans. The higher populations of tribes than of bands require more food to support more people in a small area, and so tribes usually are farmers or herders or both, but a few are hunter- gatherers living in especially productive environments (such as Japan’s Ainu people and North America’s Pacific Northwest Indians). Tribes tend to be sedentary, and to live for much or all of the year in villages located near their gardens, pastures, or fisheries. However, Central Asian herders and some other tribal peoples practise transhumance—i.e., moving livestock seasonally between different altitudes in order to follow the growth of grass at higher elevations as the season advances.
In other respects tribes still resemble large bands—for instance, in their relative egalitarianism, weak economic specialization, weak political leadership, lack of bureaucrats, and face-to-face decision-making. I’ve watched meetings in New Guinea villages where hundreds of people sit on the ground, manage to have their say, and reach a conclusion. Some tribes have a “big man” who functions as a weak leader, but he leads only by his powers of persuasion and personality rather than by recognized authority. As an example of the limits of a “big man’s” powers, we shall see in Chapter 3 how the ostensible followers of a leader named Gutelu of the New Guinea Dani tribe succeeded in thwarting Gutelu’s will and launching a genocidal attack that split Gutelu’s political alliance. Archaeological evidence of tribal organization, such as remains of substantial residential structures and settlements, suggests that tribes were emerging in some areas by at least 13,000 years ago. In recent times tribes have still been widespread in parts of New Guinea and Amazonia. Tribal societies that I’ll discuss in this book include Alaska’s Inupiat, South America’s Yanomamo Indians, Afghanistan’s Kirghiz, New Britain’s Kaulong, and New Guinea’s Dani, Daribi, and Fore.
Tribes then grade into the next stage of organizational complexity, called a chiefdom and containing thousands of subjects. Such a large population, and the incipient economic specialization of chiefdoms, require high food productivity and the ability to generate and store food surpluses for feeding non-food-producing specialists, like the chiefs and their relatives and bureaucrats. Hence chiefdoms have built sedentary villages and hamlets with storage facilities and have mostly been food-producing (farming and herding) societies, except in the most productive areas available to hunter-gatherers, such as Florida’s Calusa chiefdom and coastal Southern California’s Chumash chiefdoms.
