A human egalitarian system can be explained at a rather basic level in terms of ethology. The “political” typology I use here was developed originally to understand the social ecology of birds (Vehrencamp 1983), but this analytical scheme can measure any social animal’s species-specific pattern of hierarchy formation. It does so in terms of useful questions that interest behavioral ecologists, and with respect to primates it has been applied to understanding the degree of hierarchy displayed by several monkey species (for instance, van Hoof and van Schaik 1992; Boinski 1994; Strier 1994; see also de Waal 1996). It also has been applied to the problem of how humans might move from egalitarianism to hierarchy (Boone 1992), and here I shall broaden its use to make interspecific comparisons useful to the determination of human political nature. The typology will be applied to the three African great apes to which humans are closely related molecularly, and also to a wide variety of humans. My goal is to evaluate all these hominoids as political animals, and to determine whether, and if so where, our species can be reliably placed on a scale that extends from egalitarianism to despotism.
Vehrencamp’s Political Continuum
At Vehrencamp’s despotic extreme are animal societies with individuals in a position to exert strong dominance and monopolize reproductive resources. Vehrencamp suggests that such a degree of individual dominance can be selected more readily if the reproductively disadvantaged subordinates have difficulty in leaving the group to seek better success elsewhere. Group size can enter into the picture. From the perspective of the dominant individual’s reproductive success, the ability to cope collectively with predators or with competing conspecific groups is improved if overdominated subordinates are not driven away. From the subordinate’s reproductive perspective, it is better to live in larger groups—but not be dominated so severely. These evolutionary dynamics help to fix the degree of despotism, which is measured phenotypically by the strength of the psychological disposition to dominate and submit.
Now let us consider bird and animal societies that fit Vehrencamp’s egalitarian classification. The typical signs of a social dominance hierarchy are muted, for competition for food and mates is absent or low key; displays of dominance or of submissive signaling occur rarely; and the fighting that attends a high degree of status rivalry is absent. In such situations of noncompetition, subordinates have no reason to leave the group—and all may gain from group responses that reduce predation.
In highly egalitarian species, individual dominance and submission behaviors can be all but absent, along with food and mating competition and coalition behavior. For example, among squirrel monkeys studied by Boinski (1994) group males sometimes cooperated in the sexual investigation of females. They also joined in aggressive interactions against males of neighboring troops, and in defense of infants and juveniles against predators. At the same time, there was little male-male aggression within the troop. Such animals have low levels of intragroup aggression because, it is hypothesized, natural selection has favored reduced intragroup dominance at the basic level of innate behavioral dispositions.
Along the continuum between the two political extremes, ethologists make their typological decisions on the basis of phenotypic behavior. At the same time, it is assumed that innate propensities are at work. An animal species, even if it is subject to some “adaptive modification” (Kummer 1971) in its patterns of social dominance hierarchy, will basically remain true to political type. This is because behaviors such as dominance and submission have such a strong innate basis in individuals, and these propensities—or their relative absence—have a direct impact on behavior at the group level.
The basic despotism of our three African great apes is exemplified by the stereotypy and frequency of dominance displays, especially of males, and also by a noteworthy presence of submissive behaviors in the form of vocalizations, gestures, postures, or facial expressions. In effect, predictable and uniform phenotypic patterns can be taken as indicators of the underlying genetic dispositions. However, if a species is extremely flexible in its political behavior, as humans can be, then a single phenotypic behavior in a sample group may be neither a reliable indicator of genotype nor a trustworthy basis for ethological classification.
My intention here is to resolve this problem well enough to be able to place the four extant African hominoids—including Homo sapiens—on Vehrencamp’s continuum. It will be beneficial to do this before the Common Ancestor of humans and the three African great apes is reconstructed with respect to its political behavior.
Difficulties Posed by Behavioral Flexibility
Primates other than humans can be impressively flexible in their social and political behavior. When Kummer (1971) coined the phrase “adaptive modification,” his example was baboons living in two notably different habitats, whose despotic social dominance hierarchies differed considerably in accordance with the (assumed) adaptive requirements of the respective niches. Yet even the desert-adapted hamadryas retains fundamental patterns of despotic male dominance that are found in environments such as savannas and forests; it is just that out on the Ethiopian semidesert, harems appear to work better for foraging than do the large, semipermanent groups that inhabit forest environments. In this dry country, foraging baboons must disperse widely and each male harem leader, with his bulky body size and large canines, guards his females. Protection from predators may be involved with this dimorphism, but the main threat to his females is from other males.
These other males provide little overt competition, for every successful adult male can create his own harem by recruiting young females, then will watch over it constantly. The entire social system seems to reach equilibrium in this respect. The harem master is an aggressive tyrant who keeps his evasive but submissive females subjugated, and with this task constantly at hand he is not in a viable position to compete directly with other highly possessive males. As a result, male hierarchy is little developed—even though hamadryas sleep together in very large troops to avoid predators, and even though they make common foraging decisions before they divide into harems to forage (Kummer 1971; see also Boehm 1978).
By contrast, baboons who utilize richer environments can stay in much larger groups, and in these groups (there are no harems) males develop a social dominance hierarchy that allows higher-ranking males to partially monopolize mating opportunities in a promiscuous breeding situation (Kummer 1971). Male dominance is directed at competition among males rather than at dominating and controlling females in harems, and while foraging, the males engage diurnally in collective defense against predators. Both systems work well in the quite different environments that stimulate and constrain them, and both social systems can be rated as despotic.
With humans, adaptive modifiability goes far beyond these variations of baboons. The Julian Steward school of cultural ecology demonstrated that human social organization, similar to that of the hamadryas, tends to be modified as environments and subsistence techniques change (Steward 1955). What is startling about this behavioral lability of humans is that sociopolitical patterns—and even subsistence patterns—can vary drastically within the same environment. This flexibility raises fundamental questions about whether humans can even be classified as egalitarian or despotic by Vehrencamp’s ethological typology. At first blush, our species appears to be all over the political continuum, as Schneider’s (1979) study of East Africa suggested. Even though this behavioral flexibility raises serious questions about humans as a political species, answers can be found.
It is my plan to try to resolve three fundamental questions as this book proceeds. One is whether humans may be carrying around something like a Lockeian “blank slate” with respect to their political behavior. If our political nature were that flexible, then our adaptive modifiability in matters of social and political self-expression would be all but infinite—and my next two questions would be irrelevant. A more specific question is whether there is, in Fried’s (1967) terminology, a universal human drive to dominance. In designating human egalitarian societies as reverse dominance hierarchies (Boehm 1993), I challenged Fried’s position that no such predispositions exist. My point was that egalitarian societies do exhibit despotic-type behaviors, ethologically speaking, because the rank and file are obliged to deliberately dominate their potential masters if they wish to remain equal. Indeed, I chose the term “reverse dominance hierarchy” precisely because I wanted to confront cultural anthropologists with the need to consider human nature in dealing with political classifications. The third question is whether there might be something like what Fried called a universal drive to parity, an ultimate evolutionary question that Fried merely mentioned in passing.
All three of these questions will be explored in future chapters. By way of preview, I can say that the evidence will point in the direction of a rather definite—if impressively flexible—human political nature, rather than some version of the political tabula rasa.
Human Nature
Human nature is of obvious importance to anthropology, for it is one major locus of ultimate causality; another, obviously, is the environment. At one time, anthropologists were so desperately enamored of the culture concept that they tended to ignore both of these other “causes.” They did so even though humans always must cope with their environments, and even though by nature we are at a minimum impelled to eat, drink, copulate, rest, seek creature comfort, form pair bonds, nurture our offspring, socialize with one another, and engage in status rivalry. When Steward (1955) did finally bring the environment into our anthropological purview, unfortunately he was more interested in taxonomy than in process—including even the long-term process of natural selection and the human nature it has produced. A generation of cultural ecologists continued to ignore the question of human nature as they developed Steward’s approach further, but they did begin to include decision models in their analyses in order to study immediate processes involving subsistence strategy (for example, Ortiz 1967).
As successors to these cultural ecologists, human-behavioral ecologists today work with models from animal behavior that do make some assumptions about behaviors being species specific. However, in dealing with Homo sapiens they largely neglect human nature as they concentrate on the environment and its direct effects on foraging strategies and social behavior. These anthropological studies are very useful, but from a larger and longer-term evolutionary perspective they remain limited.
Unfortunately, as proponents of the holistic study of their own species, cultural anthropologists—and most biological anthropologists as well—have not really engaged with human nature as a problem that demands theoretical attention. Over the past several decades, in effect others have begun to do the job for us (examples are E. O. Wilson 1975, 1978; Alexander 1987; de Waal 1989, 1996; Wrangham and Peterson 1996; Betzig 1997; Sober and Wilson 1998). Few ethnologists have wanted to take on the task, even though human nature and human universals are crucial to their discipline (see, for instance, Kluckhohn 1953; Boehm 1979; Brown 1991; Sussman 1995).
In later chapters I shall have much more to say about human nature—and about human social and political nature in particular. At this point my suggestion is that we can learn a great deal about human cultural flexibility, and about the human nature that channels and constrains such flexibility, by comparing ourselves with closely related species that appear also to be behaviorally quite labile.
African Great Apes
Chimpanzees as Candidates for Despotism
Wild chimpanzees, particularly the males, rather nicely fulfill Vehrencamp’s criteria for a despotic animal society. We have seen already that dominance seems almost to be an end in itself for males of this species, and that alphas and other high-ranking individuals gain reproductive benefits via political intimidation in mating and food competition. A male subordinate cannot reduce his reproductive disadvantage by leaving the group or by trying to change groups, for he will be killed on sight by members of neighboring communities.
Dominance rankings play a significant part in female reproductive success as well (Baker and Smuts 1994; Pusey, Williams, and Goodall 1997). Females compete for core foraging areas, but they seldom vie for mating opportunities and they do not seem to be nearly as obsessed with status rivalry as are males (Goodall 1986). A female can leave the group safely, but only if she is reproductively “available.” A large number of females do transfer, and others remain peripheralized (Wrangham 1980; Goodall 1986), so chimpanzee communities are far from being closed. Basically the males stay put for life, and it is they who engage in hierarchical behavior to a degree that suggests very strong despotism.
The fact that subordinate males must stay put is to the advantage of the alphas: numbers help when chimpanzees mob predators and when chimpanzees engage in direct territorial competition at the intercommunity level—a special type of coalition behavior (Boehm 1992). On record are two instances in which small communities (habituated and provisioned wild groups) were lethally raided by larger ones until the males of the smaller groups were virtually eliminated (Nishida et al. 1985; Goodall 1986; see also Manson and Wrangham 1991). If subordinate males were able to transfer to groups with less-dominant alphas, the more-dominant alphas would lose out because their smaller groups would become vulnerable territorially. On that basis, dominance behaviors would be less strongly selected in this species; but this is not the case.
It is with this type of situation that Vehrencamp (1983) believes despotism can flourish, and in fact many behavioral correlates of strong despotism are present. We saw in the second chapter that dominance and submission are prominent in chimpanzees, with a linear male hierarchy based on competition for status and an alpha male in the control role. We saw also that coalition behavior is prominent among males—and evident with females, who gang up against immigrant females. It bears mentioning that the capacity of female chimpanzees to act in power coalitions can become much greater in captive situations, where females are not so socially isolated (de Waal 1982) and adaptive modifications occur. Given this suite of behaviors, chimpanzees may be placed squarely on the despotic side of Vehrencamp’s continuum, even though the collective power of subordinates can be decisive at times in reducing the power of alphas (de Waal 1996:131).
Having made that assessment, I need to say a word about a book by Power (1991), which in its title and analysis characterizes chimpanzees as being egalitarian. By any political or social typology, be it technical or commonsensical, chimpanzees are unegalitarian because domination behavior is prominent and intrinsic to their social life, and because domination leads to reproductive rewards. Power’s book has been severely criticized on many grounds (for example, Stanford 1993). Whatever the merits of her arguments about chimpanzees being free to come and go in their fission-fusion communities, it is evident that wild chimpanzees—whether they are baited or not, whether they are habituated to humans or not—are given to status rivalry that leads to a high degree of political, social, and reproductive inequality. In no important sense are they politically egalitarian, for they always have alpha males.
Silverback Gorillas as a Special Type of Despot
In politically rating the well-studied mountain gorilla, sexual dimorphism tells a substantial part of the story. The much larger body size of males may stem in part from the protection against predators silverbacks provide to their harems, but the requisite data are not available. What we do know is that harem leaders must defend their females against the many other males who have no mates (Fossey 1983; Watts 1996). With sexual selection operating so strongly, their being almost twice the size of females comes as no surprise. Despotic male gorillas are innately disposed to display and bluff, but also to fight and vanquish.
Within the harem a silverback easily dominates the adult females and any other males who grow to maturity and fail to leave the group. He exerts significant control over the entire group of perhaps half a dozen adults. Whenever the group travels, he sets its direction and manipulates it if danger is apparent; if quarrels break out among those subordinate to him, he suppresses them using a pig grunt or other means of intervention. His position of domination is easily recognized (Fossey 1983).
In terms of subordinates leaving the harem, reproductive females (who most decidedly are subordinate to silverbacks) do manage sometimes to transfer (Fossey 1983). The situation is quite different for males. As the silverback’s sons or the sons of his predecessor reach maturity, they may leave the harem because the silverback inhibits their chances of mating. Then, as rogue males who travel alone or in packs, they must try to invade other harems by defeating incumbent silverbacks. From this picture it is obvious that dominance is closely related to reproductive success in male mountain gorillas—even though dominated males can readily leave their natal groups.
While mountain gorillas seem despotic, their political style is quite different from that of chimpanzees. Social dominance is not manifested continuously by means of male-male competition; instead, the contests between males are infrequent but reproductively ultimate (Fossey 1983). Infanticide plays a role sometimes, as a male may kill the progeny of a genetic competitor and sire his own offspring with the same female (Wrangham and Peterson 1996).
In formally applying Vehrencamp’s criteria, we see that mountain gorillas exhibit male domination strongly in mating contexts and that the controlling silverback regulates whatever competition takes place among his females. Males without harems sometimes travel in groups, but their attempts to usurp established harems seem to be individual. Furthermore, if younger males have stayed into adulthood with a harem, they may support their leader against a male intruder, and females may act in what appear to be political coalitions when two harems meet (Fossey 1983). We will investigate these patterns further in Chapter 7, but they too are evidence of despotism.
If we compare mountain gorillas and chimpanzees to determine the relative degrees of despotism, decisive male domination over females is present in both species, and success in dominating other males is relevant to mating success. Higher rank also affects access to food sources. To consider the alternatives available to male subordinates, whose low political status brings reproductive disadvantages, chimpanzee males are locked into the same group for life whereas subordinated male gorillas can leave their natal harem and seek to displace a silverback elsewhere. However, subordinate chimpanzees can bully a female into going away on a consortship and thereby gain significant reproductive success (Goodall 1986). In effect, chimpanzee subordinate males are able to subvert the dominance hierarchy without leaving the group.
In light of all of these diverse features, it is almost impossible to make a precise decision about the relative positions of chimpanzees and mountain gorillas. But if we compare them with squirrel monkeys, who have low rates of agonism, little dominance behavior, and no group-internal political coalitions (Boinski 1994), both deserve to be placed near the despotic end of the Vehrencamp scale.
Semidespotic Bonobos
The bonobo is a somewhat more gracile version of the chimpanzee, about the same size but a separate species with differing facial characteristics and a different placement of the vagina that makes ventral-ventral copulation much easier (de Waal 1996). Pan paniscus lives in a restricted African environment in what formerly was known as the Congo, and shows both similarities to and sharp differences from Pan troglodytes. Because the two lines split only about two million years ago (Wolpoff 1996), the similarities are not surprising. Both species live in fission-fusion communities that have their own home ranges, both exhibit hostility when they meet another group, and the males of both species essentially stay in their natal groups whereas the females tend to emigrate (Wrangham and Peterson 1996).
Rating these two species on a despotism-egalitarianism scale is difficult, in part because we humans always have at the back of our minds the idea of finding an “ancestor” who fits with our (often wishful) conception of ourselves as a human animal. It is easy to disagree with Power (1991) about chimpanzees, because they are well studied in the wild and in captivity, and in some cases they have been studied without baiting. Bonobos are not so well studied, even though field workers have observed this species at several sites for as long as two decades (Kano 1992).
A great deal of my work in placing bonobos on Vehrencamp’s political continuum has been accomplished by Wrangham and Peterson (1996). In a chapter entitled “The Gentle Ape,” they comment (p. 205):
On the surface, bonobos have a social life very much like chimpanzees, living in communities, sharing a range with eighty or more others, traveling in various-size parties within the community range, living with their male kin group, and defending their range against outsider males … Among chimpanzees every adult male is dominant to every adult female, and he enjoys his dominance. She must move out of his way, acknowledge him with the appropriate call or gesture, bend to his whim—or risk punishment … But among bonobos, the sexes are codominant. The top female and the top male are equal. The bottom female and the bottom male are equal. In between, your rank depends on who you are, not what sex you are.
“Who you are” is not just a matter of competing individuals, for the authors go on to discuss coalition behavior (Wrangham and Peterson 1996:205–206; see also Kano 1992). They use the example of a testosterone-driven male who, as a young adult, tried to challenge Ude, the second-ranking male in his group. The younger male’s mother was named Aki, and she also ranked high in the group.
One day Aki’s son charged aggressively at Ude, screaming and dragging a branch, swerving away only at the last second. Ude, clearly agitated, slapped his challenger before being calmed by an intervention from the top-ranking male. But Aki’s son charged again. This time Ude chased him but Aki’s son stood his ground. A fight ensued, with some kicking and hitting. The tide turned when Aki joined in. Carrying her screaming baby on her belly, she chased Ude not once but a dozen times. Other females joined in the fray with supportive calls. It wasn’t long before Ude fled. Ten years after that single incident, Ude is still subordinate to Aki’s son: fleeing, presenting, or taking little steps away whenever the two meet.
Female bonobos are “physical” in providing political support to their sons, and each female has female coalition partners who can back up such support. So bonobo males depend on their mothers (and their mothers’ friends) for reinforcement, and they themselves do not form coalitions with other males. With chimpanzees, whereas a male may receive noisy support from his mother in the form of agonistic vocalizations, the coalition partners who will join him actively in a fight are other males.
In Wrangham and Peterson’s (1996) view, this allocation of substantial political power to bonobo females makes for significant differences in agonism levels, differences that might be used to argue that bonobos are significantly less despotic than chimpanzees. Behaviorally, the overall result seems to be a lower level of fighting and wounding, and definitely a far lower level of competition among males for access to sexually receptive females. However, male chimpanzees intensify their competitive mating efforts around the time of ovulation because they are able visually to determine it. Female bonobos apparently conceal their ovulation; therefore the male bonobo has no way of maximizing his reproductive efficiency by competing harder during special windows of opportunity (Wrangham and Peterson 1996). However, male bonobo dominance does come into play prominently in situations of feeding competition. De Waal (1996:244) shows significant differences between captive bonobos and captive chimpanzees, with the bonobos engaging more in forced claims and theft and the chimpanzees engaging more in cofeeding or sharing behavior.
In Demonic Males Wrangham and Peterson are exploring an area of strong interest to educated readers who want to know whether a truly despotic ape—or possibly a gentler version thereof—shares our immediate phylogeny. They hypothesize that chimpanzees may be highly conservative in terms of retaining ancestral features, whereas bonobos could be more of an offshoot species that went its own way ecologically, sexually, and socially. Bonobos do seem to be much less engaged in status rivalry and competition for mates, and certainly are far less involved in male coalitions. This difference tends to make wild bonobos less despotic—but far more involved with coalitions of females. It is difficult to say which species is more despotic with respect to development of coalitions; but if the larger coalitions of chimpanzee females in captivity are brought into the picture, the edge probably goes to Pan troglodytes, not Pan paniscus.
Elsewhere (Boehm 1992) I have suggested extending “coalition theory” (Harcourt and de Waal 1992) to include the macrocoalitions of chimpanzees that take the form of patrols or excursions (Goodall 1986), and also the mobbing of predators (Byrne and Byrne 1988). Territorial behavior of chimpanzees is reasonably well studied (see also Nishida 1979), and it represents an extension of dominance behavior to a special collective realm. With much less research expended on bonobos, the outlines of social dominance behavior when two communities meet are only starting to be understood.
Wrangham and Peterson (1996) report on bonobos in territorial encounters, some of which are directly influenced by provisioning, and because they have carefully summarized the long-term data of ethologists such as Kano (1992), I shall rely on their discussion. When bonobo groups meet, they “run to the border to chase away neighbors. Clashes can result, sometimes leading to bloody wounds. But … no one has seen border patrols, raiding, lethal aggression, or battering of strangers” (Wrangham and Peterson 1996:215–216). Thus, the tentative conclusion is that bonobos are less systematic about defending their resources and more restrained, territorially speaking, than are chimpanzees with their regular patrols and lethal stalking raids.
The contrived encounters of bonobos were as follows. At Wamba, the Japanese primatologist Takayoshi Kano created what proved to be an unintended experiment in nature, baiting bonobos from two different groups with sugarcane right at the frontier of their ranging areas. By chance, the two groups arrived at the same time. Instead of behaving like chimpanzees, with males displaying fiercely and prolongedly before the two groups retreated, the groups approached each other. While the mature males on both sides stayed aloof—a probable sign of male macrocoalition behavior—the females crossed to the other group and copulated both with other females and sometimes with the males.
Thus it appears that chimpanzee tendencies to dominance, expressed by attacking as well as by bluffing, are far stronger in a territorial context than those of bonobos (see also de Waal and Lanting 1997:88–89). To understand this experiment better, it would be useful to know the political and social histories of the two groups in depth, just as it would have been useful to know the histories of the two groups at Gombe which for a time fed together on provisioned bananas and later split and behaved as lethal competitors (Goodall 1986).
These differences of territorial behavior should not weigh too heavily in evaluating the two species on Vehrencamp’s criteria. Wild bonobos have both alpha males and alpha females, and potent female political coalitions. Their low level of mating competition is at least partly explained by the absence of signals of ovulation; bonobos may well be more competitive over food than chimpanzees. Although bonobos probably should be rated as less despotic than chimpanzees, they are despotic, nevertheless. All three African great apes can be placed on the despotic side of the Vehrencamp continuum.
The Human Spectrum
In considering significant varieties of human political society, I will attempt to deal in straightforward behavioral descriptions that parallel accounts of the great apes. I go into considerable detail with respect to the first human category, hunting nomads, because I shall shortly explore the political life of their precursors, the Paleolithic foragers who put the definitive touches on our political nature.
Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers
On a daily basis, we have seen that in bands there appears to be little expression of interpersonal rivalry among the main political actors. This is so even though there can be considerable male domination of females within the household. Still, underlying tensions—especially among male household heads—are far from absent. Serious disputes do arise, and in cases of sexual jealousy they quickly reach the level of homicide. Females too engage in disputes with both males and other females (for instance, Shostak 1981).
In bands, one man’s dominating or controlling another becomes a critical issue at the level of egalitarian ideology. As a practical matter, behaviors in this direction can be harshly sanctioned by the group, which itself is a form of domination. Bands also develop institutions designed to head off serious male conflicts. The cultural specifics vary, from mutually vilifying song contests, to physical competitions in which turns are taken in delivering blows by hand, to purported duels in which the aggrieved party is expected to wound the perpetrator with a spear (Hoebel 1954). The purpose is always to resolve the dispute sufficiently to eliminate the likelihood of the group’s being disturbed by a homicide.
Chapter 4 included examples of typical forager bands exhibiting serious competitive tensions, usually associated with male status rivalry. Disputes can be focused on specific “commodities,” and the prime bone of contention is women, in the context of adultery—a point emphasized by both Fried (1967) and Knauft (1987, 1991). Despite an ethic that strongly condemns homicide within the group, such disputes readily become lethal because hunters are adept at killing large-bodied mammals. A homicide of this sort can easily lead to lethal retaliation by armed kinsmen. Both the original lethal attack and subsequent retaliation by kinsmen qualify as forms of domination behavior. We must keep this in mind when evaluating ethnographic reports citing an everyday absence of male competition.
Overt competition for food usually is not prominent. Sharing systems are kept carefully in place with respect to foods that either come in large packets (Cashdan 1990; Kelly 1995) or are in chronic short supply (Gould 1982). Here too, underlying tensions and outbreaks of conflict can occur. Many ethnographers have remarked on the smoothness of routinized sharing in bands, but a few have emphasized the competitive tensions that accompany it (for example, Peterson 1993). The Hadza seem to be frequently cantankerous as sharers (Blurton-Jones 1984), even though at the level of ethos they believe in meat-sharing in the same way that all hunter-gatherers seem to. The Siriono hunters of South America can be added to the list of “nasty-sharers” (Edgerton 1992:13). They often hunt cooperatively and share on that basis, but overt conflict over food has been expressed straightforwardly.
One day Eantandu was angry with Mbiku, who had hunted coati and given him none. Flushed with anger Eantandu picked up his bow and arrows and departed for the hunt. When he returned about five hours later with a couple of small monkeys his wrath had subsided considerably. He told me that when men are angry they go hunting. If they shoot any game their anger disappears; even if they do not kill anything they return home too tired to be angry. (Holmberg 1950:157)
Holmberg’s published accounts of Siriono behavior are unusually detailed. Another Siriono disagreement over meat illustrates still better the intimate connection between sharing and power politics.
Kwandu, a member of the band and extended family of Aciba-eoko, the chief, was absent for several days with his younger brother on a hunting expedition. On returning to camp, they brought with them about a dozen tortoises of good size. These were tied up with lianas and hung on beams in the house, one or two of them being butchered each day. Aciba-eoko, desiring meat, first made a direct request to Kwandu, but was brushed off and given nothing. Following this he made public remarks without mentioning names that mbia (countrymen) were keeping all the meat to themselves and not giving any to him, the chief. The owners of the tortoises still paid no attention to him. Finally, after about three days, Aciba-eoko, having received nothing, became so angry that he left for the hunt with his family and stayed away for about a week. He returned with considerable roast meat which he distributed to no one else but members of his immediate family. (Holmberg 1950:149)
This second nonsharing incident deserves further attention. Undoubtedly contributing to situational ambiguity was the fact that, in toto, the captured tortoises added up to a large amount of meat—but the meat happened to be in small, living parcels that could be eaten, fresh, over a considerable period. It is possible that the would-be sharer was counting all the meat together and seeing it as part of a variance-reduction plan, whereas the owner chose to see it as a collection of separate small parcels that did not need to be shared. In any event, nepotistically selfish behavior prevailed and the chief’s attempt to dominate was resisted.
The Siriono system of sharing apparently is not fine-tuned at the cultural level—by which I mean that effective customs and rituals have not been set in place and refined over time, in order to avert predictable misunderstandings that come from individuals overperceiving their prerogatives. It is the potential for provocative, socially disruptive behavior of a competitive nature that has led foragers on various continents to invent and refine the amazingly similar “randomization systems” that are designed to defuse a sense of ownership where large amounts of meat are involved. The prevalence of these customs suggests that the underlying problem—competitiveness over food—is widespread. Although foragers usually cooperate quite well, they are competitive nonetheless.
This conclusion about food competition is worth noting when we think about where to place human foragers on Vehrencamp’s continuum. So is the fact that male competition over women (and, to a lesser degree, female competition over men) leads to tensions, quarrels, and homicides. Societally inspired efforts do not eliminate such problems, even though the moral community does its best to head off these conflicts. If the band succeeds reasonably well, then an ethnographer visiting for one or two years may well report low levels of conflict and competition. If the same ethnographer gets to witness a forager community with a serious behavior problem, two kinds of political coalitions may appear. One is the entire moral community as it engages in serious sanctioning, actively dominating the deviant in question. The other is a small male coalition of relatives that can form to avenge a kinsman’s death. It is for this reason that killers predictably leave their band: they know that retaliation is both predictable and difficult to avert.
The most frequent type of power coalition in egalitarian bands consists of the entire adult community coalescing against a deviant. In addition to the proscription of bullying by upstarts, all foragers are opposed to incest, murder within the group, and undue selfish use of deception. Campbell (1975) has shown that these prohibitions are present in all ancient civilizations, and probably in all moral codes everywhere. Let me emphasize that among mobile foragers even moderately despotic behavior among the main political actors is morally proscribed.
When one of these small nomadic, moral communities becomes aroused, it is males and females together who act as a power coalition. This behavior was emphasized in Chapter 1: all the adults line up against deviants who threaten the group’s quality of social life or the individual autonomy of its members (or even their very lives). Often the culprit realizes his adverse position, submits, and is socially rehabilitated. If not, he (or she) pays the price. This use of aggressive, dominant coalitions is universal, as is the submission of most individuals who try to behave dominantly or otherwise become deviant. Usually it is the rank and file who dominate, and the would-be political upstart who submits. Once in a while the tables are turned—temporarily.
Because human foragers exhibit male competition for females, high homicide rates, and substantial overt competitiveness, and because they act aggressively as large power coalitions when they behave as moral communities, I believe that they could be conservatively placed on Vehrencamp’s political continuum somewhere between bonobos and chimpanzees (closer to chimpanzees). If one adds in the occasional domination episodes that occur in bands, the placement would be still closer to the despotic pole.
Acephalous Tribes
We have seen that tribal societies have significantly greater military requirements than hunter-gatherers, and that this characteristic is reflected in the rearing of males. The result is a higher degree of overt male status rivalry, plus some ephemeral delegation of authority to military commanders on the battlefield. Nonetheless, the political situation for males is the same as for egalitarian hunter-gatherers. They are “equals” who are willing to tolerate some “firsts”—but only if such outstanding men do not try to take away the autonomy of the average main political actor.
Premaritally, male competition for mating partners usually is not overt, direct, and physical, as it is with chimpanzees or mountain gorillas. Parental manipulation or female choice is likely. After marriage, however, and in spite of group disapproval of adultery, male-male competition over females can become dramatic and lead to serious quarrels. This behavior is similar to that of foragers, and we have seen that there is a propensity to feud rather than rely on flight and avoidance.
Conflict resolution is likely to be more effective with tribesmen, however. Within tribes, competition over food sources is no longer mediated by pervasive sharing, for often tribesmen produce and eat their food as household units. To regulate natural resources, cultural rules pertain to property rights, a political and economic assessment that holds across a wide variety of tribal social organization types (Sahlins 1968; see also Service 1962; Fried 1967). Most tribes compete directly as groups, whether through warfare or raiding. When they engage in conflict, very often their political coalitions are patrilineally based and involve associations of males who ideologically consider themselves to be “brothers” (Thoden van Veltzen and van Wetering 1960). The result is a strong tendency to fight together, and to retaliate for homicides as a unit. Thus, while leadership remains muted in tribal societies, coalitions of males are quite conspicuous; competition and domination are prominent at the intergroup level, just as they are with chimpanzees.
The fact that small tribal segments can merge and function as much larger political units does not really change this overall political characterization. The same limitations on leadership and intermale domination prevail when larger political segments are activated, for tribal segments always have equivalent status; there may be an overall “chieftain,” chosen to lead a temporary confederation of segments, but he is carefully defined as a mere first among equals. His role is not dominant.
If the only humans we knew were tribesmen rather than foragers, placement on Vehrencamp’s scale would move a bit toward the despotic pole, perhaps quite close to the chimpanzee. But tribesmen suppress many kinds of within-group competition, along with strong leadership, and therefore they fail to develop anything like a linear dominance hierarchy in spite of strong tendencies to compete and dominate.
Big-Man Societies
Big-man societies are basically egalitarian tribal societies that permit men adept at trading to develop personal economic empires and throw their political weight around a little (Godelier 1986). Apparently, their behavior is tolerated because of the rivalry between groups; such men help their entire group to compete with others at the level of prestige. Big Men tend to be large-scale feast givers, and conspicuous consumption is the name of the political game they are playing. They end up creating a caricature of the humble generosity that leaders of bands and tribes everywhere are expected to demonstrate. In being hypergenerous, they lose much of their humility.
Permitting this role to develop may lead to some ethnographically noticeable political authority, but in practice these trading empires tend to be very much a product of individual skills. They also tend to be unstable. Just as Schneider (1979) suggested that livestock provide a statistically precarious base for the growth of economic power, Big Men are subject to similar vagaries. Their empires are built upon networks of debts and obligations, and by their nature these seem not to stay in equilibrium forever. The more stringent and predictable limit on development of authority is the egalitarian ethos: we have cited assassinations of Big Men when they begin to be too assertive (for example, by taking over other men’s wives). Like tribal societies and bands, Big-Man societies are kept intrinsically egalitarian (for the males) by a power coalition composed of the entire rank and file, which sets the limits on how much a Big Man can throw his weight around. The limits on acting the bully may be more relaxed than in other tribal societies; still, the entire group remains firmly in control when it comes to outright domination by a Big Man who has upstart tendencies. Big-Man societies are a special instance of tribal society, one that by definition lacks social stratification and hereditary leadership, and has an egalitarian ethos.
Sedentary Foragers
I have referred in passing to sedentary foragers such as the Kwakiutl, who are nonegalitarian. It is they and some of their northwest-coast neighbors, and a few other people like the Calusa in Florida and the Ainu in Japan, that Kelly (1995) refers to as nonegalitarian hunter-gatherers. The exceptions are important, for they show that hunting-and-gathering is not always associated with egalitarianism, and also because extant sedentary foragers may help in interpreting the political effects of an increasingly sedentary life on foraging adaptations in the Neolithic (Price and Brown 1985).
Woodburn (1982) has drawn a sharp distinction between foragers whose economies are “immediate-return”—meaning that they do not engage in long-term food storage and are politically egalitarian—and “delayed-return” systems with storage, competition, and considerable social hierarchy. The Kwakiutl fit this model well: they live in the midst of rich resources and therefore can stay in a permanent village. Along with social classes and slaves, they have intensive warfare and strong hereditary chiefs, and they are anything but egalitarian in their outlook. Because villages own specific resources and go to war, it is not easy for low-ranking commoners to leave. Slaves remain heavily exploited with little possibility of exit.
In thinking about Woodburn’s delayed-return subtype, I do find a problem. In northern California are instances of sedentary, warlike, food-storing hunter-gatherers, such as the Tolowa and Coastal Yurok, who remain politically egalitarian with weak leaders (Gould 1982). Aside from their egalitarianism, these village communities are quite different from nomadic bands. They neither hunt together nor share their large-game kills, but tend to function economically as independent families. They also engage in degrees of overt social competition that would be frowned on in nomadic groups.
These sedentary foragers can remain politically egalitarian even though they exhibit noteworthy levels of social competition and engage far less in sharing (because individual families can depend on storage). Their natural resources are usually abundant, as with the despotic Kwakiutl. By contrast, Kwakiutl-type sedentary foragers seem to have gone well beyond the Big-Man societal pattern. They have lost the egalitarian ethos and established authoritative hereditary leadership.
These political variants do not seem to have been determined exclusively by availability and type of natural resources or by storage of food. They do suggest a general tendency for sedentary life, coupled with population expansion, to spur an increase in competitive behavior and social hierarchy that may or may not coexist with egalitarianism. If we consider only the Kwakiutl type of sedentary forager, it is obvious that a few hunter-gatherers come closer to the chimpanzee degree of despotism than tribesmen do. In effect, these are “forager chiefdoms”: leadership and high rank are hereditary, and social classes exist.
Chiefdoms
Service (1975) describes chiefdoms in terms of voluntary patron-client relationships, which keep the patrons in a position of economic and political power. Chiefdoms are difficult to delineate politically, for their forms are manifold and the degree of authority residing in the leaders varies considerably. Firth’s (1936) classic study of the island of Tikopia examines a chiefdom that is not overly centralized politically. Tikopian chiefs have some authority, but it is far from being absolute or even very strong. Yet, they are expected to live better than their fellows, and because they have more wives their reproductive advantages can be substantial. Although they receive submissive deference in public, politically these men are far from being serious despots. They are susceptible to being deposed, and they are kept in check by fonos—popular assemblies that arrive at major decisions by consensus, even though they take into serious account the opinions of their chief. Firth (1949) emphasizes that chiefs in Tikopia are governed by public opinion, and must remain sensitive to it. Even in the absence of an egalitarian ethos, the moral community tends to govern its governors to a considerable extent.
A more developed chiefdom was that of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia (Malinowski 1929). They had a paramount chief who ruled over a number of satellite villages, each of which had its own chief. The egalitarian ethos definitely was absent: as one example, commoners could not tower over their chief, and when he sat outside, his chair was placed on a raised platform so that people would not have to stoop as they passed. His authority was greater than in Tikopia, but he too had to abide by tradition or else face rebellious forces.
We have already met the eighteenth-century Montenegrin Serbs who, while resisting an empire, moved from a strictly egalitarian segmentary tribal system to hereditary leadership at the confederation level. Because tribal opinion was divided, eventually a succession of hereditary paramount chiefs were able to gradually increase their power, and despotic practices increasingly were tolerated. The result, after a coup by an exceedingly strong leader, was a despotic kingdom in which the leader acquired fearsome coercive power—far more than any alpha-male chimpanzee.
In some ways, a pristine chiefdom is similar to a chimpanzee community. The leader has many advantages, and other heads of household also are socially unequal, yet the leader cannot boss the entire community unless he (or she) is in accord with group inclinations. The leader also has significant conflict-resolution duties and can exert some authority if intervention is needed, though the use of force is not possible. Chiefdoms seem to me to be on a par with chimpanzees on Vehrencamp’s political scale.
Primitive Kingdoms
In delegating legitimized power to their rulers, people in primitive kingdoms go far beyond what takes place in chiefdoms (Service 1975). The egalitarian ethos is long gone, having been replaced by a hierarchical worldview by which people accept major differences that not only separate commoners from the royal line, but may include an intermediate noble class as well as slaves at the bottom. In terms of the popular will, such societies are not supposed to be oppressively despotic. But when legitimate rulers are given control of full-time military specialists like bodyguards or standing armies, they have at their fingertips an instrument of raw coercive power. The fact that their lineages are exalted also helps them to push their political prerogatives.
As with chiefdoms, one legitimate use of power in these kingdoms is to resolve or forcibly suppress active competition between factions. Another is to lead the society in directions that make sense to the leader, to a point where people begin to react strongly to either poor decision-making or abuse of power. While I must emphasize that nothing like an egalitarian ethos prevails in such societies, it is possible that a coalition of all or most of the rank and file may revolt and overthrow a seriously despotic king. Beattie (1967) has shown that both chiefdoms and kingdoms in Africa have checks on the abuse of power. Some are formal or institutionalized, such as rendering kings unable to hold property; others are spontaneous, such as engaging in popular revolts.
How do primitive kingdoms rate on the Vehrencamp scale? The leader has far more power to manipulate his group’s destiny than does a chimpanzee alpha male, so that social dominance hierarchy is very strongly expressed. The human potential for despotism is much in evidence.
Ancient Civilizations and Modern States
What has been said about primitive kingdoms holds also for ancient civilizations and states—which added writing, impressive bureaucracies, and a high degree of economic specialization with social class distinctions (Service 1975). In terms of a general political typology, modern nations are fairly similar to primitive kingdoms. Both have strongly centralized polities with abundant coercive force available to the rulers, and both can suppress most factional strife—even though civil wars may arise. As with primitive kingdoms, both nondemocratic modern nations and despotic ancient civilizations vest enormous power in their leaders, and tend to provide few institutionalized means of controlling tendencies to tyranny. Ancient and modern democracies may temper individual power with checks and balances, but centralized power still exists and is backed by the coercive force supplied by professional policemen or soldiers. In Vehrencamp’s sense, both ancient civilizations and modern nations are highly despotic because the leaders can govern strongly, with abundant coercive power. Although this is somewhat less true of democracies, they too are more similar to primitive kingdoms than to chiefdoms.
Rating the Hominoids
Chimpanzees appear to be quite despotic in all of the varied environments in which the species is distributed. Mountain gorillas seem to be almost as despotic as chimpanzees; but rating them against chimpanzees or bonobos becomes rather subjective because we are comparing harem structures with fission-fusion communities. Bonobos seemingly are notably less despotic than chimpanzees, a species to which they are frequently compared in terms of social organization. Among primates, they nevertheless appear to be on the despotic side of the scale.
If we restrict ourselves to obvious political phenotype, humans appear to be capable of extreme adaptive modification. At one extreme are egalitarian foragers; at the other, despotic kingdoms and modern dictatorships. If we look below the surface, however, the fact that egalitarians are obliged to strongly suppress both competition and social hierarchy means that the range of modifications is not so broad. While I have placed foragers and tribesmen somewhere between bonobos and chimpanzees, primitive kingdoms and tyrannical modern states are far more despotic than any ape. Ethologically, humans are definitely a despotic species. But this discussion leaves us with a question: Which are the real human political animals?
Is Human Nature Despotic?
If we change gears to speak of human nature, one of Fried’s questions can now be answered. There is, in fact, a “universal drive to dominance” in our species, in the sense that we readily learn both domination and submission behaviors and that such behaviors tend to emerge in situations of competition (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979, 1989). “Drive to dominance” is, of course, old-fashioned terminology. But whether it is called a “predilection” or a “genetic preparation” (E. O. Wilson 1975), or simply “an innate disposition,” we are talking about a behavior that, because of our genes, is more readily learned in our particular species than it might be in another.
Particularly in the interactions of males with males and males with females, humans are prone to dominate and prone to submit. Dominance and submission are constants that run across all the societal types we have discussed. Sometimes the subordinates dominantly hold down their would-be alphas, who either submit to them or are executed. Sometimes a tyrant gains absolute control of a very large human society and personally dominates its members. Often, as in chiefdoms, some kind of compromise is reached, by which power is shared more or less equally by leaders and followers. In all such contexts, domination and subordination are prominent underlying mechanisms, and often they become quite obvious when conflicts arise between leaders and followers.
Human nature surely is despotic in Vehrencamp’s terms, particularly if we focus on the males; but the forms that our hierarchies take are quite varied—precisely because sometimes the subordinates take firm charge of the group, sometimes they share their power with fairly authoritative leaders, and sometimes they are subjugated or enslaved. Our despotic human nature is flexible, and it leads to many permutations that may be influenced by local environments but that also are part of local or regional history.
My last chapter will be devoted to human nature, with a focus on its expression in males. This venture into political typology tells us already that human nature is given to competition and that dominance and submission are natural tendencies of our species, even though most of the domination is accomplished by males. So we come now to the second human-nature question, the one that Fried posed but did not explore: Is there anything like a universal drive to parity? In the next chapter I shall make the case that the seeds of egalitarianism were in place millions of years ago.