3

The tyranny of cousins

Disputes over the fact and nature of human social evolution; family- or band-level social organization, and the transition to tribalism; an introduction to lineages, agnation, and other basic anthropological concepts

Since Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754), there has been a vast amount of theorizing about the origins of early human institutions. This was driven first in the late nineteenth century by the accumulation of empirical knowledge about existing primitive societies by founders of the new discipline of anthropology, such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Tylor.¹ Morgan did field research on the dwindling populations of indigenous North American peoples and developed an elaborate classificatory system for describing their forms of kinship, a system he broadened to apply to European prehistory as well. In his book Ancient Society, he devised an evolutionary scheme that divided human history into three stages—savagery, barbarism, and civilization—through which, he argued, all human societies passed.

Morgan was read by Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels, who used the American anthropologist’s ethnographic studies to develop a theory of the origins of private property and the family that later became gospel in the Communist world.² Together, Marx and Engels propagated the most famous developmental theory of modern times: they posited the existence of a series of evolutionary stages—primitive communism, feudalism, bourgeois society, and true communism—all driven by an underlying conflict between social classes. The misconceptions and oversimplifications of the Marxist development model led generations of later scholars down blind alleys, looking for an “Asiatic mode of production” or trying to find “feudalism” in India.

The second important impetus to theorizing about early political development was the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 and the elaboration of his theory of natural selection. It made logical sense to apply the principles of biological evolution to social evolution, which theorists like Herbert Spencer did at the beginning of the twentieth century.³ Spencer saw human societies as engaging in a competition for survival, in which superior ones came to dominate their inferiors. Non-European societies were ones whose development was stunted or arrested. Indeed, development theory in the immediate post-Darwin period succeeded in justifying the existing colonial world order, with northern Europeans occupying a place at the top of a global hierarchy that stretched through various shades of yellow and brown down to black Africans at the bottom.⁴

The judgmental and racist character of evolutionary theorizing led to a counterrevolution in the 1920s whose impact is still felt in anthropology and cultural studies departments around the world. The great anthropologist Franz Boas argued that human behavior was not rooted in biology but was socially constructed to the core. In one famous study, he used empirical data from an analysis of immigrant head sizes to prove that much of what social Darwinists attributed to race was actually the product of environment and culture. Boas made the case that the study of early societies needed to be purged of all value judgments about higher and lower forms of social organization. Methodologically, ethnographers should immerse themselves in the societies they examined, evaluating their internal logic and divesting themselves of prejudices based on their own cultural backgrounds. Through the practice of what Clifford Geertz later labeled “thick description,” different societies could only be described, not compared to one another or ranked in any way.⁵ Boas’s students Alfred Kroeber, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict then went on to reshape the discipline of cultural anthropology in a nonjudgmental, relativistic, and decidedly nonevolutionary direction.

Early evolutionary theories, including those of Marx and Engels, had other problems. They often posited a relatively linear and rigid progression of social forms, in which one stage of development necessarily preceded the one following, and in which one factor (like Marx’s “mode of production”) determined the characteristics of the stage as a whole. With accumulating knowledge of actual primitive societies, it became increasingly clear that the evolution of political complexity was not linear: a given stage of development often contained characteristics of earlier ones, and there were multiple dynamic mechanisms moving societies from one stage to another. In fact, as we will see in later chapters, an early stage of development is never fully superseded by later ones. China made a transition from kinship-based forms of organization to state-level organization more than three thousand years ago, and yet complex kinship organizations still characterize parts of Chinese society today.

Human societies are so diverse that it is very difficult to make truly universal generalizations from the comparative study of cultures. Anthropologists delight in discovering obscure societies that violate purportedly general laws of social development. This does not mean, however, that regularities and similarities in evolutionary forms do not exist across different societies.