Egalitarian Societies

[Tamrin]

Types of societies

[Introduction - Mesa Community College - Linked Above]

Anthropologists tend to classify different societies according to the degree to which different groups within a society have unequal access to advantages such as resources, prestige or power. (Useful definitions.) Virtually all societies have developed some degree of inequality among their people through the process of social stratification-the division of members of a society into strata (or levels) with unequal wealth, prestige or power. Differences lie in how societies treat the inequalities. Some may downplay them so they become transparent and insignificant (egalitarian societies) while others will accent inequalities (ranked and class-based societies). Three different types of societies can generally recognized: egalitarian societies, ranked societies and class-based societies.

Egalitarian societal members tend to treat each other as equals. Wealth differences are few as is the amount of power available to any individual or group. The people possess norms that emphasize sharing and ideals of interpersonal equality. This is not to say that stratification is non-existent in these societies. In comparison with nonegalitarian societies, however, stratification is relatively insignificant. Even when someone like a bigman is present, prestige is important and linked to redistribution. However, the bigman gives more than he receives as his role as a redistributor is defined. If he hordes or possesses too much, he will lose the recognition as a bigman. In effect, he is a member of society as an equal who has a defined role that carries prestige but not wealth and recognition but not status. (See reading on egalitarian hierarchies.)

In ranked societies people are divided into hierarchically ordered groups that differ in terms of prestige, but not significantly in terms of access to resources or power. Within this context it is possible to identify persons we can label as chiefs whose inherited position and prestige is often linked to the redistribution of goods.

In class-based societies people are divided into hierarchically ordered groups that differ in terms of access not only to prestige, but also to resources and power. Western capitalist societies have distinct classes (e.g. upper class, middle class, poor), but mobility amongst the classes sometimes occurs through activities such as education, marriage or hard work. For similar reasons to those mentioned above, it is not appropriate to describe the Net as a class-based society.

[maximus]

LOL, intellectual woo.

No such animal as an egalitarian society, you just described nanny state socialism. "Redistribution" of resources my eye!

[Tamrin]

Jan 3, 2012 13:55:37 GMT 10 Tamrin said:

I ... have difficulty with your insistence of hierarchy of some form being universal. Firstly, I suggest we need to be more specific: What sort of hierarchy? Aristocracy, meritocracy, theocracy, ethnocracy, bureaucracy, plutocracy, democracy, etc.

Secondly, I would argue that hierarchy arises from the division of labour common to civilizations, i.e. the culture of cities and of societies with cities. In Australian Aboriginal societies there was no hierarchy (apart from a general deference to elders). European settlers sought their leaders in vain and finally more-or-less arbitrarily assigned “chiefs” and distinguished them with ridiculous collar plates.

While hierarchical societies may generally be more efficient, displacing or converting others, this points to pragmatic competitive factors rather than innate psychological factors. For this reason we need to look beyond extant societies and also consider those which had once been.

Jan 3, 2012 19:57:00 GMT 10 Tamrin said:

As for the Aboriginal deference to elders, when we consider the totality of an individual’s life, there is no difference. Provided they survive, each child becomes an adult and each adult becomes an elder. Deference is appropriate to elders because of their knowledge acquired from having survived diverse challenges (fire, flood, famine, inter-tribal conflict, etc.), some of which may only occur once or twice in a generation.

[Tamrin]

The Malaysian Semai:

The Semai are horticulturalists who have a gift economy. They are among the indigenous peoples of Malaysia (see Orang Asli) who have been pushed into the hills and mountains by later, more technologically powerful incoming peoples. They have no police and no government per se. According to Dentan, adults appear to be controlled primarily by public opinion. The Semai themselves say "There is no authority here but embarrassment." Although popular and verbally facile individuals are influential in public affairs, the Semai have no formal leaders.

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There are two major reasons for the importance of age in Semai social organization. The first is that in a society with no written tradition and little oral tradition wisdom consists largely of the lifelong accumulation of personal experience. The older a Semai is, the more he knows and the greater his expertise at dealing with his fellows. Such wisdom merits respect. Second, … young people and young married couples frequently move around from settlement to settlement. Eventually, however, they settle down in one place. It is therefore the older, settled married couples who supply stability and continuity to a Semai settlement or large household. By virtue of this position they win the respect of the younger people.

At first it seems as if Semai communities are run by a council of elders. There is in fact a Semai word for “elder” (rana’) which comes from the same root as the word for “old” (ənra’). The elders have no authority to enforce their decisions, however, and the variety of ways in which the Semai calculate age often makes it hard to tell just who the elders are.

The fact that the Semai respect the elders does not mean that they have to obey them, any more than a child has to obey his parent if he [is] bood [reluctant]. A Semai takes heed of what his elders say. In the Semai phrase, he “hears” them. He does not interrupt when they are speaking, nor does he address them familiarly. No Semai, for example, would talk about sex to someone in his father’s generation. On the other hand, after listening respectfully to them, he may reject their advice. If they press the point, he may say, “I don’t hear you.” Although a senior may have great influence over some of his juniors, he cannot order them to do anything they do not want to do.

Community leadership provides a fine example of the sort of misunderstanding that has occurred between the Semai and their non-Semai neighbours. In the old days, a settlement had no formal leaders, although there were influential elders who could sometimes persuade people to follow their suggestions. The office of headman is a new one, inadvertently created by non-Semai to serve their own interests. With the cessation of the slave trade the Semai came to have more and more peaceful contacts with non-Semai, especially in the west, where non-Semai were far more numerous. To handle such contacts the Semai relied on one of the elders who could speak Malay and who was brave enough to deal with mai (non-Semai). The non-Semai misunderstood this man’s position in the settlement, thinking of him as if he were a Malay headman. They called him “headman” and treated him as if he had some authority over the people for whom he was the spokesman. At first, of course, he had no such authority.

At the turn of the century the Sultan of Perak began to assert Malay authority over the Semai by giving certain west Semai elders fancy titles and “letters of authority” (surat kuasa) that acknowledged them as “headmen.” During the Communist insurgency in the early 1950s the British extended this system to the east Semai in hopes of gaining control over them. The first trained anthropologist to study the Senoi-speaking peoples, the lat Pat Noone, had a low opinion of the surat huasa. “It is,” he wrote in an unpublished report to the government, “merely a makeshift piece of paper designed to delude the Sakai [Semai] into thinking that they are secure.” For the east Semai, however, these letters have taken on a magical potency as talismans against the possible malevolence of non-Semai. The result is that the influence of the elder given a surat kuasa has increased, while the influence on the other elders has declined. People now say, “I don’t hear you, you have no surat,” and a headman relies heavily on his surat to assert his authority.

Even with a surat, a Semai headman is merely the most senior, in terms of prestige, of a group of influential men, not an autocrat.. He keeps the peace by conciliation rather than coercion. He must be personally respected as well as having a surat. Otherwise people will drift away from him or gradually stop paying attention to him. Moreover, the Semai recognize only two or three occasions on which he can assert his authority: dealing as a representative of his people with non-Semai; mediating a quarrel, if invited by the quarrelling parties to do so but not otherwise; and, in the west, selecting and apportioning land for fields. On all other occasions he has no more authority than any other elder. Furthermore, most of the time a good headman gauges the general feeling about an issue and bases his decision on that, so that he is more a spokesman for public opinion than a molder of it.

In short, although outsiders have introduced a position of authority into the Semai band, the authority is diluted, and a Semai can ignore it entirely by moving to another band or settlement. The ability of one person to constrain the actions of another is limited.

DENTON, Robert Knox, THE SEMAI: A Nonviolent People of Malaya,
(Stanford University’s Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology),
1968, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, pp. 65/70.

[Tamrin]

Hadza: Last hunter-gatherers of the African savanna

About a thousand Hadza live in their traditional homeland, a broad plain encompassing shallow, salty Lake Eyasi and sheltered by the ramparts of the Great Rift Valley. Some have moved close to villages and taken jobs as farmhands or tour guides. But approximately one-quarter of all Hadza, including those in Onwas's camp, remain true hunter-gatherers. They have no crops, no livestock, no permanent shelters. They live just south of the same section of the valley in which some of the oldest fossil evidence of early humans has been found. Gene­tic testing indicates that they may represent one of the primary roots of the human family tree—perhaps more than 100,000 years old.

What the Hadza appear to offer—and why they are of great interest to anthropologists—is a glimpse of what life may have been like before the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Anthro­pologists are wary of viewing contemporary hunter-gatherers as "living fossils," says Frank Marlowe, a Florida State University professor of anthropology who has spent the past 15 years studying the Hadza. Time has not stood still for them. But they have maintained their foraging lifestyle in spite of long exposure to surrounding agriculturalist groups, and, says Marlowe, it's possible that their lives have changed very little over the ages.

Hadza camps are loose affiliations of relatives and in-laws and friends. Each camp has a few core members—Onwas's two sons, Giga and Ngaola, are often with him—but most others come and go as they please. The Hadza recognize no official leaders. Camps are traditionally named after a senior male (hence, Onwas's camp), but this honor does not confer any particular power. Individual autonomy is the hallmark of the Hadza. No Hadza adult has authority over any other. None has more wealth; or, rather, they all have no wealth. There are few social obligations—no birthdays, no religious holidays, no anniversaries.

[Tamrin]

Chachapoya

One of the least understood ancient cultures in South America, the Chachapoya lived in a vast territory stretching between the Huallaga and Marañon rivers within the headwaters of the Peruvian Amazon.

Literally translated as ‘the people of the clouds’, the Chachapoya arose between AD 900 and AD 1450 in this region dominated by the humid cloud forests of the eastern Andean slopes. With their distinctive circular architecture and zig-zag artistic motifs, this strongly egalitarian society of over 500,000 people capitalized on their ability to control the trade routes between the cultures of the Amazon and Andes.