Basic patterns of human societies

Families, households, ecology, technology, connections, states.

Bosco Verticale, Milan: Victor, Unsplash.

As we humans have the most biologically expensive children (in length and level of required care and attention) in the biosphere, a fundamental structuring pattern of all human societies is transferring risks away from child-rearing and transferring resources to child-rearing.

Hence families (parents and children) are the basic social unit of human societies.

Families originally organised within foraging bands and, as sedentism developed, households. Foraging bands enable the sharing of resources and risks.

Households, operating out of a dwelling that provides shelter, mean sharper, less fluid, daily demarcation between different families. Shifting to households requires sufficiently stable food sources so that the subsistence-risk sharing of the foraging band is no longer optimal.

If dwellings are grouped, sedentism also creates neighbourhoods. The creation of neighbourhoods tends to increase the role of peer groups, and reduce the dominance of parents, in child-development.

The next basic structuring pattern come from the ecology, as that determines (given our biological capacities) the potential pattern of risks and resources. Potential pattern, because we are a technological (i.e. tool-using) species and have been for our entire existence as a genus. So, the operating technology applied to the ecology is the second fundamental shaper of human societies.

As our technological capacity has developed, the possibilities and constraints of technology become more important, those of ecology less.

The third structuring pattern is how communication and coordination is scaled-up. Originally, this was typically kin-groups (“clans”), ritual-language groups (“tribes”), an individual’s friendship-gift networks (which, among foragers, can range up to 200km), plus ritual (“secret” or “cult”) societies.

Property, based originally on conventions of acknowledged possession, emerges out of interactions within and across social groupings. While foragers often have exchange networks, the shift to households, with their sharper differentiations, often expands exchange activities.

So, raising animal herds on pastures encourages patrilineal kin groups, as men (not encumbered by children) do the animal herding, so animals are passed down from father to son. Moreover,  having teams of related (so raised together) warriors to defend said animal herds (or steal more) is a powerful social advantage.

Conversely, hoe farming (horticulture) is often dominated by women. Hence such societies often have matrilineal kin groups, as farming skills (or even land) are passed down from mother to daughter.

Introducing the plough typically shifts farming to a male activity (one does not plough with children in tow), and so patrilineal systems, with land going from father to son. (Or to adopted-into-the-family son-in-law.)

Some patrilineal systems even have “female husbands”, where a no-surviving-brothers daughter becomes a “son” to carry on their father’s lineage. They take one or more wives (who can only have sexual partners that are approved by their female husband). Their children are deemed to be of the children of the female husband, so continue the lineage. Other patrilineal societies can have adult women take on a (celibate) male persona to be clan head, if there is a lack of available adult men.

These examples bring out the difference between gender (a cultural identity) and sex (a biological reality). Female husbands also bring out how much fatherhood is a social relationship.

Indeed, most human societies suppress casual sexual liaisons (i.e. short-term mating) in order to protect marriage (i.e. long-term mating) and so create and sustain the social relationship of fatherhood. Precisely because human children are so biologically expensive, we have evolved to pair bond and to have two parents raise children.

Once chiefdoms, and especially states, develop, they dominate social coordination. Their tribute/taxation systems extract resources before they can be applied directly to supporting babies.

State apparats have therefore dominated the creation and extraction of surplus. Surplus being resources in excess of subsistence.

Only in the most mercantile, including mass slave-owning, of pre-industrial societies have states not dominated the creation and extraction of surplus. Even those societies can only be so mercantile, including having mass slavery, because of the ordering efforts of the surplus-creating-and-extracting state apparat. Firms that are not simply households can far more readily emerge, for instance.

The default relationship between the state apparat and the territory from which it extracts its surplus has been a colonising one. The state apparat’s ordering role making such extraction both possible and (somewhat) tolerable. It takes considerable, systematic, effort to make the state apparat accountable to, and serve, the wider society.

It is thus a fundamental analytical mistake to see the state as a “reflection” of the society it creates-and-extracts surplus from. If a society is ruled by a state, the state is a fundamental ordering structure for that society.

Because the state apparat dominates the creation, extraction and use of surplus, and the ordering of society so that such extraction and use be achieved, the state apparat also dominates the creation of class structures.

Societies without states or chiefs do not have much in the way of class structures, excepting the role of captives/slaves. It is state societies that have complex class structures because they have the level of surplus extraction and extraction to support such class structures.

This is not to say that foraging societies, or other stateless/chief-less societies, do not display hierarchies. They certainly do. But their hierarchies are far too individual-based and fluid to count as “class”.

Bureaucracies, both state and religious, tend to hoard authority, so have often sought to supplant parental authority. We can see this currently with the use of “trans” by educational and social work bureaucracies to undermine parental authority.

The Catholic Church has a long history of trying to control what constitutes a family. Various messianic movements have attempted to replace the family. The family wins in the end, however, because there is no practical, mass alternative for raising future generations.

The triad of family, techno-ecology and state are the fundamental structuring elements of any state society, with intermediate patterns of connection and coordination operating within (and across) that triad.

References

Catherine M. Cameron, Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World, University of Nebraska Press, 2016.

Michael J. R. Crawford, An Expressive Theory of Possession, Hart Publishing, 2020.

Bryan Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and the Origins of Social Complexity, Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Hillard Kaplan, Jane Lancaster & Arthur Robson, ‘Embodied Capital and the Evolutionary Economics of the Human Life Span’, in Carey, James R. and Shripad Tuljapurkar (eds.), Life Span: Evolutionary, Ecological, and Demographic Perspectives, Supplement to Population and Development Review, vol. 29, 2003. New York: Population Council, 152-182.

Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum, Cambridge University Press, [1995] 2013.

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Zvika Neeman, “Geography, Transparency and Institutions”, American Political Science Review, August 2017, Vol. 111, Issue 3, 622-636.

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Luigi Pascali, ‘The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?,’Journal of Political Economy, April 2022, 130, 1091-1144.

Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, Free Press, [1982] 2010.

Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (eds.) Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Harvard University Press, [1982] 2018.

Emmanuel Todd, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, (trans. David Garroch), Basil Blackwell, [1983] 1985.

M. “Lorenzo” Warby, ‘Why Ritual,’ Lorenzo from Oz Substack, Aug 14 2022.

Why Ritual?

Polly Wiessner, ‘Hunting, healing, and hxaro exchange: A long-term perspective on !Kung (Ju/’hoansi) large-game hunting,’ Evolution and Human Behavior, 2002, 23, 407–436.