Chapter 14 of my book Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997) discusses the evolution of societies from bands to states according to the classification used in my present book, while Johnson and Earle (2000, cited above) discuss those transitions in more detail and with a more finely divided classification of societies. Classic accounts of the classification of human societies include two books by Elman Service: Primitive Social Organization (New York: Random House, 1962) and Origins of the State and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1975).
Some classic books of anthropology that provide examples of the different approaches mentioned in my text to explain differences among human societies are as follows: John Bodley, The Power of Scale: A Global History Approach (London: Sharpe, 2003); Timothy Earle, Bronze Age Economics: The Beginnings of Political Economies (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002); Timothy Earle, ed., Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (New York: Random House, 1979); Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972); Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York: Crowell, 1968); Claude Leví-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Doubleday, 1963); Julian Steward, Theory of Culture Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955); Alfred Kroeber, The Nature of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
Kim Hill et al., “Co-residence patterns in hunter-gatherer societies show unique human social structure,” Science 331: 1286–1289 (2011) analyze the patterns of who is actually related to whom in 32 present-day foraging bands.
The quotation on page 477, about the difficulties of interpreting field observations of modern traditional societies, comes from page 15 of Ian Keen’s 2004 book cited above.
Pioneering studies of methodologically rigorous oral history are two books by Jan Vansina: Oral Tradition: a Study in Historical Methodology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965) and Oral Tradition as History (London: James Currey, 1985). For readers interested in exploring some fascinating aspects of societal variation that I do not discuss, thereby earning myself the gratitude of readers for reducing the length of this already long book, one suggestion is Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why (New York: Free Press, 2003). On his page 43 Nisbett briefly discusses cognitive differences between hunter-gatherers, traditional farming peoples, and industrial peoples. Joseph Henrich et al., eds., Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) discuss differences among traditional and industrial societies in their sense of fairness, reciprocity, and pursuit of self-interest.
For a detailed case study illustrating the difficulties of transferring one society’s practices and lessons to another society, see Elizabeth Watson, Living Terraces in Ethiopia: Konso Landscape, Culture, and Development (Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2009).
Sources of knowledge about traditional societies
On pages 23–24 I briefly summarized our four sources of information, blurring into each other and each with its own advantages and disadvantages, about traditional societies. For readers (especially scholars) interested in learning more about these various sources, I now provide a more extended discussion.
The most obvious method, and the source of most of the information in this book, is to send trained social or biological scientists to visit or live among a traditional people, and to carry out a study focusing on some specific topic. The scientists variously identify themselves as practitioners of different disciplines, including anthropologists, biologists, economists, ethnographers, geneticists, historians, linguists, physicians, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists. The authors publish their results as scientific articles or books, often frame their study at the outset in terms of some particular question or hypothesis to be tested, and often (especially nowadays) gather quantitative data to be presented in tables of numbers. As applied to traditional human societies, this is the scientific approach that has evolved over centuries as the best approach for obtaining reliable knowledge of the real world, whether it’s the world of human societies, or else the worlds of bacteria, molecules, rocks, or galaxies.
Two main types of difficulty have arisen in applying this approach to the study of traditional human societies. Naturally, these difficulties do not invalidate such studies; they merely need to be borne in mind in interpreting the conclusions, and they explain why we resort to other sources of information as well. The Australian anthropologist Ian Keen introduced his book on Aboriginal Australian societies by summarizing these difficulties as follows: “The main issues of interpretation arising from the work of professionally trained anthropologists are that they are late in colonial/post-colonial trajectories, and particular paradigms strongly shape (and limit) their interpretations. However, within their fields of interest these works tend to be the most thorough and systematic.”
Keen’s warning about studies late in colonial/post-colonial trajectories refers to a dilemma inherent in cultural anthropology, analogous to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in physics. That principle states, in effect, that any physical measurement inevitably perturbs the system being studied and thereby introduces uncertainty into what the true value would have been if the system had not been perturbed. (Specifically in particle physics, the principle states that it’s impossible to measure simultaneously the exact values of both a particle’s position and its velocity.) To appreciate the corresponding dilemma in cultural anthropology, recall that modern anthropological studies of Aboriginal Australia began in the 20th century, and ethnographic accounts began in the 19th century before the rise of modern professional anthropology. However, Europeans had already landed in Australia in 1616 and founded their first settlement in 1788, while Macassans (Indonesian fishermen) had regularly been visiting northern Australia for many centuries before European arrival, and unidentified Austronesian people from Indonesia somehow introduced dogs (dingoes) and possibly other life forms and technologies into Australia several thousand years ago.
Modern studies of Aboriginal Australians have thus been of societies radically changed from their pre-European or pre-Macassan condition, because most of the population had already been killed by European-introduced and perhaps also Macassan-introduced diseases, conquered and subjected to the control of Euro-Australian state government, prevented from exercising traditional fire management (i.e., burning) of their landscape, driven off their prime lands targeted for European settlement, and deprived of part of their subsistence base by the impacts on native animals and plants of European-introduced cats, foxes, sheep, and cattle and Austronesian-introduced dingoes. Similarly, while the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert are often taken as models of hunter-gatherers, the detailed studies of the !Kung that began in the 1960s, and that I cite frequently in this book, have been of people who had already given up their traditional bone arrow-points for metal points, had stopped raiding each other, had recently been trading with and encroached on by Bantu herders, and must somehow have been influenced by other Bantu herders who reached southern Africa almost 2,000 years ago.