Profiles in Cultural Evolution: Papers from a Conference in Honor of Elman R. Service 9781949098877, 9780915703234

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Anthropological Papers Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan No. 85

Profiles in Cultural Evolution Papers from a Conference in Honor of Elman R. Service

edited by A. Terry Rambo and Kathleen Gillogly

Ann Arbor, Michigan 1991

� This monograph was published with the support of the Envi� ronment and Policy Institute, Honolulu, Hawaii © 1991 by the Regents of The University of Michigan The Museum of Anthropology All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-915703-23-4 (paper) ISBN 978-1-949098-87-7 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Profiles in cultural evolution : papers from a conference in honor of Elman R. Service /edited by A. Terry Rambo and Kathleen Gillogly. p. cm. - (Anthropological papers/ Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan ; no. 85) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-915703-23-8 (pbk. : acid free) : $20.00 1. Social evolution-Congresses. 2. Ethnology-South America-Congresses. 3. Ethnology-Asia, Southeastern-Congresses. 4. Human ecology-South America­ Congresses. 5. Human ecology-Asia, Southeastern-Congresses. 6. Service, Elman Rogers, 1915- . I. Service, Elman Rogers, 1915- . II. Rambo, A. Terry. III. Gillogly, Kathleen. IV. Series: Anthropological papers (University of Michigan. Museum of Anthropology) ; no. 85. GN2. M5 no. 85 [GN360] 305.8--dc20 90-25676 CIP The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1984 (Permanence of Paper)

Contents

List of Figures, vii List of Tables, viii Foreword, xi HENRY T. WRIGHT

Introduction, xiii A. TERRY RAMBO, KATHLEEN GILLOGLY, KARL L. HUTTERER, AND JEFFREY R. PARSONS

List of Conference Participants, xvii

1. BACKGROUND 1. Evolutionary Theory in Ethnological Perspectives, 3 ARAM A. YEN GOY AN

2. The Study of Cultural Evolution, 23 A. TERRY RAMBO

II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES IN TROPICAL SOUTH AMERICA 3. Cultural Evolution, Human Ecology, and Empirical Research, 113 ROBERT D. DRENNAN

4. Coevolution and the Development of Venezuelan Chiefdoms, 137 CHARLES S. SPENCER

5. The Nature of the Chiefdom as Revealed by Evidence from the Cauca Valley of Colombia, 167 ROBERT L. CARNEIRO

III

6. Cultural Evolution in Amazonia, 191 BETTY J. MEGGERS

III. STAGE SEQUENCES AND THE DIRECTIONALITY OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION 7. Losing Track of the Tribes: Evolutionary Sequences in Southeast Asia, 219 KARL L. HUTTERER

8. The Diversity and Cultural Evolutionary Trajectories of Philippine "Negrito" Populations, 247 JAMES F. EDER

9. Technological Complexity, Ecological Diversity, and Fire Regimes in Northern Australia: Hunter-Gatherer, Cowboy, Ranger, 261 HENRY T. LEWIS

IV. THE QUEST FOR PRIME MOVERS IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION 10. Energy and the Evolution of Culture: A Reassessment of White's Law, 291 A. TERRY RAMBO

11. Social Integration and Energy Utilization: An Analysis of the Kubu Suku Terasing of Indonesia and the Temuan Orang Asli of Malaysia, 311 ALI M. A. RACHMAN

12. Esoteric Knowledge, Geographical Distance, and the Elaboration of Leadership Status: Dynamics of Resource Control, 333 MARY W. HELMS

V. DIVERSITY AND CHANGE 13. Similarities and Differences in Lifestyles in the Central Cordillera of Northern Luzon, Philippines, 353 JULES DE RAEDT

IV

14. The Development of Kinship in Tropical South America, 373 GERTRUDE E. DOLE

15. Social Ecology of Thai Peasant Society: The Impact of Larger and External Social Relations (1850-1950), 405 OPART PANYA

16. Ethnic Groups in Transition and Some of Their Impacts on the Hinterland Environments of Southeast Asia: Are There Lessons to Be Learned?, 429 PERCY E. SAJISE

v

List of Figures

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 13.1 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 16.1

Western Venezuela, showing how the study area overlaps sections of the Andean piedmont and the llarws, 148 The study area, 150 Topographic map of the archeological site of La Esmeralda, 153 Topographic map of the Gavan, 155 La Tigra, the drained-field system, 157 Some of the major chiefdoms of the Cauca Valley of Colombia during the sixteenth century, 171 Maximum and minimum water levels recorded at the mouth of the Negro between 1902 and 1953, 196 Sites of the Apuau and Pajura phases, Polychrome Tradition, Guarita Subtradition on the lower Rio Negro, 201 The seriated sequences defining the Apuau and Pajura phases of the Polychrome Tradition, 202 Profiles showing four occupations of AM-MA-9, 204 Affiliations of archeological sites on the lower Xingu, 205 Carbon-14 and thermoluminescent dates from sites on eastern Maraj6, 207 Evolution of energy use, 294 Per capita energy consumption at different evolutionary stages: empirical assessment,298 Energy consumption by cultural systems representing different evolutionary stages, 306 The Kubu territory of south-central Sumatra, 314 Layout of Kubu settlement at Kampung Celor, 315 The Kubu ecosystem at Kampung Celor, 317 Temuan territory in west peninsular Malaysia, 318 The Temuan of Kampung Pay a Lebar, 319 The ecosystem of the Paya Lebar Temuan, 323 Northern Luzon provinces and ethnolinguistic groups, 357 The Cross Cousin pattern, 379 The Dakota-Iroquois (Bifurcate Merging) pattern, 379 Dual relationships with sister's daughter marriage, 387 Dual relationships with father's sister marriage, 388 The Cross Generation pattern, 389 The early nineteenth century Thai socioeconomic formation, 408 Socioeconomic transactions in the early Bangkok economy, 409 The transformation of Thai socioeconomic formation, 413 Thailand Central Plain, 417 Social ecology of Thai peasant society, 422 Conceptual framework for relating human impacts on agroecosystems to resource base, 431

VB

List of Tables

4.1 Radiocarbon dates, 151 4.2 Thermoluminescence dates, 152 8.1 Tribal assistance projects visited, 249 11.1 The Kubu band of Kampung Celor and its household composition, 316 11.2 Households in Kampung Paya Lebar, 320 11.3 Energy output of activities, 325 11.4 Energy consumption per capita per day for household and social activities, 327 13.1 Distribution of select cultural traits in the Central Cordillera, 369 15.1 Peasants' management input and activities in Central Plain agriculture, 420 16.1 Area coverage of "core" areas in Southeast Asia, 430 16.2 Hierarchical impacts of some ethnic groups on agroecosystems in the hinterlands of Southeast Asia, 443

VIll

Profiles in Cultural Evolution Papers from a Conference in Honor of Elman R. SeNice

Elman R. Service

Foreword Henry T. Wright, Director Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan

Almost three decades ago, in the autumn of 1961, a single event set the direction of my future research interests. I was one of the fortunate undergraduates who was able to register for Elman Service's course on primitive social organization. We students may have thought that we were to learn about the general principles of cultural evolution, the broad ideas discussed in a book Service had recently edited with Marshall Sahlins, Evolution and Culture (1960). With the gentlest of smiles, Service quickly disabused us of this notion. If we were interested in such generalities we could read that volume or his forthcoming book, Primitive Social Organization (1962). In our course, Service would provide only a general introduction to this body of theory. If, however, we had any intention of mastering such ideas, evaluating them with the evidence of the ethnographic record, and contributing to the growth of the evolutionary perspective in anthropology, our most important task was to begin to master the ethnographic record. Therefore, each of us would be expected to read in depth the ethnography of four groups, ranging from hunting and gathering bands to simple states. With all the self-confidence of the average Sophomore, I dove into the task, reading everything I could find on the Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego, and keeping detailed notes on file cards. By the time I had begun to wade though the sources on my fourth group, the Lozi of Central Africa, I had learned three things which I have no doubt Service wanted us to learn. First, the "ethnographic record" was a collection of unsystematic interpretations, with few sources that presented coherent accounts of what people actually said and did. Second, even the largely anecdotal information available on one community or group was so complex that it was not possible to "master" it in a few weeks or months. Third, all of these societies had been decimated by new diseases or "pacified" by colonial forces. They were no longer in full control of their own productive resources or responsible for their own defense, and one Xl

could assume that sociopolitcal structures had changed in response to these changes. My experience with Service left me with an enduring interest in the evolution of chiefdoms and states, a belief that general explanations of such evolution would have to be tested with specific case materials, and a conviction that archeology and ethnohistory would provide the most secure evidence for evaluating evolutionary models. Many of my ideas have changed, but the interests and convictions are still important to me. lowe them in large part to Elman Service, and am very grateful that the editors have invited me to make this small introductory contribution to this book. Indeed, many of my colleagues at the Museum of Anthropology owe such debts to Service, and all of us at the Museum feel privileged to be able to bring this collection of papers out as one of our Anthropological Papers. The reader will note that this is not a festschrift composed of small items that former students had been intending to publish somewhere. It is true that some contributors are former students, but others are the students of students or colleagues, and some have no formal relation with Elman Service at all. What unites these papers is their relevance to the present state of research on some of the many issues on which Service himself has written so cogently. For the most part, they are a complementary set of studies, emphasizing the diversity of thought and the ongoing spirit of healthy conflict within cultural evolutionary studies. Thus, The first two papers deal with general theoretical issues, Yengoyan specifically on some of Service's constructions and Rambo on some strengths and weaknesses of recent cultural evolutionary thought. The next four papers (Chapters 3-6) deal with case studies from lowland South America, all based on new approaches in archeology or ethnohistory, each providing new insight into aspects of the development and operation of chiefdoms. The next five papers ( Chapters 7-11) present similar case studies from Southeast Asia and the Pacific, all based primarily on ethnographic studies and providing insight into foragers or village agriculturalists. The final set of five papers (Chapters 12-16) are in various ways explicitly comparative, the authors varying widely in the success which they claim for this approach.

xu

Introduction

Elman R. Service has been one of the major influences on the postWorld War II development of American anthropology. His contributions to cultural evolutionary theory have been especially significant. As Aram Yengoyan observes in the first chapter of this volume, the organization of many introductory anthropology textbooks today reflects Service's thinking about cultural evolutionary stages. His ideas about the evolution of social organization also continue to guide much archeological research, an influence that is exemplified in several of the chapters in this volume. In recent years, however, Service has been in eclipse in his own field of ethnology. This reflects the general turn away from evolutionary concerns in cultural anthropology in the 1970s and early 1980s. The study of evolution came to be regarded by many ethnologists as somewhat passe, a topic fit perhaps for archeologists and physical anthropologists, but no longer worthy of the attention of those who considered themselves to be cutting-edge thinkers. This may in part be attributed to the faddishness that sometimes characterizes the discipline, but it also reflected the recognition that evolutionism had, by the mid-1960s, come to be a speculative and rather sterile field of inquiry, bogged down in endless arguments about the number of stages that separated Paleolithic hunters from the modern nation-state, and whether population increase was the cause or the consequence of the Agricultural Revolution. Since it appeared unlikely that ethnologists, unlike archeologists, could answer any of these questions, their attention turned to other concerns. Cultural evolutionism was not rejected out of hand, as it had been during the Boasian ascendancy; it simply was dropped off the research agenda. Curiously, however, the questions that have long engaged cultural evolutionists have continued to arise anew. In part, this stemmed from the attention being paid to sociobiology and its claims to represent a genuinely Darwinian approach to cultural evolution. The evident sterility of functionalist explanations in human ecology, and the growing recognition that knowledge of history was an essential aspect of understanding contemporary cultural adaptations, also tended to direct attenXUI

tion back to evolutionary concerns. By the mid-1980s there were signs that evolutionary questions were again being seriously addressed from within mainstream cultural anthropology. It seemed, therefore, to be an especially appropriate time to organize a conference in honor of Elman R. Service. Held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in August of 1986, the conference was attended by more than 20 scholars concerned with the study of cultural evolution (a list of participants follows this Introduction). Participants included Service's former colleagues, students, students of students, as well as scholars not directly influenced by Service but working within the general framework of cultural evolutionism. The stated goal of the conference was to explore the relationship of ecology and cultural evolution, especially with regard to societies found in tropical habitats in Asia and the New World. As it turned out, most of the papers emphasized questions of cultural evolution to a much greater extent than those of ecology. Many of the cases considered were in the tropics but tropical ecology, in the strict sense of the term, did not emerge as a major theme. Consequently, we have decided to give the title Profiles in Cultural Evolution to this volume of selected and revised papers, thus more accurately reflecting its contents. A strong ecological flavor characterizes many of the chapters, however, reflecting the original orientation of the conference toward problems of human ecology. It should be evident to the reader that neither the contributors to this volume nor its editors share a monolithic view of the nature of cultural evolution. This is, in our view, a strength rather than a weakness. It is a reflection of the fact that all of the contributions in this volume represent work in progress rather than final conclusions. This is wholly appropriate to the evolutionary theme with which they are all concerned. The study of cultural evolution, like evolution itself, is an ongoing process. Fixed conclusions are as vulnerable to extinction as fixed species. What contributors to this volume do share is the conviction that evolutionary questions are important in the study of culture and that cultural evolution is deserving of serious attention from anthropologists and other social scientists. The diversity of viewpoints and topics represented in the papers has made this a difficult volume to organize in a neat and logical fashion. The approach finally adopted is somewhat of a compromise, in part grouping papers by type of evolutionary question addressed, in part by geographical focus. Part I presents a background on the study of cultural evolution. Chapter 1 is an assessment of Elman Service's contributions to anthropology. We are grateful to Aram Yengoyan for accepting our post-conXIV

ference request to write this chapter. Although Yengoyan is a friend and former colleague of Service's, we feel that he has provided an insightful and eminently fair appraisal of Service's work, one that gives full credit for his contributions but avoids hagiography. The second chapter, also written especially for this volume, is an extended review of major issues in the study of cultural evolution. In it Terry Rambo delineates different conceptual approaches to evolutionary research and suggests where the subsequent chapters in the present volume fit into this framework. Although presented as an introductory chapter, it is also intended to represent conclusions derived from this conference and to suggest some possible directions for future research. The 14 conference papers are grouped into four parts. Part II presents four chapters dealing with the evolution of complex societies in the tropics of South America. Chapter 3 by Robert Drennan suggests a theoretical framework and methodological approach for archeological research on chiefdoms in Colombia. Charles Spencer describes in Chapter 4 his ongoing research on interactions between chiefdoms and neighboring tribal societies in Colombia. Robert Carneiro reviews historical accounts of chiefdoms in the Cauca Valley of Colombia in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, Betty Meggers discusses cultural adaptation to the tropical rain forest in Amazonia, suggesting that this environment was much less stable than previously believed. Part III includes three chapters discussing stage sequences and directionality in cultural evolution. In Chapter 7 Karl Hutterer reviews evidence for the existence of tribes as a distinct evolutionary stage in Southeast Asia and concludes that all such formations were secondary responses to intrusion of states into the region. James Eder, in Chapter 8, questions the applicability of conventional assumptions about the directionality of cultural evolution to Philippine Negrito groups, suggesting that each of these groups is following a different trajectory of change. Henry Lewis compares in Chapter 9 the systems of knowledge about fire ecology of Australian Aborigines, cowboys, and park rangers and concludes that the Aborigines have a more highly developed system than do the representatives of more complex evolutionary stages. The three chapters making up Part IV examine the role of prime movers in cultural evolution. Leslie White's law that cultural evolution is the result of increased capture of energy is subject to empirical test in Chapter 10 by Terry Rambo. His conclusion that energy is not the prime mover of cultural evolution is supported by Ali Rachman's presentation in Chapter 11 of data on energy use by Kubu bands and Temuan tribes in Sumatra and Malaysia. In Chapter 12 Mary Helms discusses long-distance travel as a factor in elite power in complex societies. She suggests that differential access to knowledge may be as xv

important as control over material resources in the emergence of a stratified society. Part V has four chapters on diversity and change. Chapter 13 by Jules De Raedt describes the great cultural diversity characterizing the indigenous societies of the Cordillera in the Philippines. Gertrude Dole describes the many different systems of kinship of aboriginal groups in Amazonia in Chapter 14. In Chapter 15 Opart Panya examines the changing environment confronted by Thai peasants. He concludes that social selective factors have been more important than ecological ones in shaping of modem Thai peasant society. Percy Sajise, in Chapter 16, explores the impact of cultural evolution on the natural environment in Southeast Asia, suggesting that adaptation is a continuous process III which social sustainability is increasingly problematic.

Acknowledgments Most of the funding for the conference was provided by the Environment and Policy Institute, East-West Center. Additional support came from the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology and the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies. Support for the editing of this volume was provided by the East-West Center. The editors especially thank Helen Takeuchi for her rigorous and meticulous editing job. Her skill and care are, as always, greatly appreciated. Marilyn Li and Regina Gregory assisted in checking references and providing the logistical support needed to electronically edit and transfer chapters across the continent. Neil Jamieson, then a Fellow at EAPI, assisted in organizing and running the conference and did the initial editorial work on several chapters in this volume. The editors thank the contributors for the patience they have displayed while waiting for publication of this volume. Over this interval, all of the chapters have been revised at least once, most in 1988 and a few as recently as mid-1989.

A. Terry Rambo Kathleen Gillogly Karl L. Hutterer Jeffrey R. Parsons Honolulu and Ann Arbor April 1990

XVI

CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS

Ms. Elisabeth A. Bacus Museum of Anthropology University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI48109

Dr. Richard 1. Ford Museum of Anthropology University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI48109

Dr. Robert 1. Carneiro Department of Anthropology American Museum of Natural History Central Park West at 79th Street New York, NY 10024-5192

Ms. Kathleen Gillogly Department of Anthropology University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Dr. Jules De Raedt Division of Social Sciences University of the Philippines, College Baguio Baguio City, Philippines 0201 Dr. Gertrude E. Dole Department of Anthropology American Museum of Natural History Central Park West at 79th Street New York, NY 10024-5192 Dr. Robert D. Drennan Department of Anthropology Faculty of Arts and Sciences University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, P A 15260 Dr. James F. Eder Department of Anthropology Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287

Dr. Christian Guksch Schuberstrasse 31 6901 Bammental West Germany Dr. Mary W. Helms Department of Anthropology University of North Carolina Greensboro, NC 27412-5001 Dr. Karl 1. Hutterer Museum of Anthropology University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Dr. Neil Jamieson Route 1, Box 61 Callao, VA 22435 Dr. Henry T. Lewis Department of Anthropology University of Alberta 13-15 HM Tory Building Edmonton, Canada T6G 2H4

XVll

Dr. Ali M.A. Rachman c/o Jurusan Ilmu-ilmu Sosial Ekonomi Fakultas Pertanian, IPB Jalan Raya Pajajaran Bogor, Indonesia

Dr. Frank B. Livingstone Department of Anthropology University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Dr. Robert McKinley Department of Anthropology Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824

Dr. A. Terry Rambo Environment and Policy Institute East-West Center 1777 East-West Road Honolulu, HI 96848

Dr. Betty J. Meggers Department of Anthropology National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution Washington, DC 20560 Mr. Opart Panya RFD-KKU-FORD Social Forestry Project National Forest Land Management Division Royal Thai Forest Department Bangkaen, Bangkok 10900, Thailand Dr. Jeffrey R. Parsons Museum of Anthropology University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI48109 Dr. Barbara Price Department of Anthropology Columbia University New York, NY 10027

Dr. Percy E. Sajise Institute of Environmental Sciences and Management University of the Philippines, Los Banos College Laguna, Philippines Dr. William T. Sanders Department of Anthropology 409 Carpenter Building Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802 Dr. Charles S. Spencer American Museum of Natural History Central Park West at 79th St. New York, NY 10024-5192 Dr. Aram A. Yengoyan Department of Anthropology-0855 University of California, Davis Davis, CA 95616

XVlll

I.

BACKGROUND

CHAPTER 1

Evolutionary Theory in Ethnological Perspectives ARAM A.

Y ENGOY AN

In attempting an overview of a scholar's intellectual contributions through his published works, one is bound to encounter numerous problems both in terms of accurately conveying the spirit of the intellectual achievement and in trying to account for how the meaning of that scholar's achievements has changed over time. Appraisal of another's achievements is, by nature, fraught with difficulties, for the interpreter must avoid hagiography but must, at the same time, present a sympathetic and balanced reading of the work, a reading both critical and constructive. There will be omissions, there will be overstatements and understatements of ideas, as well as misinterpretations, but given these limits it is still important to venture into the endeavor with an open mind and with an eye toward understanding how and why the scholar's thoughts and practices developed as they did. Elman Service's work ranges across a number of theoretical and empirical domains. His theoretical work has been identified as evolutionary in perspective, but to leave it at that is far too simple; it would be simply wrong. Service has written on a number of topics ranging from kinship to political organization, from history of anthropological thought to a rethinking of certain historical figures in our pantheon of anthropological luminaries, from the origin of the state to the evolution of the modern nation-state. He has also maintained a keen interest in ethnography and in how empirical realities relate to theoretical and comparative issues. His theoretical works have had a marked impact on certain strains of thought in ethnology and a great impact on archeological theory. Furthermore, as will be discussed, many of his comparative conceptualizations have been vital in influencing how textbooks have approached the subject matter of anthropology. In this essay, what I attempt to provide is a general survey of some of his contributions, and thus, due to spatial limitations, I can deal only with the more critical

3

4

PROFILES IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

and lasting issues. For example, since I am not a Latin Americanist, it would be most difficult for me to make any judgments on Service's contributions to the comparative ethnography of Latin America; thus I will only make passing references to those works. On a more personal level, I should note that I was a colleague of Elman's at the University of Michigan from 1963 (when I arrived) to 1968 (when he took a position at the University of California, Santa Barbara). During and prior to this period, evolutionary theory, in terms of developmental sequences, such as the trajectory of development from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to the state, was one of the major intellectual links which combined ethnology and archeology both at the undergraduate level and at the level of advanced graduate studies in the Department of Anthropology. With the presence of Leslie White, Marshall Sahlins, Eric Wolf, and Elman Service on campus, the anthropology department buzzed with ideas of how cultural change came about through evolutionary processes, how cultural evolutionary theory could be ethnographically supported, how the state was structured both in terms of its origins and in terms of its formative processes, and how evolutionary thinking might revolutionize our ideas on polity, kinship, and economy. It was a fervent time. Coming with a degree from the University of Chicago, where evolution was seldom if ever mentioned, into this Michigan foment, I was at times bewildered and amused at the degree of intensity and argumentation with which students discussed these ideas in classes, in corridors, and in the local pubs. As an outsider, I was not expected to toe the evolutionary line. After all, I was not one of the "chosen"; the chosen had arrived in another context and in other ways. However, I might be converted. This essay is concerned primarily with the ideas Service developed during his years at Michigan and Santa Barbara. Within an evolutionary framework, many facets of his theoretical and comparative writings have had an impact on our ideas on polity, on the evolution of political structures, on the evolution of cultures and changes in kinship systems, and on a rethinking of some of our intellectual ancestors.

EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT Service's conception of culture and cultural evolution is in many ways different from those of his teachers, namely Leslie White and Julian Steward. Although it is difficult to find a general definition of culture in Service's writings, one is led to the conclusion that culture is adaptive and structurally complex, and complexity increases in and through evolutionary change, giving culture the ability to transform itself. Thus,

CHAPTER 1 -

YEN GOY AN

5

Service's idea of culture as a conceptual category contrasts with, and is even the reverse of, that proposed by White, who saw culture as a symbolic entity. Specific cultures (and not "Culture" as a conceptual category) evolve and change through processual evolution, manifesting greater specialization and adaptation which might lead either to progressive changes or to involutional semi-stagnation. The implications of this conceptualization in Service's writings are most marked in a number of directions. For Service, anthropology is the analysis of sociocultural differences and similarities as indicators of evolutionary development, and cross-cultural comparison must not be relegated simply to theory building about social organization in synchronic context. Order and logic are imputed through processual comparisons and that order is provided in the scheme of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and primitive states. These views are expressed in three different and revised editions of his analysis of comparative ethnology (Service 1958, 1963, 1978b) and in the two editions of his book on primitive social organization (Service 1962, 1971b). Two important implications of this framework for processual development are to empiricize the idea of culture and to render it with temporal utility, both aspects which are lacking in Leslie White's framework. Furthermore, the shift away from a global concept of culture also means that cultures as results of particular historical and comparative developmental sequences must be comprehended in different ways. Service does not explain cultural change through reference to a single source as does White with his theory that the development of increasingly effective means of harnessing energy was the causal mechanism for cultural growth and increasing cultural complexity. In 1968, Service severely criticized various theories of cultural evolution. He concludes by statmg: Down with prime-movers. There is no single magical formula that will predict the evolution of every society. The actual evolution of the culture of particular societies is an adaptive process whereby the society solves problems with respect to the natural and to the human-competitive environment. These environments are so diverse, the problems so numerous, and the solutions potentially so various that no single determinant can be equally powerful for all cases. [Service 1968:406]

Harris (1969) attacks Service on a number of relevant (and many irrelevant) issues, but the point is that Service's opposition to prime movers-whether they are manifested in mentalistic idealism, conflict theories, or technological imperatives-can only be maintained through a dismissal of culture as a concept, that is, by rejecting culture both as a superorganic and sui generis entity (as exemplified by Kroeber and White) and as a symbolic subject. Whereas Kroeber saw the prime

6

PROFILES IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

mover in the human brain and White saw the prime mover in the harnessing of energy, Service, by rejecting prime movers and thus dismissing the concept of culture, is forced to change his position to that of a generalized particularism. He expresses this theoretical change by turning toward an examination of the sequential processual developments of human cultures. The flaw in Service's rejection of prime movers is based on two issues which at times are compounded and also confusing. First, Service seems to equate prime movers with general theory. As is well known, general theory, be it evolutionary or structural/functional, tries to explain a set of empirical phenomena. However, theory in this sense is not a prime mover or a single causal factor from which everything emanates. The second issue is that by rejecting prime movers Service almost by definition seems to reject the idea that ethnology/social anthropology possesses a unifying subject matter. If culture is the subject matter (as expressed by Kroeber and White), or if universal mental structures are the subject matter of anthropology (as expressed by Levi-Strauss), one must have a sense of a prime mover. One might not agree with what is defined as the subject matter or with the particular prime mover, but the point is that a global subject matter is integrally linked to the concept of a prime mover (a term with which I am uncomfortable); the two are logically and philosophically connected to each other. On the other hand, a change in subject matter requires different types of explanations for cultural differences and change. Thus, a move toward generalized particularism or extreme particularism requires other explanatory factors such as ecological and/or adaptive explanations which account for given cultural forms and organizations through an almost infinite diversity of specific conditions; in these instances, prime movers are no longer viable explanations. Surely, prime movers are not explanatory devices, nor are they required in Steward's framework of cultural evolution. One might argue that the concept of culture core was his prime mover, but Steward (1955) was often inconsistent in what he defined as constituting the cultural core in particular cases. Service's understanding of culture and cultural evolution has been primarily informed by empirical realities derived from ethnography rather than archeology. In this sense, his work leans closer to Steward. Service's use of ethnography also reflects his concern for making cultural evolution an understandable process by connecting ethnography to theory and vice versa, by showing how theory can inform ethnography for comparative concerns. In a recent review of White's ethnological essays, Service (1988:767) notes that a large part of the impact of White's The Science of Culture (1949) was because scholars at that time were looking for more general theoretical perspectives as a means of

CHAPTER 1 -

YENGOYAN

7

rescuing anthropology from the Boasian disarray (my words); but the same culturological essays and themes will not find the sort of audience in the late 1980s that existed in the late 1940s. This is surely the case, but it also means that the Whitean paradigm never really fit with Service's endeavors. Thus, cultural evolution is understood as a framework within which the adaptive and structural complexity of different societies expresses itself over time and space and a method by which these cases can be compared in ways which have explanatory value. Whereas White argued that theory and ethnography were distinct types of intellectual activities, a stand for which he was continuously criticized as having an inability to relate generalized evolutionary schemes to a corpus of ethnographic realities, Service muted this criticism by being able to relate ethnographic cases to a generalized framework. As a consequence, Service's evolutionary concepts have had a critical impact on certain theories in ethnology as well as in archeology where his ideas are still much in evidence. We must also note that Service's concept of "evolutionary potential" is not only a framework for looking at extinct stages and societies. In many of his writings, Service has attempted to understand current postWar developments in capitalism in the West and the development of communist China. Through his creative use of the concept of "evolutionary potential," Service provides a theoretical explanation for these problems and illuminates various facets of how and why capitalism can or cannot transform itself into the post-capitalistic state. If the evolution of a system like capitalism occurs under certain constraints and can only be understood in terms of its structure of operation as it evolves or changes, certain limits occur at the upper thresholds which impede or curtail its transformation. The semi-stagnation of capitalism due to limits on its evolutionary potential might result in changes which are either revolutionary or which trigger the onset of involutionary processes, virtually precluding any form of evolutionary change. Service's (1960b, 1971a) essays on the modern world and its evolutionary problems are probably now more critical and vital than when they were first published for any understanding of the current nation-state regardless of its economic structuring, be it capitalist, socialist, or communist.

THE EVOLUTION OF POLITY AND THE STATE This section is premised on the assumption that the reader knows, or has read, Service's discussion and analysis of the evolution of polity as it culminates in the state in some particular localities. Since I plan to

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summarize his findings, my discussion will take into account some of the theoretical and empirical issues which underlie Service's approach and the kinds of problems which were generated by that evolutionary approach. In the three editions of Profile of Primitive Culture (1958, 1963, 1978b), Service proposed a number of taxonomic categories which provided the evolutionary canopy for discussing structural similarities between societies and for designating how each level of evolutionary development differed from others in terms of complexity. The 1958 edition grouped societies into four levels: bands, tribes, primitive states, and modern folk societies. In the 1963 and the 1978 editions, chiefdoms were established as a fifth category and placed between tribes and primitive states. Service's theoretical delineations for chiefdoms were originally published in Primitive Social Organization (1962). Not only did chiefdoms represent an increased level of complexity above the stage of tribes, they also displayed the beginnings of a theocratic component which served as a symbolic unity and was in concordance with political process. This introduction of the new category was an important addition that improved the conceptual focus of the earlier categories as well. The 1958 edition listed eight cases under tribe; and a quick ethnographic review of these cases shows such great organizational differences among them as to raise the question how and why societies as different as the Cheyenne and Nuer could be combined with Nootka and Tahitians. Thus, the 1963 edition of Profiles in Ethnology lists Nootka, Trobrianders, Tahitians, and Kalinga as examples of chiefdoms. The placement of the Kalinga in the new category of chiefdom still presents a problem. In the 1958 edition the Kalinga were listed under primitive states along with the Maya, Inca, and the Ashanti. This proved infeasible, for while the Kalinga might have some state-like qualities, they are far from possessing the state structures found among the Maya and the Inca. Although the Kalinga possess a concept of law and political hierarchy which has some similarities with the Maya and Inca, differences in bureaucratic structures and military organization as well as kinship make the differences even more glaring. Indeed, the Kalinga fail to fit any of the three categories of tribe, chiefdom, or primitive state. The political structure of Kalinga, with the pangat 1 system and the complexity of the legal structure, would exclude them from, and place them above, the category of tribe. As a chiefdom, the Kalinga fall somewhat short in comparison to the Tahitians, since they lack the ability to mobilize a military force or a semi-permanent army. Furthermore, the role of the Kalinga chief is not as all-inclusive as one finds in Polynesian cases. Finally, as noted, the Kalinga are not a

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pnmItIve state. In the 1978 edition, Service drops the Kalinga altogether and replaces them with the Rwala Bedouin, although one might also question this case. Obviously, the Kalinga are difficult to place within evolutionary categories, just as the upland insular societies of Southeast Asia were difficult for Sahlins (1968) to explain within the category of "tribesmen." Yet, while one can sympathize with Service in his dilemma, we must ask whether he omitted the Kalinga in 1978 merely to replace them with a more appropriate ethnographic example, or whether he realized that the Kalinga simply would not fit any of his categories. During the 20-year period from 1958 to 1978, Service rethought some of the issues regarding his evolutionary typology. Just as Steward (1955) had problems with the composite band, Service (1962) felt that the composite band idea should be dropped, partly because it was not an aboriginal type and was probably an adaptive response to the penetration of Western cultures. Later, Service went even further and concluded that the stages of band, tribe, chiefdom, and primitive state were never true to "the aboriginal state of affairs," and that "They may be useful for a classification of modern ethnography but not useful if they are to be used in extrapolating from extant stages to extinct ages" (Service 1971a:157). This amounts to virtual abandonment of his original typology. He concluded that only three types of stages might exist as plausible evolutionary phases, that is "(1) the Egalitarian Society out of which grew (2) the Hierarchical Society, which was replaced in only a few instances in the world by the Empire-State that was the basis of the next stage (3) the Archaic Civilization or Classical Empire" (ibid.). It is unfortunate that Service substituted Egalitarian, Hierarchical and Archaic civilizations for his earlier typology. In the first place, the new threefold typology is so general that it loses any potential value for theoretical and/or evolutionary explanation. Not only is the threefold typology difficult to operationalize, but it adds little to our understanding of particular ethnographic cases. Furthermore, the original fivefold classification was more significant because it was a sequence of evolutionary types. By "type" I mean ideal types in the Weberian sense, for one would seldom if ever find a type existing in empirical reality; the ideal type is not meant to exist in any single particular case. A "tribe," as an ideal type, is constituted by a number of structural properties which are interrelated with one another. The power of the type concept is that it directs our inquiries toward specific issues as we try to understand particular cases. Once the investigator notes how a certain case differs from the ideal type, the next methodological operation is to assess those local factors (e. g., ecology, history, extra-tribal interactions,

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internal structures) that might explain the degree of divergence of the particular society from what the ideal type renders, and how and why this occurs. The fruition of Service's ideas and thoughts culminate in his major empirical and theoretical works on the origin and structure of the state. One of the major themes of his analysis is the refutation of all primemover theories in the evolution of the state. Service rejects all forms of Marxist interpretations of the state as expressed in the works of Childe, Wittfogel, and, to a certain extent, Fried, through a minute analysis of early classical state formation and through a careful examination of modern primitive states. In example after example, Service (1975) discusses various prime-mover theories with regard to particular cases to demonstrate that they do not work. According to him, Egypt and the Indus River Valley were civilizations, but they lacked urbanism as defined by Childe (ibid., 246). The major contrast between states and chiefdoms is that states are primarily secular while chiefdoms are characterized by a theocratic component which not only legitimates the political process but enhances the hierarchical structure of redistribution. Furthermore, the establishment of the state is based on separation of powers with an increasing reliance on military structures which not only maintain internal peace but are part of the expansionist nature of early civilizations. In recent years, students of both classical and archaic states as well as early civilizations have grappled with the endless problems of how states differ from advanced chiefdoms in particular cases. It is difficult to come forth with broad generalizations, and a close reading of each particular case makes it all the more difficult. Service's contributions to the understanding of these issues have been central, even though they have been challenged by archeologists of various theoretical persuasions. Basically, the narrative which he (1975, 1978a) sets forth has a threefold aim: 1. To construct a plausible framework for the analysis of the origin and development of archaic civilizations through comparing different cases; 2. To classify them as a means of assessing prime-mover theories as proposed in the works of Marx, Wittfogel, Childe, Carneiro, and Lattimore; and 3. To provide an argument for the evolution of the state in opposition to Marxist interpretations which focus on issues such as class and social stratification.

As opposed to class theories, Service's work (1978a:29) stresses an integrationist explanation of early and archaic state formation through a detailing of the beneficient aspects of the state, especially in its early formative phases. These organizational benefits are accomplished through several developments, including increased production, a struc-

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ture of redistribution which alleviates local disparities in resources across territories through the chiefly control of exchange, and the rise of a bureaucratic administrative structure which, over time, would enhance and support the role of the chief, the court, and the priesthood, and ultimately would benefit the citizenry to a certain extent. The development of military structures and complex public works are also benefits which integrate society and cut across different interest groups (Service 1978a:32). Eventually the clustering of law, governmental structures, and an able bureaucracy would not only perpetuate the social domination of rulers but would also provide organizational benefits for the populace. Although Service dedicates his Origins of the State and Civilization (1975) to his lifelong friend Morton Fried, Service's integrationist framework also contrasts with most Marxist and other class theories of the state, of which Fried's (1967) approach is the most insightful. A number of assumptions regarding Service's explanation of the origin of the state need further discussion. If I read him correctly and, hopefully, if I interpret his analysis in the spirit in which it was intended, I am led to the conclusion that the state does not arise as a result of negative forces such as the repression and oppression of a citizenry or rampant external military conquests of neighboring societies. For Service, the features central to understanding the emergence of early states and archaic civilizations are primarily positive and good. In different contexts throughout his two major pieces (1975, 1978a), he makes a distinction between positive and negative forces, arguing that benefits seem to characterize the emergence of early states and archaic civilizations, but over time and into the more modern period of the state under different ideological influences, negative influences have become dominant. If the state failed to provide the benefits in Western industrialism, it might have a chance of establishing itself along more beneficial lines in other contexts, such as post-War China, where Western contact has not brought forth political submission and where domination by Western industrialized powers has been avoided, thus providing the state the means of creating new solutions to problems of energy. In this rendering of the state, the particular nature of state formation must be linked with the question of evolutionary potential. If my interpretation of Service has some merit, it implies that there is a connection between Service's conception or vision of society and his theory of what constitutes the state. What I see as central in his theory (though Service does not mention it) is the idea of civil society as expressed by the Scottish Moralists (Ferguson 1966; Schneider 1967). In their view, civil society existed in early states, but over time it gradually eroded as the state became a more repressive class-structured form of sociopolitical domination.

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This assumption is not neutral for it involves not only how Service envisions the state itself, but also how society relates to the state. However, Cohen (1978:17) notes that for Service, Wright, and also himself, the state is neutral; it is neither good nor bad and it arises like a natural phenomenon. By stating that it is a natural phenomenon, Cohen leads one to the conclusion that the state is an expression of natural law, of processes in which the human agent is passive. If this is the case, it would be difficult for Service to accept the assumption that the state is an expression of natural law. In fact, in many other facets of his prolific WTitings, Service is quite explicit in downplaying the role of natural law which, in many ways, evokes theological explanations. Service's evolutionary framework has had a critical and lasting impact on archeologists who are dealing with chiefdoms, early and archaic states, and the rise of civilization. Over the past 15 years, a number of conferences and anthologies have dealt with the issue of the state and, in one way or another, Service's ideas have been central to all the discussions. Some of the major interpretive works on Service's ideas are found in Gledhill et al. (1988), Haas (1982), and Schiffer (1983, 1987). The research problematic in contemporary archeology on state formations, the theory of the state, and the investigation of particular prehistoric and historic cases all emerge, in some form, from what Service set forth as early as 1958. Within ethnology, the bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and state sequence is seldom discussed, but its heuristic value is much in evidence, particularly in anthropology textbooks which continue to use this evolutionary trajectory in conveying the idea of cultural differences and similarities as they exist through time and space.

KINSHIP AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION The publication of Primitive Social Organization (1962, 1971b) was, in part, Service's response to Murdock's Social Structure (1949). Whereas Murdock stressed a purely formal approach to kinship terminology and kinship behavior, Service took a functional and evolutionary perspective, one which notes that an Eskimo kinship terminology exists for both the Eskimo as well as the New England Yankees but functions in different ways in each case. Service's writings on social organization are a brilliant attempt to show how the logic and structure of kinship and social groupings relate to larger institutional features which embed kinship. After some 20 or 30 years, one now reads Murdock for his definitions, while one reads Service for an understanding of how kinship and social formations operate within an evolutionary perspective.

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Through the utilization of the segmentary model, Service dealt with a range of cases and established the tribe as a type which would have explanatory power for a range of different ethnographic cases. Much of his work is now part of our common and shared wisdom as it relates to social organization and culture. One of Service's major contributions to the analysis of social organization is his contrasting of egocentric and sociocentric kinship terminologies. By showing how sociocentric terminologies connect groups or categories with one another, especially those which are socially distant, Service (1960a) was able to solve a major problem, that of trying to understand kinship apart from a genealogical and egocentric basis. He demonstrated how both forms of kinship relations occur within the same society. For example, he showed how, among the Aranda of central Australia, a subsection system exists above and apart from the genealogical and egocentric kinship grid which regulates kinship behavior and marriage relationships. The logic of the Aranda system of subsections cannot be fully generated from the egocentric framework; but through his approach, Service (1960c) was able to demonstrate how subsections work in relation to kinship and marital arrangements. Furthermore, he (1960a) was also one of the early writers on kinship to deal with the existence of status terminologies as part of the total kinship framework. Status terminologies are theorized to be part of the sociocentric terminological system. They occur and proliferate in societies which are not only larger but are also divided into corporate groups, along class lines, and into hierarchically ranked groupings. At a more complex level of cultural evolution, status markers also become part of the occupational specializations which are present in various societies characterized by a highly evolved organic solidarity. From an evolutionary perspective, the organizational basis of the supra-kinship orders can be differentiated from earlier forms of social structure which are primarily egocentric and possibly genealogical. Service's approach to this problem, as well as other social organization issues, was and is a much needed corrective to the formalization of kinship started by Murdock and expressed in various works of the 1950s and 1960s on componential and formal analysis. Another contribution of Service's work on kinship is his development and analysis of the concept of sodality. Although the term "sodality" was used by Lowie (1948), Service rethought the concept and redefined it as a "nonresidential association that has some corporate functions or purposes" (1971b:13). Whereas Lowie saw it as primarily a voluntary category, Service conceived of sodalities as either voluntaristic or nonvoluntaristic groupings with many purposes beyond any single function. For Service, sodalities need not be groups in the sense that all members

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of that group come together for common action or common purposes; rather, they are segments of a group which come together based on common ends as well as a common membership which is emblematically symbolized. As non-local and non-residential groups, sodalities have the ability to integrate different resident groups. In this sense, they are panlocal in that they are never fixed to a particular group or a particular locality. Although sodalities do exist in band societies, they are mainly representative of tribal structures in which clans have members in different localities, thus permitting them to combine for certain purposes without involving all clan members, something that would be a practical impossibility. These pantribal sodalities, according to Service, are either identified through kinship idioms (like clan) or involve non-kin groupings (like a warrior class or age grades). In either case, the sodality must be labeled. It must have a name through which individual members can establish common linkages to others who also adhere to that group and that label. The functions of sodalities can and do vary depending on the scale of a society. At the tribal level, however, it appears that they are essentially political because they function to create and maintain alliances which cross-cut different local groups. The initial impact of the concept of sodalities was marginal in the early 1960s; but in the past 10 years, many writers on kinship and social organization have returned to Service's original formulations in developing the idea of alliances and linkages, which articulate segments of society with each other both horizontally and vertically.

HISTORY, CULTURE, AND ETHNOLOGY Over the past 10 years, Service (1981, 1985, 1987) has written on various aspects of the history of anthropology. Like all cultural evolutionists, he begins by addressing Lewis Morgan and what Morgan really meant. There is now a great deal of literature dealing with Morgan's writings, but it is still difficult to get a handle on the various positions which one finds in his work. At one time it was assumed that Morgan had only one or two possible readings, but in reality the readings of Morgan have not only been varied, but in most cases, contemporary interpretations are quite different from what Engels (1942), Stern (1931), and White (1964) presented in earlier generations. Terray's (1972) readings of Morgan's works stress their structuralist aspects, at least in terms of the language used by Morgan. Probably the most illuminating recent rethinking of Morgan is by Trautmann (1987), who, in many ways, has finally settled the historical and intellectual context of

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Morgan's writing of Systems (1870) and the kinds of influences which prevailed on him, either directly or indirectly. In A Century of Controversy (1985), Service devotes at least two chapters to Morgan, and throughout the text there are various references to Morgan's impact on anthropological thought and the study of kinship. Both in this work and in the earlier piece on Morgan, Service always seems to be wrestling with the problem of interpreting Morgan as a materialist or as an idealist, or as some kind of mentalist. In fact, at times, one is puzzled by the use of all of these labels in trying to assess what Morgan was doing. Surely Morgan himself never thought in terms of "-isms" and "-ists," but nearly all recent writers on Morgan invoke such contrasts. It is true that Morgan, in Ancient Society (1964), talks about the growth of the idea of government and of the idea of property or family. The usage of the term "idea" in this context cannot be utilized by recent writers to pigeonhole Morgan as a mentalist or as an idealist. What Morgan meant by the "idea of . .. " was what we now would term a concept. Morgan was talking about the concepts of government, property, and family, and how these concepts evolved and changed through the various stages and periods in the evolution of culture. There are other parts of Morgan's writings which are idealistic, but surely the term "idea of' only means how the concept of property works, what it embraces over time, and how such concepts relate to empirical realities. It is unfortunate that in this discussion, Service, to some extent, treats mentalism, idealism, and materialism as a set of oppositional categones. Furthermore, it is true, as Service (1985:50) correctly notes, that Morgan seldom delineates the causes for the evolution of institutions in a clear way. But again, in Morgan one finds passages which appeal to a natural logic of the brain as the means by which humans solve problems. This reference to natural logic cannot be used to cast Morgan as an idealist or a mentalist. During the nineteenth century, the idea of a natural logic was premised on the concept of a psychic unity of humankind which was essential in developing the idea that humankind was one and that the unity rested in the brain. Thus, the appeal to natural logic in Morgan is a statement of the oneness of humanity; differences in human societies must be accounted for in terms of different natural and cultural circumstances which influence the natural logic. I might have been overcritical of Service's reading of Morgan. His work is difficult, and one can find reference to many issues or pull out quotes in order to support a range of interpretations. Service (1981) is correct when he stresses the idea that reading Morgan with hindsight allows one to read into his work what one wishes to find. However, one

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must always recognize the language and rhetoric which Morgan used; accounting for these factors is the basis of contextualization. I am not a specialist on Morgan, yet I do find inspiration in reading him and, in most cases, I find more inspiration in Morgan than in the myriad of writings on Morgan. Service's most recent book, A Century of Controversy (1985), is an important volume in setting forth various issues of intellectual debate which have formed the essence of anthropological theory. Students who are looking for an intellectual overview will find it exciting reading. However, some sections are notably lacking in perspective. Thus, in discussing the debate between Boas and Kroeber on the question of anthropology as a science or as history, Service should have addressed a third vital component to that debate: Radin's (1965) position on science and history is essential to understanding how Boas responded to Kroeber. Radin was the dominant force in particularism, and his critique of both Boas and Kroeber extends to virtually all of the Boasians, especially to Benedict and Mead. Radin's particularism might have been extreme relativism and can only be comprehended in terms of how Boas and Kroeber conceptualized generalization either in history or in science. In drawing his own contrasts, Service (1985:299, 1987:323324) designates opposing views as evolutionism vs. relativism, when relativism should be the central factor in discussing how and why various Boasian writers wrote about science, history, configurations, and modal personality structure, almost always as an attempt to escape extreme relativism. Radin's position was not only the basis of extreme cultural relatiVIsm as a denial of science, historical reconstruction and history in general, along with culture and personality studies, but a positive insistence that anthropology and ethnography must develop cultural portraits based on minute ethnographic reporting which reflects as closely as possible what the "native" does and says. Radin's position, which was out of fashion during his time, is much in evidence in contemporary anthropology through various renditions of "thick description and postmodernism." It is unfortunate that A Century of Controversy ends at 1960. Many of the issues and debates of that time are still central to current anthropological argumentation, many have acquired a new vigor since 1960, and in some cases the developments since 1960 have returned the debate to the initial level of ferment. It is evident from how Service (1985, 1987) poses the various oppositions and contrasts that the evolution of anthropological explanations has occurred in most part through ongoing and redefined positions. Each side of these debates is strongly argued and in many cases is passionately expressed by the original proponents. What is critical to

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note is that much of what we label theory and explanation in ethnology and social anthropology was forged through the proposition of ideas and opposition to them, rather than through eclecticism; the latter can be intellectually debilitating for a new discipline. On eclecticism, Harris (1969) appears to equate historical particularism and/or generalized particularism with eclecticism, in that no single dominant prime mover or no single dominant theory is utilized. This kind of comparison brings forth the issue of what is being compared to what. Eclecticism refers to either shifting research strategies to suit the problem or the dominant concern to invoke all forms of explanation to explain a problem as a means by which the analyst attempts to cover the range of possibilities as well as warding off future criticisms. Generalized particularism (an oxymoron which might cause problems for some readers, coined by Yengoyan, not Service) differs from eclecticism in that it is a consistent research strategy that attempts to explain particular events and structures in terms of preceding particular events and structures. Eclecticism is a dead-end intellectual endeavor, one which Service has been able to avoid in his writings.

SUMMARY Evolutionary explanations in ethnology are not in vogue at present, although they are still critical for archeological problematics, for the understanding of temporal process as well as for ecological interpretations. In fact, ecological explanations shorn of an evolutionary perspective are simply another version of relativism. This point is evident in the contrast between the Boasian approach to environmental limitations and ecological problems and recent ecological approaches that combine evolutionary and population perspectives for explaining and comparing different ecosystemic interactions. However, evolutionary accounts, in terms of specialized and generalized frameworks, are now seldom found in contemporary ethnology and social anthropology. In part, this is a result of the language we now use and the problems we now pursue. The interest in ethnohistories is couched in particularism and limited frameworks which are utilized in order to elucidate the data at hand. Furthermore, the late 1980s in anthropology is a period in which we shun grand theories, broad generalizations, and comparisons. The term "theory" itself has a negative patina, and there is a general feeling that theories are dubious if they cannot be anchored to a corpus of ethnographic reporting. Furthermore, the current move away from theory and comparison also reflects the ongoing debate on the nature of the subject matter of ethnology/social anthropology (see Yengoyan 1986).

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If cultural evolution is no longer a major theoretical framework in ethnology/social anthropology, the source of this change must be sought not only in terms of other contemporary modes of explanation and interpretation, but also within cultural evolution itself. Although Service boldly argued against prime movers, he also confused prime movers with general theory. If one rewrote the prime-mover quote as cited earlier to apply to organic evolution, the following would emerge: There is no single magical formula that will predict the evolution of every [species J. The actual evolution of the [population J of particular [species J solves problems with respect to the natural and to the [speciesJ-competitive environment. These environments are so diverse, the problems so numerous, and the solutions potentially so various that no single determinant can be equally powerful for all cases.

Statements such as these have only been made in a pre-Darwinian mode of thought. One of the shortcomings which has plagued almost all forms of cultural evolution is its inability to deal with the Darwinian framework. In part, this kind of pre-Darwinian thinking was a result of the acute division which our intellectual ancestors created between culture and biology. From Boas to Kroeber and White and even to most forms of contemporary cultural evolutionism (Harris), the concern to comprehend culture as a sui generis phenomenon in order to avoid biological and psychological reductionism has had a dire consequence on most theories of cultural evolution. Service's theoretical and comparative "\\'Titings on various issues in ethnology and archeology represent one of the major contributions to that phase of anthropology during which the discipline was a generalizing science or perhaps an expression of comparative humanism. In either context, much of Service's work is still vital to our endeavors now but will be more so in the future. Service's generalizations can be criticized, but then all generalizations are criticized these days. His typologies might or might not work, since most human cultures are difficult to type, let alone to compare. In fact, one might say that Service's sequence of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and primitive states might only account for a minority of the ethnographic cases of which we are aware. But that is not the point. Service's concept of type is an ideal theoretical construct which facilitates our thinking on issues of structure and process. In the past 40 years of thinking and writing, Service's work represents an attempt to put order into things and to explain cultural events and cultures as part of a logic applied in an extremely broad sense (such as an evolutionary perspective) or a more narrow one (such as the prob-

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lem of sociocentric kinship terminologies or sodalities}. Generalized concepts or frameworks like Service's are part of anthropology even though we continuously question their foundations and their utility. It is part of the disciplinary training that we must question the general; but seldom, if ever, has an individual started fieldwork without a conceptual framework, be it broad or narrow. We cannot escape it. In an era in which the anthropological enterprise is under attack from inside and from outside the discipline, it is fashionable to enhance and, in fact, create one's career by attacking scholars who have put forth ideas, theories, and generalizations. Elman Service is a scholar who has put forth his ideas as he saw them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Nancy Thompson Price for her acute and critical reading of this paper, especially of those sections pertaining to polity and state formation. Her advice and scholarly acumen saved me from some potential problems. Special thanks are also extended to Karl Hutterer and H. Clyde Wilson for their responses on various sections of this paper, and their clarification of some of my theoretical discussion.

NOTE 1. Pangat are defined as the most influential men of the Kadangyan class who have

special political functions due to their high rank.

REFERENCES Cohen, Ronald 1978 Introduction. In: Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution, edited by Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Engels, Friedrich 1942 [1884] The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Reprint. New York: International Publishers.

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Ferguson, Adam 1966 An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fried, Morton H. 1967 The Evolution of Political Society. New York: Random House. Gledhill, John, Barbara Bender, and Mogens Trolle Larson 1988 State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization. London: Unwin Hyman. Haas, Jonathan 1982 The Evolution of the Prehistoric State. New York: Columbia University Press. Harris, Marvin 1969 Monistic determinism: Anti-Service. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 25:194-206. Lowie, Robert H. 1948 Social Organization. New York: Rinehart. Morgan, Lewis H. 1870 Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, No. 218. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. 1964 Ancient Society. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Murdock, George P. 1949 Social Structure. New York: Macmillan. Radin, Paul 1965 [1933] The Method and Theory of Ethnology: An Essay in Criticism. Reprint. New York: Basic Books. Sahlins, Marshall D. 1968 Tribesmen. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Schiffer, Michael B., editor 1983 Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory. Vol. 6. New York: Academic Press. 1987 Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory. Vol. 11. New York: Academic Press. Schneider, Louis, editor 1967 The Scottish Moralists on Human Nature and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Service, Elman R. 1958 A Profile of Primitive Culture. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1960a Kinship terminology and evolution. American Anthropologist 62:747-763. 1960b The law of evolutionary potential. In: Evolution and Culture, edited by Mar-

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1962 1963 1968 1971a 1971b 1975 1978a

1978b 1981 1985 1987

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shall D. Sahlins and Elman R. Service. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sociocentric relationship terms and the Australian class systems. In: Essays in the Science of Culture in Honor of Leslie A. White, edited by Gertrude E. Dole and Robert L. Carneiro. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Random House. Profiles in Ethnology. Rev. ed. New York: Harper and Row. The prime-mover of cultural evolution. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 24:396-409. Cultural Evolutionism: Theory in Practice. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. 2nd ed. New York: Random House. Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton. Classical and modem theories of the origins of government. In: Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution, edited by Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Profiles in Ethnology. 3rd ed. New York: Harper and Row. The mind of Lewis H. Morgan. Current Anthropology 22:25-43. A Century of Controversy: Ethnological Issues from 1860 to 1960. New York: Academic Press. The bifurcation of method and theory in ethnology. In: Themes in Ethnology and Culture History: Essays in Honor of David F. Aberle, edited by Leland Donald. Delhi: Archana Publications. Review of Ethnological Essays by Leslie A. White, edited by Beth Dillingham and Robert L. Carneiro. American Anthropologist 90:765-766.

Stem, Bernhard J. 1931 Lewis H. Morgan, Social Evolutionist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steward, Julian H. 1955 Theory of Culture Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Terray, Emmanuel 1972 Marxism and "Primitive" Societies. New York: Monthly Review Press. Trautmann, Thomas R. 1987 Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Leslie A. 1949 The Science of Culture. New York: Farrar, Strauss. 1964 Introduction. In: Ancient Society, by Lewis H. Morgan. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pp. xiii-xlii. Yengoyan, Aram A. 1986 Theory in anthropology: On the demise of the concept of culture. Comparative Studies in Society and History 28:368-374.

CHAPTER 2

The Study of Cultural Evolution A.

TERRY RAMBO

The status accorded the study of evolution is very much higher in the natural sciences than it is in the social sciences. Evolutionary theory is the dominant, indeed the only, currently accepted paradigm in the historically oriented natural sciences. In contrast, its place in the social sciences is both less central and less secure. This difference is surprising when it is remembered that evolutionary questions were considered to be absolutely central in the formative stages of the modern social sciences. It is all the more surprising in view of the frequency with which evolutionary questions have continued to be raised by social scientists. Cultural evolutionism, although often proclaimed dead, has proven to be remarkably resilient. It seems as if each generation of scholars feels compelled to wrestle with the same immensely significant but intellectually intractable problems, only to once more abandon the struggle when no progress is evident in resolving these perennial questions. As someone who was an undergraduate student in anthropology at the University of Michigan during the major revival of cultural evolutionism there in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I have long wondered why this theoretical approach failed to become established as a core concern in the social sciences. This chapter represents my attempt to find an explanation for this failure and to suggest how the study of cultural evolution might be reconstructed so as to again occupy a central place in the social sciences.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW This chapter has four major sections followed by a brief concluding section. It begins with a review of the historical place of evolutionary thought in the social sciences. The distinctive approaches to evolution-

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ary studies that characterize the natural and the social sciences are then discussed. Particular attention is paid to the confusion arising from the assignment of two different meanings to the term "evolution." Evolution refers (1) to the sequence of life forms that have evolved over time, and (2) to the process that has caused these different forms to evolve. Both are legitimate concerns in evolutionary studies, but failure to recognize the existence of these different perspectives has led to misunderstandings between those who think evolution refers only to the study of sequences of forms and those who think it refers exclusively to the study of the process of change. This discussion of terminology is followed by extended reviews of the study of sequence and process in cultural evolution. These reviews are not intended to be comprehensive. The body of literature relating to cultural evolution is enormous. No one can hope to sample more than a small fraction of it. I have therefore included only those works that exemplify themes and issues which I consider to be central to the evolutionary tradition in the social sciences or that raise critical questions about cultural evolutionism.

1. THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURAL EVOLUTIONISM Evolutionary concerns were central ones in the formative years of the modern social sciences (see Goldman 1959, Harris 1966, Service 1985, and White 1959a for more extended reviews). Virtually all of the founding fathers of anthropology and sociology were evolutionists. These included not just the commonly cited figures of Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and E. B. Tylor but Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Emile Durkheim as well. Yet, with the displacement of the evolutionary paradigm by those of historical particularism in anthropology and a-theoretical empiricism in sociology, for much of the first half of the twentieth century most social scientists were either actively hostile to evolutionary questions or chose to simply ignore these issues. Marxists were almost alone in continuing to describe history in terms of evolutionary stages, but these tended to be treated as received wisdom rather than as hypotheses for generating new knowledge. V. Gordon Childe was an exception, however, in demonstrating how ideas derived from Marxist historical methodology could help to understand archeological data in new ways. Only in the 1950s did concern with cultural evolutionism begin to gain renewed respectability in mainstream social science. Leslie White and lulian Steward and their respective students led this revitalization movement in anthropology, while Karl Wittfogel and Gerhard Lenski

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contributed to the legitimization of evolutionary concerns in sociology and political science. In economics, W. W. Rostow (1960) presented an explicitly evolutionary approach to development in his influential Stages of Economic Growth. Publication in 1960 of Evolution and Culture, edited by Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service, followed two years later by Service's Primitive Social Organization, marked the high point of the revival of concern with cultural evolution in American social science. For a brief moment it seemed, at least to its proponents, that it would become the unifying paradigm for the social sciences. When mainstream figures such as Margaret Mead (1964) and Talcott Parsons (1966), who had previously ignored or been indifferent to evolutionary questions, took up the banner, it seemed that victory was at hand. Victory proved illusive, however. Rather than becoming the new central paradigm of the social sciences, cultural evolutionism proved to be the theoretical equivalent of the hula hoop, an intellectual fad rather than a true revolution. In a remarkably short time, it was again in eclipse. Other approaches, cultural ecology, structuralism, cognitive and symbolic anthropology, which, if not anti-evolutionary, were at best indifferent to questions of cultural change and transformation, came to dominate anthropological discourse (Ortner 1984). It fared no better in the other social sciences. Cultural evolutionary inquiry was left in the hands of the Marxists, who all too often seemed to know the answers before they posed the questions, and the sociobiologists, who had no meaningful questions to ask. Only in archeology did cultural evolution remain a central concern, and even there it was to some extent pushed to the sidelines by the emergence of the "new archeology." In 1984, when Karl Hutterer, Jeffrey Parsons, and I first discussed holding the conference on which this volume is based, cultural evolutionism appeared moribund, a subject largely relegated to footnote status in introductory textbooks on the history of anthropology. One could read whole issues of the American Anthropologist without encountering even a passing reference to evolution. Most of the scholars who had led the revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s had either died (Leslie White, Julian Steward) or ceased to concern themselves with evolutionary questions (Marshall Sahlins, Eric Wolf). Elman Service was almost alone in continuing to publish on this theme (Service 1971a, 1975, 1985). Robert Dunnell is reflecting a widespread sentiment when he claims that "Were it not for the fact that American archeologists adopted elements of the new Cultural Evolution, Cultural Evolution would not be offurther concern" (Dunnell 1988: 182). As Hallpike (1986: 13) has noted, however, "Social evolution is much too important a subject just to disappear because it is unfashionable."

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Recently, there have been signs of yet another revival of interest in cultural evolution. A new or at least a somewhat refurbished bandwagon appears to be gaining momentum, as publications dealing with evolutionary questions appear with increasing frequency (for example, see Hallpike 1986; Ingold 1986; Johnson and Earle 1987). That we were able to assemble the group of scholars whose work is presented in this volume in a conference explicitly devoted to cultural evolution is itself evidence of the strength of this revival. Although my co-editors and I are personally pleased at this confirmation that we are not alone in believing that the evolutionary approach is worth pursuing, we are also painfully aware that cultural evolutionism has already twice failed the test of selection among competing paradigms in the social sciences. This suggests that there are fundamental shortcomings in the theoretical approach to the evolution of culture as it has been formulated in the social sciences thus far. The ephemeral place of evolution in the social sciences is especially puzzling when it is contrasted with the dominant position it has occupied in the biological sciences since Darwin and Wallace articulated their theory of natural selection. No scientist concerned with living organisms can work in ignorance of Darwinian theory; in contrast many, perhaps most, social scientists lack any substantive understanding of theories of cultural evolution. How can this differential fate of evolutionary theory in the biological and social sciences be explained? I believe that it reflects the fact biologists and social scientists are usually not talking about the same phenomenon when they use the term "evolution."

2. THE TWO MEANINGS OF EVOLUTION Evolution is a peculiar word, one that can be used interchangeably, often without the user being conscious of this fact, with two quite different meanings. One usage refers to the sequence of forms that have evolved over time, the products of evolution; the other usage, to the causal mechanisms that produce such change in forms, the process of evolution. 1 In popular usage, evolution most commonly refers to the temporal sequence or succession of forms (e. g., the replacement over time of dinosaurs by mammals, or hunting bands by agricultural states). When biologists claim that evolution is a fact rather than a theory, this is what they mean. The fossil record offers convincing evidence of the sequential appearance of different life forms and species in the course of Earth's history. Remains of fish appear in the geological record before reptiles, reptiles before mammals, Homo erectus before Homo sapiens.

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The second meaning of evolution is that of the causal process by which change in forms (e.g., species or cultural traits) occurs over time. Darwin was primarily concerned with understanding the process of evolution as is indicated by his choice of the title The Origin of Species for his most important book. Although a number of different causal processes have been suggested, the process based on the natural selection ofrandomly occurring heritable variation is most widely accepted today. With regard to this usage, evolution remains a theory rather than a fact. The Darwinian causal model is a plausible one, and the weight of biological evidence is overwhelmingly in its favor, but like all causal models it can never be proven to be true. Use of the term evolution with these two distinctly different meanings helps to illuminate the very different programs of evolutionary studies followed in the biological and the social sciences. Students of biological evolution use the term in both of its meanings. Research aimed at reconstruction of fossil sequences is pursued with equal vigor to that on natural selection. Findings regarding fossil sequences offer new opportunities to test models of process; hypotheses about evolutionary process suggest new ways to interpret the fossil record. The debate surrounding the problem of mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous period involves both questions of sequence (was there a simultaneous global extinction event?) and process (what selection agent could cause such an event?). The arguments between proponents of "punctuated equilibrium" and "gradualism" are also simultaneously concerned with sequence and process (e. g., see Williams 1987). This continuous interplay between improved knowledge of sequences and more powerful models of process contributes to the continued vigor of evolutionary studies in biology. In the social sciences, on the other hand, reconstruction of cultural sequences has always been the primary concern. Much less attention has been paid to questions of process, and no single causal model has been widely accepted. Keller (1947) and Murdock (1971) advocated application of the Darwinian model to culture, but their influence on the anthropological study of cultural evolution has been almost nil (Campbell 1975). Only recently, as Robert Dunnell (1988:169) points out, have genuine processual models of cultural evolution been suggested. Robert Drennan's chapter in this volume illustrates this new concern with problems of process. Not surprisingly, given the extent to which concern with reconstruction of sequence dominates cultural evolutionary studies, there is almost no integration of research on sequence and that on process. In the absence of such integration, the study of cultural evolution remains in a state not unlike that of paleontology before Darwin. Temporal sequences

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were clearly evident in the fossil record but, without a plausible naturalistic mechanism to explain change, the Biblical flood was as believable an explanation for extinctions as any other. The occurrence of cultural evolution is as much a fact as is biological evolution, in that sequences of cultural forms can be shown beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt to exist in the archeological record. Not even Franz Boas doubted that hunting-and-gathering cultures preceded agricultural societies or that stone tools were invented before iron tools. In the absence of any convincing model of the causal processes that produce such temporal sequences, however, cultural evolutionism does not offer social scientists a coherent theory around which to organize further research. Whether social scientists employ the term evolution in the sense of a process or in the sense of a sequence of stages is more than a semantic nicety. It influences the kinds of questions that they are likely to ask. Scholars concerned with sequential stages will focus on questions of evolutionary typologies, directional trends, prime movers, and limiting factors. Those concerned with process will focus on questions of diversity, environmental selective forces, differential survival and adaptation, and mechanisms of transmission. These are very different research agenda, posing different questions and requiring different answers. Each represents a legitimate field of inquiry in its own right. But neither can provide by itself an adequate foundation for the development of a cultural evolutionary paradigm for the social sciences. Development of such a paradigm requires the integration of the processual and the sequential approaches to cultural evolution into a single comprehensive theory. Such an integration would for the first time offer the social sciences a paradigm with power rivaling that of evolutionary biology's "modern synthesis" (Huxley 1943). I will return to the question of such a synthesis in the concluding section of this chapter, after first reviewing the current status of the two approaches to cultural evolutionary research: cultural evolution as sequence and cultural evolution as process. During these discussions, I will also suggest some relations between the chapters included in this volume and these central issues in cultural evolutionary research.

3. THE STUDY OF CULTURAL EVOLUTIONARY SEQUENCES Students of cultural evolutionary sequences have been primarily concerned with four main themes: the construction of stage typologies, the question of directionality in cultural evolution and the identification of progressive trends, the search for prime movers of evolutionary change,

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and the identification of limiting factors on evolutionary advance. Each of these themes will be discussed in turn below.

TYPOLOGIES OF CULTURAL EVOLUTIONARY STAGES Lewis Henry Morgan's division of the cultural evolutionary sequence into seven "ethnical statuses" of lower, middle, and upper savagery and barbarism, and civilization (Morgan 1964) is one of the earliest and most influential efforts to construct a stage typology. Construction of typologies of stages remains a major preoccupation of cultural evolutionists. Certainly, Elman Service's most widely known contribution to contemporary anthropological theory is his band-tribe-chiefdom-state stage sequence (although, as Yengoyan points out in his chapter in this volume, this typology is by no means Service's only or even most significant contribution to ethnological thought). Stages have been defined in terms of many different criteria. Technology, means of subsistence, and forms of social and political organization have been the most commonly employed. Curiously neglected, in view of our presumed interest in the evolution of culture, has been employment of culture as a system of symbols as a criterion for delineation of stages.

Technological Stages The classic division of European prehistory into the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages is perhaps the best-known example of an evolutionary taxonomy based on technological stages. Morgan's characterization of each of his "ethnical" stages according to key inventions is another example of employment of the technological criterion. For example, he described the "middle status of savagery" as being marked by the knowledge of fire, the "upper status of savagery" by the bow and arrow, and the "lower status of barbarism" by the art of pottery. The "status of civilization" commenced with "the use of a phonetic alphabet, and the production ofliterary records" (Morgan 1964: 10-11). The frequently observed failure of ethnographic cases to fit into this typology has long been a problem for its users. The Polynesians, for example, were assigned by Morgan (ibid., 16) to the stage of "savagery, pure and simple" because they lacked pottery, his key indicator for advancement to barbarian status. Given the complex rank-stratified "chiefdom" type of social organization displayed by Polynesians in Hawaii and Tahiti, it seems self-evident that they should be assigned to a

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higher level. Such lack of fit between those technological traits used to mark stages and other aspects of culture continues to constrain the use of this type of typology.

Subsistence Stages Stage taxonomies based on the means of subsistence are probably the most commonly employed classification in contemporary anthropology. Hunters and gatherers, swidden farmers, and pastoralists are now standard categories used to organize the presentation of ethnographic materials in introductory textbooks. The use of subsistence criteria to classify evolutionary stages is a venerable practice in ethnology. L. T. Hobhouse, G. C. Wheeler, and M. Ginsburg had as early as 1915 classified a sample of several hundred primitive societies according to levels of "economic culture." It was their view that the means used by groups to obtain their subsistence provided an accurate measure of the extent to which humans have gained control over nature and thus a reasonably objective measure of cultural evolutionary "progress." Methods for obtaining food were the primary criterion they employed for assignment of societies to different stages. Technological factors, including tools and implements, house types, and pottery making and metallurgy, were also taken into account (Hobhouse et al. 1930:16-17). Their taxonomy included seven subsistence stages: Lower Hunters; Higher Hunters; Lower Pastoralists; Higher Pastoralists; and Incipient, Pure, and Highest Agriculturalists. Pastoralists and Agriculturalists were seen as separate branches on the evolutionary tree. This taxonomy is still of interest in that it illuminates how little change there has been in the delineation of subsistence stages in three-quarters of a century. Building on the work of Hobhouse et al. and Walter Goldschmidt (1959), the comparative sociologist Gerhard Lenski (1966:9Off; Lenski and Lenski 1978:88ff) has suggested a more elaborate typology of subsistence stages. He classifies societies as belonging to ten basic stages: (1) hunting and gathering, (2) simple horticulture, (3) advanced horticulture, (4) simple agrarian, (5) advanced agrarian, (6) fishing, (7) maritime, (8) simple herding, (9) advanced herding, and (10) industrial. This is not a unilineal sequence because "societies may reach comparable technological levels by following different evolutionary paths, that is by developing different but equally advanced subsistence technologies. . .. Maritime and agrarian societies, for example, are roughly equal in terms of technological progress even though they employ very different subsistence technologies."

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Subsistence-based taxonomies, such as that proposed by Hobhouse and colleagues and the Lenskis, assume that there is a deterministic relationship between the way a society interacts with its environment to meet subsistence needs and many other aspects of its culture. This assumption is poorly supported ethnographically. Cases of a rather dramatic lack of fit between the subsistence base and other aspects of the culture are not infrequently encountered. The Northwest Coast Indians are the classic case of such disconformity. Their economy was based on hunting and gathering; yet, their society was a complex rank-stratified one, of a type normally associated with a rather highly developed form of agriculture. That this posed a problem had already been recognized by Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsburg (1930:18-19). They included the Northwest Coast Indians in their Higher Hunter stage but stated that they should, in fact, "form a class apart" because of their greater material wealth and social complexity. Many of their attempts to find statistical correlations between cultural traits and evolutionary stages were, in fact, vitiated by the inclusion of these complex chiefdoms in the same category as socially much simpler bands and tribes.

Stages Based on Social and Political Organization Stages based on social and political organization are also frequently employed in evolutionary taxonomies. Although Marx assigned primacy to the forces of production in his theory of social change, his developmental sequence of primitive communism, slave state, feudalism, and capitalism reflects social and political organizational criteria rather than technological ones. Julian Steward's concept of "levels of sociocultural integration" introduced the idea of emergent levels of social organizational complexity into American anthropology. He asserted, however, that his concept was purely a heuristic one, "simply a methodological tool for dealing with cultures of different degrees of complexity. It is not a conclusion about evolution" (Steward 1955:52). In Primitive Social Organization (1962), however, Elman Service employed Steward's concept of integrative levels as the basis for proposing a more finely differentiated sequence of evolutionary stages. His well-known sequence of band, tribe, chiefdom, and state has been widely employed to organize evolutionary reconstructions. It has also generated heated debates about both the validity of the overall sequence and the attributes assigned to specific stages. The continuing debate about the nature of band-level societies exemplifies the latter type of argument. I do not intend to review the large, and often highly polemical, literature spawned by Service's suggestion

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that all pristine hunting-and-gathering bands were organized on a patrilocal basis. In his preface to the second edition of Primitive Social Organization, Service (1971:x) remarks that "What the standard aboriginal band was is a factual problem and will never be known for sure. My feeling that the data and functional logic argued for the likelihood of the patrilocal band was only a surmise, but it was so often regarded by others as my firm conviction that I now willingly give it up. I haven't really changed my mind, but I don't want to be misunderstood any longer." Even if Service was in error, his formulation has been valuable in generating much new empirical work on hunters and gatherers, work that has led to new ways of thinking about egalitarian social systems. The resulting recognition that the organization of band societies is highly variable has important implications for our understanding of the process by which cultural evolution occurs, a question that will be explored at length later in this chapter. Service's sequence as a whole has also been the focus of considerable discussion, particularly the chiefdom stage as Carneiro points out in his chapter in this volume. Although his band-tribe-chiefdom sequence can be seen as a further refinement of Morgan's division of primitive society into the two stages of savagery and barbarism, it runs counter to the even longer standing Western intellectual tradition of emphasizing the vast gap between all primitive societies on the one hand and all civilizations on the other, with the primitive category treated as essentially undifferentiated. Leslie White (1975:173) exemplifies the latter view with his statement that "In the process of the evolution of culture, the tribe and the nation are the two major forms of cultural system; as a matter of fact, they are the only significant cultural systems in human history." White's dualistic view echoes Durkheim's dichotomy between traditional societies based on mechanical solidarity and industrial societies characterized by organic solidarity. In his The Evolution of Political Society, Morton Fried (1967) presents a stage typology based on political organizational criteria. His sequence is that of egalitarian societies, rank societies, stratified societies, and the state. These stages are distinguished by the means by which they maintain social control over their members and the extent to which individuals are able to exercise differential power over resources and people. Hunting-and-gathering bands exemplify the egalitarian stage in that they lack any institutionalized means of compelling members to behave in prescribed ways and, in the absence of formal ranking and stratification, display minimal individual differences in access to power. Hydraulic states of the type that Karl Wittfogel (1957) described in his Oriental Despotism represent the other extreme of the political

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evolutionary continuum. Stratification is extreme with total power over the lives of individual subjects concentrated in the hands of the ruler. A central theme of discussions on the evolution of political stages is that of the origin and nature of the state and civilization. As Service (1975:3) has said, "The watershed in the evolution of human culture occurred when primitive society became civilized society." How can this transformation of societies from egalitarian, kinship-based systems to hierarchical, territorially defined systems be explained? Robert Carneiro (1970), building on an idea put forward much earlier by Herbert Spencer, has suggested that state formation can be explained in terms of the existence of territorial circumscription. In those situations where growing populations are hemmed in and prevented from expanding beyond the limits of their existing territory by ecological barriers (as the Egyptians were contained in the narrow ribbon of the Nile River Valley by the surrounding desert) or social barriers (as the farming populations in the Valley of Mexico were contained by the war-like nomadic Chichimec tribes on their northern frontier), people have to accept the emergence of state power because they literally have no choice. In his chapter in this volume, Carneiro discusses the circumscription hypothesis in relation to the emergence of complex aboriginal chiefdoms in the Cauca Valley of Colombia. Carneiro's hypothesis is a plausible one, but debate over the causes of state origins continues unabated. Resolution, as Charles Spencer and Robert Drennan point out in their chapters in this volume, if possible at all, will have to come in large part from archeology.

Stages Based on the Evolution of Culture as a Symbolic System The most commonly employed taxonomies of cultural evolutionary stages employ criteria relating to rather narrow subsystems of culture (e. g., technology or social organization). Such taxonomies are appropriate for the study of social evolution and could, with relatively minor modification, be equally well applied to species lacking culture such as ants and termites. If, however, the evolution of culture is at issue, and if, following Leslie White (1949b), culture is defined as a system of symbols, use of cultural criteria to define evolutionary stages would seem desirable. A number of schemes have been suggested. Some define stages in terms of the means of transmission of cultural symbols; others use the content of the symbolic system to define stages. Means of cultural transmission. Talcott Parsons (1966) suggested that the types of mechanism employed for the storage and transmission of cultural information could be used to define stages of cultural evolution. Spoken language is the basis of the symbolic system in primitive socie-

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ties. Speech allows the rapid generation and transmission of symbolic information in small groups organized on a face-to-face basis. It also provides the means for storing relatively large quantities of information in the human memory. For Parsons, as for Jack Goody (1986), the invention of writing marks the transition from primitive society to civilization. Writing, although itself a form of technology, transforms the character of the symbolic system: "[It] . . . increases the basic differentiation between the social and cultural systems and vastly extends the range and power of the latter. The principal symbolic contents of culture can, with writing, be embodied in forms which are independent of concrete interaction contexts. This makes possible an immensely wider and more intensive cultural diffusion, both in space (e.g., relative to populations) and in time" (Parsons 1966:26). Writing also permits the development and maintenance of a much larger population of symbols than can exist when all transmission and storage of knowledge is verbal and memorate. Marshall McLuhan (1962) has suggested that the invention of printing represents an even more significant change in the means of transmission of symbols, one that fundamentally alters the character of the cultural system. Finally, Parsons sees the emergence of "institutionalized codes of normative order" in the form of the legal system as marking the transition from archaic to modern civilization. In his view, "Law, when developed to the requisite level, furthers the independence of the normative components of the societal structure from the exigencies of political and economic interests and from the personal, organic, and physical-environmental factors operating through them" (Parsons 1966:27). Mary Helms's suggestion in her chapter in this volume that longdistance journeys by members of the elite in stratified societies give them access to a unique body of information can be readily assimilated to this type of taxonomy. Long-distance travel, like writing or law, can be seen as representing a special mechanism for acquisition and transmission of symbolic information. Content of the symbolic system. A second approach to definition of evolutionary stages in terms of characteristics of culture as a symbolic system is represented by attempts to identify distinctive kinds of informational content as being associated with cultures at different levels of development. For example, Alan Lomax has attempted to relate musical style to cultural evolution (Lomax with Berkowitz 1972; Lomax 1976). By comparative "cantometric" analysis of 400 cultures drawn from Murdock's World Ethnographic Sample, Lomax (1976:22-28) concluded that song style was closely related to other aspects of culture: "The productive system, the sexual division of labor, the power of govern-

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ment, the strength of community ties, the position of women, the sexual code, the adequacy of diet, the way children are raised, the size of the community, the climate--all these social fundamentals seem to be represented by special aspects of song" (ibid., 25). Not surprisingly, given the existence of such functional integration between music and other aspects of culture, Lomax found that distinctive song styles were associated with cultures at different evolutionary stages. Sample cultures were assigned to five evolutionary stagesExtractors, Incipient Farmers, Animal Husbandry, Plow Agriculture, Irrigation-presumed to represent increasingly productive subsistence systems characterized by increased socioeconomic complexity. The information load of the songs was found to increase along the same scale, for example, "In singing we find that the proportion of repeated text decreases and the proportion of new text rises along this productive scale. The proportion of precisely to laxly enunciated consonants and the proportion of small to large intervals are also related to socioeconomic complexity. However, the proportion of precisely enunciated syllables is associated with the degree to which government is centralized ... while the proportion of small to large intervals is strongly related to the degree of layering and social stratification. In other words, the degree of articulation or the facility of song style for registering small differences rises along with the information requirements of complex socioeconomic systems" (Lomax 1976:26). Henry Lewis's chapter in this volume describing the differing kinds of knowledge possessed by aboriginal foragers, white cattle ranchers, and park rangers regarding the use of fire to manage the habitat in Northern Australia raises interesting questions about the relationship between complexity of symbolic systems and overall social and cultural complexity. Lewis reports that the aborigines have a much more detailed and comprehensive understanding of fire ecology than do the cattlemen or the rangers. In fact, it is the rangers, members of a large and complex bureaucracy of a nation-state, who have the least complex knowledge system regarding fire. Lewis suggests that this represents a kind of "devolution" of cultural knowledge about the environment accompanying the progressive evolution of social complexity. Robert Bellah's delineation of cultural evolutionary stages in terms of the nature of religious belief and practice represents one of the most ambitious efforts to date to develop a taxonomy of stages based on symbolic content. Bellah (1970:21) defines religion as "a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence." It is religion as a "symbol system" that he sees as evolving "in the direction of more differentiated, comprehensive, and in Weber's sense, more rationalized formulations. " These changes are accompanied

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by related changes in the place of religion in society. He also assumes that "These several changes in the sphere of religion ... are related to a variety of other dimensions of change in other social spheres that define the general process of sociocultural evolution" (ibid., 24). Bellah proposes a five-stage sequence in which religious symbol systems become increasingly complex and differentiated in the course of evolving from the stage of Primitive Religion through the stages of Archaic, Historic, Early Modern, and Modern Religion. Each of these stages is distinguished by a distinctive religious world view. The world view of the stage of Primitive Religion, for example, is characterized by a high degree of "particularity"-the extent of detail with which the world of myth is related to the actual world-and "fluidity." Archaic Religion is characterized by "the emergence of true cult with the complex of gods, priests, worship, sacrifice, and in some cases divine or priestly "kingship" (ibid., 29). The religious symbol system of this stage is correspondingly more definitely characterized and stable. Historic Religion's symbol systems are transcendental, involving rejection of the actual world in favor of a supernatural one which is conceived of as totally separated from daily existence. Although Bellah's stages are defined in terms of religion, such a taxonomy conceivably could be expanded to incorporate the entire content of the cultural system. This would provide a genuinely "culturological" taxonomy of evolutionary stages.

Are There Stages in Cultural Evolution? Except for those typologies of cultural stages derived from archeological data on prehistoric technology, most typologies are constructed by applying the comparative method to ethnographic data. The assumption is made that contemporary "primitive" cultures are representative of earlier evolutionary stages. Groups such as the Yahgan or the Arunta are viewed as cultural "living fossils" in much the same way as the horseshoe crab might be considered to be a survivor from an earlier era in the evolution of life. Murdock's collection of ethnographic case studies, Our Primitive Contemporaries (1934), exemplifies such use of the comparative method as does Service's Profiles in Ethnology (1971b)--a volume that when first published in 1958 was entitled A Profile in Primitive Culture. The nineteenth century British evolutionist Pitt-Rivers (1906:49-50) neatly summarizes the underlying logic of the comparative method (and also the racism and eurocentrism that so long contaminated it): "The existing races of mankind may be taken to represent the budding twigs and foliage, each in accordance with the relative superiority of its civili-

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zation, appertammg to branches higher and higher placed, upon the great stem of life." It will come as no surprise that Pitt-Rivers assigned contemporary Europeans to the highest branch, one bearing "to their ancestors of the historical period the same relationship that geologists have shown the existing mammalia of our forests to bear to the mammalia of the tertiary geological period. The semi-civilized Chinese and Hindoos, in like manner, may be classed with the races of ancient Assyria, Egypt, and other nations prior to the first dawn of history, the civilization of which nations they still so greatly resemble, and appear to have retained, in a state of retarded progress from those ages to our own." And finally, down near the bottom of the trunk he placed the bushmen and the Australian aborigines, whom he saw as having the same relationship to the paleolithic societies of ancient Europe as do the "mollusca of recent species to the mollusca of the primary geological period. " Pitt-Rivers justified his employment of this method of reconstructing evolutionary sequences by the argument that "In all of these existing races, we find that the slowness of their progression and incapacity for improvement is proportioned to the low state of their civilization, thereby leading to the supposition that they may have retained their arts with but slight modification from the time of their branching from the parent stem, and may thus be taken as the living representatives of our common ancestors in the various successive stages of their advancement" (Pitt-Rivers 1906:50). In order for true living fossils to survive, however, the environment would have to have remained absolutely constant from the time of their origin to the present. This is rarely the case, either for biological species or for cultures. The world that modern molluscs inhabit is different from that of their ancestors, if for no other reason than it is also occupied by many more recently evolved species. If the molluscs have not also evolved in response to the presence of these other species in their environment, they would not continue to survive. The same must be true of contemporary primitive cultures who inhabited an environment that differs in many ways from that of the Pleistocene period. Hunting-andgathering cultures must have changed in response to changing environmental selective pressures (e. g., the extinction of megafauna in many parts of the world). As Fried (1967:37-38) observes, "Most primitive cultures that survive are found in rather inhospitable habi.tats .... The consequences of this condition can hardly be overstated .... One of the most important variables in the development of complex political systems is population size and density; these factors rest, in turn, upon the carrying capacity of the environment. ... Simple extrapolation from ob-

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servations of Eskimo, Bushman, or other cultures in marginal habitats to paleolithic cultures in the Pleistocene is dangerous." Such criticism is reinforced by the belief that the ethnographic record has been so badly distorted by the expansion of civilized societies, especially in the form of European colonialism and capitalist penetration, that it cannot offer a valid basis for making evolutionary reconstructions (Wolf 1982). From this perspective, tribes and chiefdoms are viewed as secondary phenomena, the social response of primitives to expansive civilization, or even, as Hutterer suggests in his chapter in this volume, the deliberate creation of colonial administrators. The fact that many seemingly primitive hunting societies in Asia were strongly influenced by their close relations with neighboring civilizations was pointed out early on by Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsburg: "There is, however, another group of Hunters and Gatherers which we have distinguished, not as standing higher than others, but as occupying a peculiar position. These are the hill and jungle tribes, principally in India and the Malay region, who do not practise any agriculture, and cannot be called pastoral. ... But they live on the outskirts of villages, come into markets, sell jungle products, possibly serve the villagers in various ways, and sometimes are hunters rather in the sense in which thieves, gypsies, and brigands may be so called than in any other" (Hobhouse et al. 1930:19-20). These groups, which Richard Fox (1969) later labeled "professional primitives," they classed as "dependent hunters," stating that "This group does not then represent a distinct cultural level, but is, so to say, a by-path in the line of advance" (Hobhouse et al. 1930:20). Thomas Harding (1960) explicitly recognized the necessity of including the social environment, or what he called the "superorganic" sector, in cultural ecological studies of adaptation in his chapter in Evolution and Culture edited by Sahlins and Service. According to Harding, "Adaptation embraces both relation to nature and, except for completely isolated societies, to other cultural systems. Adaptation to nature will shape a culture's technology and derivatively its social and ideological components. Yet adaptation to other cultures may shape society and ideology which in turn act upon technology and determine its further course. The total result of the adaptive process is the production of an organized cultural whole, an integrated technology, society, and ideology, which copes with the dual selective influences of nature on the one hand and the impact of outside cultures on the other. Such are, in general outline, the mechanics of cultural adaptation" (Harding

1960:47-48). Curiously, the implications of this view of adaptation for the validity of ethnographically based evolutionary reconstructions seem to have

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been largely overlooked by Harding's fellow contributors. Service's own typology of social organizational stages, based largely on ethnographic information, was published two years after Harding's chapter. Although recognizing that changes initiated by contact with Europeans had altered many surviving hunting-and-gathering societies (hence his rejection of Steward's "composite band" as a pristine primitive form of social organization), Service continued to accept ethnographic accounts of bands at time of first contact as representative of an earlier evolutionary stage. In a later paper, however, Service (1968b) firmly rejected the comparative method as unreliable. Although suffering from serious limitations, the comparative method does not deserve to be wholly abandoned. Its use seems justified with regard to those aspects of culture that are most strongly determined by population size, settlement pattern, technology, and means of subsistence. Reconstructing the kinship system of paleolithic hunters and gatherers on the basis of data derived from the Eskimo, Shoshoni, and Semang is unquestionably a dubious venture, as the continuing controversy over Service's patrilocal band stage demonstrates. It is much more plausible, however, to infer on the basis of ethnographic accounts of the Australian aborigines, as Robert Bellah does, that the religious world view of the hunting cultures of the Paleolithic was a highly particularistic and fluid one. What other type of religious world view could be associated with small, nomadic, technologically unspecialized huntingand-gathering societies? The logic of functional analysis offers strong support for such a reconstruction. Ultimately, the archeologists will have to resolve many of the outstanding questions about the sequence of stages of cultural evolution. Are, for example, chiefdoms a discrete social organizational stage in the main cultural evolutionary sequence or are they a secondary phenomenon, arising on the peripheries of states? This is an empirical question that will ultimately have to be answered by carefully designed archeological studies of the sort outlined in the chapters by Charles Spencer and Robert Drennan in this volume. The search for universal stage typologies may, in any case, ultimately prove futile. Such typologies assume that cultural evolution is unilinear. To some extent it must be so. There is no doubt that on a worldwide basis hunting and gathering preceded agriculture as a subsistence stage, for example. Similarly, the stage of lithic technology must have preceded the stage of smelted metal tools. But swidden agriculture need not have preceded wet rice farming nor tribes and chiefdoms existed prior to the rise of states. Cultural evolution may be more stochastic than is allowed for by conventional stage typologies. As Julian Steward (1955) suggested with his multilinear approach, more than one evolu-

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tionary trajectory is possible. The description by James Eder in this volume of the several very different trajectories being traced by Philippine Negrito groups offers impressive empirical support for the multilinear perspective. Finally, any proposed sequence of stages has validity only to the extent that cultural evolution has been consistently directional.

DIRECTIONALITY IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION Closely associated with the construction of stage typologies is the search for evidence of directionality in the evolutionary sequence. Although not a major concern of Darwin, the question of directionality was a major preoccupation of many evolutionists in the latter part of the last century and the early part of the present one. Vitalists and finalists sought to use the fossil record to prove that life was driven to evolve in predetermined directions (Simpson 1964:180). They sought to establish various "laws" of orthogenesis: for example, Cope's law that body size increases in the course of evolution and Williston's law that structural parts become reduced in number but more specialized in the course of evolution (ibid., 184). Unfortunately for those seeking an orderly pattern in nature, paleontologists have been unable to find consistent support in the fossil record for any orthogenic laws. The direction of change is a reflection of the nature of the selective pressures operating on the gene pool of each species. The fossil record displays such trends as it does because, as Simpson (1964:229) so eloquently puts it, "History is inherently unrepeatable, so that any segment of a historical sequence ... begins with one state and ends with another. It therefore necessarily has a direction, and if orthogenesis is merely that direction, it explains nothing and only applies a Greek term to what is obvious without the term." Today, the search for evolutionary laws is largely relegated to the fringes of biological science although, as the popularity of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man (1959) demonstrates, finalism continues to appeal to the literate public. Unfortunately, it also retains a place in the thought of many professional social scientists. Most social scientists have viewed cultural evolution as inherently directional. Service (1971a:3) is representative when he defines evolution as "sequential, directional advance in terms of some measurable criteria of progress." Few anthropologists would disagree with his statement that "The earliest human societies must have been small and simple in social organization, poor in technological equipment, without formal legal or governmental institutions, and with an ideology based

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more on the supernatural than on science. Since these characteristics contrast greatly with modern industrial states, we think of evolution as directional: generally from small to large societies, from simple to complex organizations, from informal to formal political institutions and so on" (Service 1968a:222). Consensus tends to break down over the question of which measures of progress are appropriate, however. Subjective criteria reflecting ethnocentric European value judgments were employed by many early cultural evolutionists. Thus, matriliny and polygamy were invariably viewed as primitive marriage forms in contrast to the "more advanced" patriarchal monogamous marriage that was the Victorian ideal. Modern evolutionists have devoted much effort to the search for objective criteria with which to measure cultural progress. Increased social complexity, greater intellectual rationality, and increased human ability to control nature have all been suggested as offering objective measures of evolutionary advance.

Societal Complexity Beginning with Herbert Spencer, "development in the direction of greater complexity" has been the most commonly employed criterion (Dole 1973:248).2 Spencer thought that all aggregations-astronomical, geological, biological, and superorganic-evolved according to the same set of principles. In the case of superorganic forms, he asserts that his evolutionary principle of "The change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous is displayed equally in the progress of civilization as a whole, and in the progress of every tribe or nation; and it is still going on with increasing rapidity." He relates the extent of division of labor and class stratification to progress: "Society in its first and lowest stage is a homogeneous assemblage of individuals having like powers and like functions: the only marked difference of function being that which accompanies difference of sex. Every man is warrior, hunter, fisherman, tool-maker, builder; every woman performs the same drudgeries; every family is self-sufficing, and, save for purposes of companionship, aggression, and defense, might as well live apart from the rest" (Spencer 1976:307). From this state of social homogeneity, society evolves forms characterized by ever more complex class stratification and division of labor, a progression Durkheim (1933) later formulated in terms of the change from "mechanical" to "organic" solidarity. Most definitions of cultural evolution proposed by contemporary anthropologists are compatible with Spencer's, although usually unaccompanied by his scientistic language regarding matter and motion. Raoul Naroll (1956:687) employs progressive functional differentiation as his criterion for social evolution: "that society is most evolved which has the

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highest degree of functional differentiation, whether in the form of occupational specialization or organizational complexity." Robert Carneiro (1967:240) views cultural evolution as involving an increase in population accompanied by increased structural complexity. Gertrude Dole (1973:248) also defines cultural evolution in terms of increasing complexity which she sees as being achieved through "three companion processes: (1) differentiation of structures, (2) specialization of functions, and (3) integration of both structures and functions into new levels of organization. "

Control of Nature Other supposedly objective criteria that have been suggested as measures of directionality in cultural evolution include greater per capita use of energy (White 1949b), a decrease in the extent of human dependence on nature (Childe 1969), and a general "enhancement of adaptive capacity" (Parsons 1966:21). White's ideas are discussed at length in a subsequent section on prime movers since he viewed increased ability to capture energy as a causal factor in progressive cultural evolution. The belief that cultural evolution progressively frees human society from dependence on the natural environment is a central theme in Marxist writings. It reflects the once-universal view among Europeans that primitive people lived in a state of continuous and frequently losing struggle with powerful forces of nature, a condition from which modem societies have been rescued by the development of powerful technology and more effective social organization which allows them to transcend environmental controls. In recent years this traditional view of primitive people as having lives the shortness of which is only matched by their nastiness has been replaced by a new orthodoxy that primitive cultures are the "original affluent societies" (Sahlins 1974). Field investigations of some contemporary hunters and gatherers have revealed that, far from engaging in a relentless struggle for existence, they enjoy an ample and well-balanced diet procured in only a few hours of work per day. It has also been increasingly recognized that primitive cultures are able to exert far greater control over the natural environment than was previously thought. The Australian Aborigines, for example, employ fire in a systematic manner to manipulate their whole ecosystem, as Lewis describes in his chapter in this volume. It has simultaneously been recognized that modem industrial societies are still highly vulnerable to environmental forces in the form of growing pollution and degradation of resources. Fear of epidemic disease, which had almost vanished from the developed countries a decade ago, has reappeared as a consequence

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of the rapid, and so far medically uncontrollable, spread of AIDS. In the face of such evidence of the vulnerability of complex modern societies to environmental perturbation, some anthropologists (e.g., John Bodley 1976) have even suggested that primitive cultures represent the only truly successful evolutionary adaptation. It is no longer as certain as it once seemed that modern industrial culture can control nature.

Intellectual Rationality That the "way of thought" typical of primitives is characterized by superstition, whereas civilized people display intellectual rationality, is one of the oldest and deepest conceits of Western scholars. Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1979), for example, asserted that primitive people had a "pre-logical mentality" which impeded their perception of cause-andeffect relationships and led them to believe in magic. Although LevyBruhl's work has fallen into disfavor because of its assumptions about racial influences on mentality and its sometimes colonialist titles (e. g., How Natives Think), his underlying hypothesis that modes of thinking change in the course of cultural evolution would seem to still deserve serious consideration. The problem is to identify objective, nonethnocentric indicators of such change. V. Gordon Childe (1951, 1969) suggested that the gradual displacement of magic by science was such an indicator of cultural evolution. He also suggested that there had been a quantitative increase in total cultural content. If Childe is correct in suggesting that the amount of culture grows cumulatively, it might be possible to define evolutionary progress quantitatively in terms of the total size of the pool of cultural symbols. Primitive cultures would be characterized by very small pools, and advanced cultures would have larger pools. A few attempts have been made to enumerate cultural traits for different societies (e. g., the University of California surveys of cultural elements of American Indian groups that were collected during the 1920s), but comparative analysis has foundered on the as yet unsolved problem of defining a crossculturally valid minimal unit. This is a serious problem even when dealing with items of material culture (Oswalt 1973); it is far more intractable when one seeks to count cultural symbols themselves. Success in defining a minimal unit of symbolic information would be the equivalent for cultural evolutionary theory to the identification of the gene as the fundamental unit of information in biological evolution. It would provide a means to directly link the study of cultural evolutionary sequences to models of process. This issue will be discussed at greater length in a subsequent section on selection units in cultural evolution.

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Vocabulary, or its constituent phonetic units, has been suggested as representing a quantifiable index of progressive cultural evolution. The idea is plausible because language is the most important means by which cultural symbols are conveyed. Many nineteenth century European linguists were preoccupied with the search for "primitive languages." Such languages were presumed to have simpler grammars and smaller vocabularies and therefore to be less capable than "evolved languages," such as English, French, or German, of transmitting complex ideas. It is now generally accepted, however, that "there is today no such thing as a 'primitive' language; every language is of approximately equal value for the purposes for which it has evolved, whether it belongs to an advanced or a primitive culture" (Samuels 1975:1). This relativistic view of languages has, however, been challenged by the work of Berlin and Kay (1969) on basic color terminology. Their study suggests that there is a universal pattern in the way that languages associated with cultures at different levels of complexity assign names to different parts of the color spectrum. Not only do more complex cultures distinguish a greater number of basic color terms, but these additional terms are added to the lexicon in a standard order as overall cultural complexity increases. Cecil Brown (1989), while explicitly avoiding making judgments about progress, has suggested that smallscale societies are often characterized by much less detailed lexical classification systems than are large-scale societies, because the functional requirements of scale create a need for greater differentiation in color terminology. That primitive cultures structure information in a distinctive way is suggested by Peter Gardner's (1966) description of "individualistic" hunters and gatherers, such as the Paliyans of India, as having cultural systems based on "memorate knowledge." He defines memorate knowledge as "knowledge which is held on the idiosyncratic level, the result of personal experience and individual analysis, rather than being derived from group opinion or tradition" (ibid., 390). In this type of culture, there is little concern with taxonomic precision or ordering and rationalization of knowledge and beliefs. As evidence, he cites a discussion with five Paliyan men about a commonly used plant. His informants were unable to agree as to its correct name and ultimately decided that their lack of terminological consensus was unimportant since, as individuals, they all knew how to recognize and use the plant. I found a similar absence of consensus about terminology for natural phenomena among lahai Semang foragers in Malaysia (Rambo 1980). Schebesta, who had studied the same group in the 1920s, reported his acute sense of frustration in obtaining agreement about the names, attributes, and relationships of the spirits in the Semang pantheon. He at one point

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actually convened a meeting of several older men to determine what the "correct" formulation was supposed to be (Schebesta 1973:187). Unfortunately, the Paliyan studied by Gardner, and most of the other ethnographic cases he cites in support of his model, including the Semang, represent cultures clearly falling within the category of "dependent hunters" by Hobhouse et al. (1930). Such groups, like peasants that they in some ways resemble, may be only "part-societies with partcultures" (Kroeber 1948:284) and thus offer an inappropriate basis on which to model the nature of truly primitive symbolic systems.

Is Cultural Evolution Directional? The cultural evolutionary sequence as reconstructed by archeologists and ethnologists does evidence a degree of directionality. That population size and social structural complexity have increased seems incontestable. Ten thousand years ago, the maximal cultural unit was some form of hunting-and-gathering band with a population numbering a few tens of people at most, age and sex as the only basis for division of labor, and kinship as the only means of social integration. Today, the maximal unit has a population of hundreds of millions, a division of labor so complex that it would take a volume much longer than this one simply to list all of the different occupations, and a multiplicity of institutional means of social integration. That the symbolic system has grown in total size also seems beyond question. The vocabulary of modern languages of complex civilizations must be many times larger than that of any language spoken in the Paleolithic period. Do the trends evident in the cultural evolutionary sequence represent any sort of orthogenic laws? Has culture developed in the way it has because of necessity? Or is the observed outcome simply a matter of chance, the way things happened on this particular roll of the evolutionary dice? A deterministic interpretation was, of course, inherent in Marx's approach to cultural evolution. As the section that follows on the search for prime movers will suggest, it also underlies the thinking of many contemporary cultural evolutionists (e. g., White and Carneiro). From a Darwinian point of view, however, the question of directionality in cultural evolution remains more problematic. Particularly troublesome is the evidence of cultures that have changed in the direction of smaller size and lessened complexity. Excavations on Marajo Island in the Amazon by Clifford Evans and Betty Meggers have provided archeological evidence suggesting the occurrence of cultural retrogression in the New World. The fall of the Roman Empire and its replacement by a multitude of petty chiefdoms is a historically well-documented European example, a particularistic event that misled Marx into insert-

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ing "feudalism" as a necessary stage between the slave state and capitalism in his universal evolutionary sequence. Some cultural evolutionists evade the problems posed by cultural retrogression by the simple expedient of denying that such change is evolutionary. Thus, change that involves shifting from a state of greater heterogeneity toward one characterized by greater homogeneity is not, in Spencer's view (1976:464-465), evolution but its opposite process of "dissolution." Gertrude Dole (1973:258) also explicitly restricts the use of the term evolution to only those social systems that are changing in the direction of greater size and complexity. She thereby excludes any cases where social systems have become simplified in the process of adaptation to new environmental conditions. Such "loss of cultural complexity [is] a process that is the reverse of evolution and is referred to as regression or devolution" (ibid.). From her point of view, then, the Aztecs evolved when they shifted from being tribal nomads foraging in the Chichimec desert to settled agriculturalists in the Valley of Mexico; the Siriono, however, did not evolve when they abandoned settled agriculture to become nomadic hunters in the Bolivian forests. Instead, they "devolved." Or, to refer to the well-known case of the Kachin of Burma (Leach 1954), communities shifting from a gumlao (democratic tribal) to a gumsa (aristocratic chiefdom) form of organization are evolving, but those changing from a structurally more complex aristocratic organization to a less complex democratic structure are not. This is not in my view a satisfactory way of resolving the problem of directionality. White's (1945; 1959b) claim that he is concerned with the evolution of Culture, with a capital C, rather than with the trajectories traced by any specific cultures, and Sahlins's (1960) division of evolution, into Specific and General forms, are equally unsatisfactory attempts to deal with the problem that cultural retrogression poses for believers in progress. They admit that individual cultures may suffer simplification in the course of adapting to new environmental forces but assert that culture as a whole always continues to evolve in the direction of greater complexity. The logic underlying this argument is weak. General evolution is nothing more than an abstraction derived from all of the events defined as being progressive that are included within the category of specific evolution. So far, despite many actual cases of retrogression, there has always been at least one case of advance somewhere in the world to offset these, making it possible to conclude that general evolution is directional. This conclusion is drawn, however, from a sample of one, which is at present the total universe available for human social scientists to analyze. This is a weak basis on which to make general predictions about the course of cultural evolution. Therefore, unless it is possible to point to a mechanism integral to the evolutionary process

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that necessitates movement in a progressive direction, there are no grounds for assuming that the current example is anything more than the chance outcome of an indeterminate process. The search for prime movers to which I now turn is important precisely because it represents an attempt to identify such a mechanism.

THE SEARCH FOR PRIME MOVERS Darwin, borrowing from Malthus, based his concept of natural selection on the intrinsic tendency of populations to increase over time. Popli:ation growth may seem, therefore, to be the prime mover in his model of biological evolution. This is, in my view, an erroneous interpretation of the role that Darwin assigned to population growth. Population increase in itself explains nothing; it is simply a necessary condition for the occurrence of competition. It is only when competition is linked to the idea of selection of hereditable variation that population increase becomes important. Students of cultural evolution have generally not employed such a complex processual model, a point which will be discussed in detail in a later section. Instead, they have tried to explain progressive evolution in terms of the direct operation of one or more prime movers. Population growth, increased capture of energy, and technological innovation are the most frequently discussed of these.

Population Growth Population growth is currently the most frequently invoked prime mover for cultural evolution, reflecting its apparent linking of "material" biological processes with cultural phenomena, as well as its resonances of Darwin's invocation of Malthusian pressures. Although fashionable, it is hardly new. In his Societal Evolution, first published in 1915, Albert Keller (1947:26) stated that "Culture is developed when the pressure of numbers on land reaches a degree at which life exerts stress on man." More recently, Sanders and Price (1968:74) assert that "Population growth may be considered as a primary process in the cause-and-effect network [of cultural evolution], with competition and cooperation as derivative processes." They suggest that "Organizational stresses occur as a society increases in size; size is broadly limited by population density, and such stresses stimulate the development of more effective systems of social control. Considered in this sense, social systems are adaptive systems that may be viewed as both causes and effects of population growth" (Sanders and Price 1968:84). Despite the invocation

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of a cybernetic systems model here, they consider population growth as more primary than other factprs, going on to claim that "Population growth is a major stimulus toward the evolution of social systems to each of the levels cited by Service. There is probably a close correlation between the rapidity of population growth and culture change" (ibid.). Johnson and Earle (1987:15) also treat population growth as the prime mover in their model of cultural evolution. They assert that "The primary motor for cultural evolution is population growth. Human populations, like all other animal populations, have an inherent biological capacity for growth that is necessary for a population to compete with other species for limited resources, to expand into unoccupied habitats, and to replenish itself after environmental disasters. Over the long course of human cultural development, the archaeological and historical record shows a consistent and eventually dramatic increase in human population worldwide" (ibid., 16). Resorting to the supposed "inherent biological capacity" of human populations to continuously increase as the explanation for cultural evolution is thoroughly reductionist. It attempts to explain change in one kind of phenomenon-the set of symbols that constitute culture-in terms of a totally different kind of phenomenon-the number of biological organisms that make up the human population. Such an explanation would be convincing only if a plausible direct linkage between the two kinds of phenomena were known to exist. To the best of my knowledge, no such linkage has been identified. Certainly, adherents of cultural materialism (e. g., Harris 1977) are able to suggest complex chains of causality that relate changes in the ideological "superstructure" of a cultural system to changes in its technological "base." They then assert that it is population increase that actually underlies all of these changes. This is playing with words. Technology, whether one assigns it an infrastructural status or not, is still an aspect of culture. It is a set of symbols that guides people in their physical manipulation of nature. Technological change, although physically manifested in tools, is fundamentally change in the symbols which provide the mental blueprints that guide the makers of those tools, and is thus no different in principle than change in ideological elements that most cultural materialists assign to the superstructure. Also overlooked is the critical question of why the human population alone, of all the millions of species in the world, has shown a consistent long-term pattern to increase its numbers throughout its evolutionary history. Why haven't the regulatory mechanisms of inter- and intraspecific competition, which cause other species to stabilize their numbers within the niche space available to them in the biosphere, operated to control the size of the human population? The answer would seem to

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be that whenever the human population reaches the carrying capacity of its environment, new cultural developments have expanded the size of its niche. The central question is, What causes these new developments in ideas, technology, and social organization that result in niche expansion? Population growth, in and of itself, would simply result in periodic crashes as population size exceeded carrying capacity. The long-term pattern would be one of oscillation rather than directional change. Population growth is no more a sufficient explanation of cultural evolution than it is of biological evolution. What population growth models of cultural evolution fail to provide is a plausible mechanism for variation and selective retention. The extent to which population increase reflects an inherent biological capability in Homo sapiens must also be questioned. Humans do not mate according to a fixed annual cycle controlled by the seasons. Instead, reproductive behavior is heavily influenced by cultural factors (e. g., age of marriage, frequency of intercourse, use of birth-control techniques, and abortion and infanticide). No known population grows at the rate theoretically achievable if reproduction were purely a biological phenomenon. Marx's rejection of a single law of population may be well founded. Instead, each cultural evolutionary stage may have its own unique law. There is, for example, a growing body of evidence that hunting-and-gathering populations are stable or have extremely low rates of increase (Gomes 1982). They display no inevitable tendency to expand beyond the carrying capacity of their habitats. The fact that hunting and gathering remained the sole mode of production in Australia for more than 40,000 years, and in California for at least 10,000 years, should be more disquieting to proponents of population increase as the prime mover of cultural evolution (e. g., M. N. Cohen 1977) than it seems to be. If demographic pressure always operated to reduce living standards at anyone stage of resource exploitation, thus forcing the pace of evolutionary change, then one must wonder why so many of the archaic states waged warfare not to seize territory but to capture the subjects of neighboring states who were then resettled into the core areas of the conquerors, as Opart Panya describes in his chapter in this volume as happening in the case of traditional Thailand. If population pressure was a problem in the Nile Valley, a circumscribed situation par excellence, the Pharaoh should have been delighted to see the last of Moses and his cogeners. That he was not, and indeed expended considerable effort to retain the Jews within his territories, suggests that population pressure was not perceived as a threat to social stability.

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Increasing Energy Capture and Utilization The view that an increased rate of capture and utilization of energy is the prime mover of cultural' evolution is commonly associated with Leslie White (Opler 1961). As White acknowledged, however, the idea originated with Wilhelm Ostwald who asserted that "The history of civilization becomes the history of man's advancing control over energy" (Ostwald 1907:511). White suggested that "Culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased" (White 1949b:368). This theoretical approach is discussed at length in Rambo's chapter on energy and the evolution of culture in this volume. White's "law" has been widely accepted so that it has become the conventional wisdom that primitive cultures are "low energy societies" in contrast to civilized societies which are based on high per capita rates of energy utilization. White's formulation is challenged on empirical grounds in the chapters in this volume by Ali Rachman and Terry Rambo. They suggest that some hunters and gatherers are prolific users of energy, with per capita consumption rates equal to or exceeding those of modem industrial populations. The energy-extensive use of fire by Australian Aborigines to manipulate their environment is documented in the chapter by Lewis. Per capita rates of energy use tend to decline over much of the evolutionary sequence, with cultures at the chiefdom and archaic state levels displaying much lower per capita energy use rates than those at the band and tribal level. What increases in the course of evolution is not per capita energy use but the total amount of energy used to support the functioning of the social system itself. The most serious objection to energy as the prime mover of cultural evolution is based on theoretical rather than empirical grounds. As Alfred Lotka observed with reference to the energetics of biological evolution, the existence of untapped energy supplies provides an opportunity "for suitably constituted organisms to enlarge the total energy flux through the system. Whenever such organisms arise, natural selection will operate to preserve and increase them" (Lotka 1922:147). Energy in itself does not cause evolutionary advance. It is the fortuitous emergence of variant organisms having the capability to capture larger amounts of energy that offers natural selection the necessary materials with which to work. The same principle applies to cultural evolution. Energy does not directly change culture. Instead, the ability of a culture to capture and use energy is a reflection of the technology available to it. Coal and petroleum have existed in nature for as long as humans have inhabited

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the earth. It was only when sufficient knowledge of thermodynamics had accumulated to allow the harnessing of these energy sources to power machines that their utilization for cultural purposes became possible. Increased energy capture is, therefore, the consequence of technological innovation rather than its cause.

Technological Innovation Underlying the apparatus of class struggle as the principal motivating force in the Marxist evolutionary model is the prime mover of technological innovation-in this case, the tendency of the "material forces of production" to develop, thus coming into contradiction with the "social relations of production" that govern their employment. Why the forces of production should develop is, however, a question ignored by Marx. He, evidently in the spirit of his times, simply accepted that such innovation was natural (Elster 1985). Karl Wittfogel's theory of "oriental despotism" represents perhaps the most influential and controversial use of a technological innovation model of evolution in contemporary social science. Stimulated by Marx's somewhat hazy ideas about a distinctive "Asiatic mode of production," Wittfogel (1957) suggested that a causal relationship existed between development of large-scale systems of hydraulic agriculture and the formation of highly centralized autocratic states. A more sophisticated analysis of the relationship between technology and social organization is offered by Stanislav Andreski in Military Organization and Society (1971). Andreski suggests that there are strong causal relationships between the cost and complexity of military technology, the proportion of the population that bears arms, and the steepness of social stratification. Primitive societies are characterized by simple and cheap weapons that all male members can possess and use effectively. Military participation is consequently high and the degree of stratification very low. Feudal societies represent the opposite extreme. Weapons are expensive and scarce, and their effective use requires extended training so that a society can support only a few military specialists. The degree of stratification is correspondingly steep. Industrial society, at least initially, made possible the mass production of cheap weapons which could be effectively used with only a minimal amount of training. The military participation ratio increased accordingly as evidenced by the "nation in arms" concept of revolutionary France. Stratification grew less steep. Technological innovation is potentially the most plausible prime mover for cultural evolutionary advance. This reflects the fact that technology, unlike energy or population, is itself a cultural phenomenon. It

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simultaneously represents a material manifestation of the symbolic system and mediates interaction between that system and the environment. As an ultimate explanation for cultural evolution, I find technological innovation to be less than fully satisfying, however. One must still seek an explanation for the movement of the unmoved force.

LIMITING FACTORS ON CULTURAL EVOLUTIONARY ADVANCES If cultural evolution is assumed to be directional, with a prime mover driving advance from one stage to the next, then the question of why some cultures have failed to advance becomes meaningful. In the nineteenth century, assumed racial differences in intelligence provided the preferred explanation. Primitive cultures remained backward because primitive peoples were thought to lack the mental capabilities needed to sustain cultural progress. Since the acceptance of the idea of the psychic unity of mankind, however, explanation has been most often sought in terms of environmental "limiting factors. " The concept of limiting factors was borrowed from ecology, where it has long been a fundamental organizing principle. The growth of particular organisms is controlled, not by their total environment, but by only those factors that are least favorable to the organism in question. As initially formulated, Liebig's "law of the minimum" stated that plant growth is restricted by whatever chemical nutrient is in shortest supply. The soil can be richly supplied with phosphorus, for example, but plant growth will be checked if insufficient quantities of nitrogen are available. Later, Liebig's law was generalized to include all of the multiplicity of environmental factors that can affect the survival of an organism or population: "Any condition which approaches or exceeds the limits of tolerance is said to be a limiting condition or limiting factor" (Odum 1971:110). Implicit in the concept of limiting factors is the belief that organisms have an inherent potential for development that they will necessarily realize except when they are constrained by shortcomings in their environment. When the limiting factors concept is translated to the domain of cultural evolution, the assumption is made that an evolving culture is equivalent to a growing organism. It starts with a certain potential for development which it will normally achieve unless it is checked by unfavorable environmental conditions. Betty Meggers (1954) employed the concept of limiting factors in an attempt to explain the collapse of lowland Maya civilization. She argued that a tropical rain-forest environment was unable to sustain the inten-

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sive exploitation necessary to support a complex culture. Subsequently, she extended her argument to the American Indian societies of the Amazon region (Meggers 1971). The failure of aboriginal societies to evolve beyond the tribal level of organization was first explained in terms of limited agricultural potential of the generally impoverished soils of the Amazon Basin. After Carneiro (1956, 1961) demonstrated that swidden agriculture could supply sufficient calories to support considerably denser populations than were actually found, attention shifted to protein as the key limiting factor for the evolution of complex social systems (see Sponsel 1985 for a review). The chapter by Meggers in this volume is part of this continuing debate about the carrying capacity of the Amazonian environment. An environmental limiting factor of great possible significance in Southeast Asia is disease. William McNeill (1979:110) has suggested that "The comparative slowness of civilized expansion in this environment is almost certainly connected with the health consequences of trying to concentrate dense human populations within a well-watered tropical landscape. Intensification of micro-parasitism-with malaria and dengue fever perhaps in the lead, water-borne infections of the alimentary tract close behind, and an extremely complex series of multicelled parasites available to batten upon what remained-presented formidable obstacles to the growth of population in southeastern Asia towards anything like the densities that sustained Chinese and Indian civilizations. Or so one may legitimately infer from the fact that strong and massive states equivalent to the Chinese or even Indian empires did not in fact arise in southeastern Asian river valleys at any time, despite the obvious fact that the geographical areas in question provide ample space for a powerful civilization to arise there." Disease also may have acted as a limiting factor on cultural development in tropical Africa. As the seemingly endless and inconclusive debate regarding protein as a limiting factor in the Amazon demonstrates, it is relatively easy to suggest plausible sounding environmental constraints on cultural evolution but extremely difficult to empirically validate them. There has also been a tendency to analyze the concept of limiting factors in a rather simplistic and lineal manner in which a single environmental factor (infertile soil, protein scarcity) is seized upon to explain the total character of cultural adaptation. Research in human ecology has convincingly demonstrated that cultural adaptation is usually a very complicated affair involving interactive relations between two complex systems, the human social system and the ecosystem (Rambo 1983). Only very rarely can the form taken by a cultural system be convincingly attributed to the impact of a single environmental factor. Gertrude Dole's chapter in this volume describing the diversity of kinship systems

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displayed by native cultures in the Amazon raises questions about the extent to which environmental factors can be used to explain marriage rules. The limiting factor approach also suffers from a tendency to perceive primitive cultures as being at the mercy of nature rather than as active partners in a coevolutionary relationship. As is pointed out in the chapter by Percy Sajise in this volume, indigenous cultures in Southeast Asia have profoundly altered many aspects of their environments. Bontoc farmers, for example, have constructed elaborate irrigated terrace systems on formerly dry hill slopes. Water, once a critical limiting factor for rice cultivation, is no longer an important constraint. In other topographically similar areas where irrigation technology is unknown, water remains the key limiting factor for sustainable intensive agricultural production. Concern with limiting factors does offer a potentially useful linkage point between the study of cultural evolutionary sequences and the study of cultural evolutionary processes. Limiting factors are simply one aspect of the complex of environmental forces that operate as selective agents in the process of cultural evolution. By focusing attention on detailed description and analysis of specific local environments, students of limiting factors have begun to provide the kind of information that is needed to understand the operation of the cultural evolutionary process.

CONCLUDING REMARKS ON CULTURAL EVOLUTIONARY SEQUENCES Research on problems relating to cultural evolutionary sequence certainly represents a legitimate and important area of scientific inquiry in archeology, ethnology, and comparative sociology. New archeological findings on the origins of agriculture in Mesoamerica and Southeast Asia, for example, have changed thinking about global patterns of cultural evolution. More accurate and more detailed data on cultural sequences are as important to the continued development of cultural evolutionary theory as improved paleontological data are for research on biological evolution. Reconstruction of evolutionary sequences as an end in itself, however, is scientifically sterile. It leads to scholastic arguments about the correct number of stages or about the relative strength of various prime movers. It is by itself incapable of generating important new theoretical questions. Such questions can emerge only when knowledge of cultural evolutionary sequences is related to a systematic model of process. The

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following sections of this chapter will examine thinking about the process by which cultural evolution occurs.

4. THE PROCESS OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION Darwin did not discover evolution, in the sense of the emergence of progressively more complex species or life forms in the course of earth's history. The idea that species had changed over time, with more complex forms evolving from simpler ones, was already widespread in Western intellectual circles by 1859. The empirical evidence supporting this interpretation was even then very convincing, reflecting the new ability of geologists to interpret the fossil record in terms of stratigraphic principles. What was lacking, however, was a plausible naturalistic explanation of how the observed sequences had arisen. Darwin's great achievement was to suggest a mechanistic process capable of explaining how species could change over time. It is the concept of natural selection that represents his major contribution to evolutionary thought (Mayr 1959). As was pointed out in the introduction, the study of cultural evolution has remained pre-Darwinian. Attention has been almost wholly focused on problems relating to sequence, with much less attention directed to problems of process. No existing processual model of cultural evolution possesses explanatory power remotely equivalent to that enjoyed by natural selection in evolutionary biology. In this section, some of the issues that must be dealt with if a useful model of the process of cultural evolution is to be developed are discussed. I do not claim to have formulated such a model myself, nor do I think that I have encountered even a reasonably close approximation of such a model in the existing literature. Eugene Ruyle's observation that "attempts to specify precisely the conceptual elements of such a model have been few and unsatisfactory" (Ruyle 1973:202) remains valid today. Several elements are required to construct a plausible model of the cultural evolutionary process. These include a specification of the units of selection in cultural evolution, and the identification of mechanisms to explain the origin of variation in these units, their differential survival, and their transmission across time and space.

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UNITS OF SELECTION IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION Definition of the unit of selection is still a fiercely debated topic in evolutionary biology. Although the individual organism is still the most favored, units ranging from the gene (Dawkins 1976, 1982) to the group, deme, or population (D. S. Wilson 1980; Wynne-Edwards 1962) and to communities and ecosystems (Wicken 1987) have been suggested (see Mitchell 1987 for a useful review of the unit of selection controversy) . Definition of the unit of selection in the process of cultural evolution also remains a major unresolved issue, one that, more than any other, impedes theoretical advance. Biologists may continue to argue about whether the principal unit of selection is the group, the individual organism, or the gene, but at least they are able to clearly define each of these units. In contrast, cultural evolutionists are notably ambiguous when it comes to identification and definition of selection units. Is it culture itself, elements of culture, or the human organisms that carry culture? Several kinds of units of selection in cultural evolution have been suggested: genes; individual human organisms; human populations; the human species; whole cultures or societies; cultural traits, institutions, or artifacts; and symbolic units of information variously referred to as memes, mentifacts, or culturgens. The list of units is in itself revealing of the confused state of thought about cultural evolution in that it encompasses both purely cultural components (e. g., whole cultures, cultural traits, memes) and biological components (genes, individuals, populations). In the discussion that follows, I will separately examine biological and cultural units.

Biological Units of Selection in Cultural Evolution As Marion Blute (1987) notes, much of the literature discussing links between biology and culture is concerned not with cultural evolution per se, but with the biological evolution of human capacity to have culture. Culture is treated as a secondary or derived phenomenon, with its existence dependent on the prior evolution of specific human biological characteristics such as large brains with the ability to acquire new behaviors by means of individual learning. As Blute (1987:191) states, "It is certainly the case that culturally transmitted behaviors, norms, values, social roles and so on are dependent on the existence of a biological substratum, typically the human species." The fact that culture, at least in the only form that we know it, could not exist without human organisms as its carriers is un contestably true, but it certainly

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does not help in understanding the specific directions taken by cultural evolution once initiated. The gene has been suggested as the principal unit of selection in cultural evolution by some sociobiologists (e.g., Lumsden and Wilson 1981). They assert that variations in cultural patterns can be explained in terms of differing genetic predispositions or epigenetic rules. Despite their use of the term "coevolution" with respect to gene-culture relations, Lumsden and Wilson basically hold a genetic determinist view. They invoke alleged epigenetic rules-genetically transmitted preferences for certain cultural behaviors-to explain observed individual variation in color vision, hearing acuity, odor and taste discrimination, number ability, and proneness to alcoholism. BIute (1987:188) correctly observes that "Many of their examples are trivial from the perspective of a social scientist." More important, their examples do not demonstrate the existence of a connection between genetics and cultural differences. In the case of color classification, for example, Lumsden and Wilson cite the work of Berlin and Kay (1969) on pancultural prevalence of a limited set of patterns of basic color terminology as evidence for genetic determination of cultural categories. 3 There is now little question but that certain segments of the electromagnetic spectrum are more readily perceived by the human eye than other segments and therefore have high probabilities of being assigned names. To that extent it is possible to claim that cultural evolution is genetically influenced: Names are assigned to wavelengths that can be perceived by human organisms while wavelengths that are difficult to perceive or invisible to the human eye remain unnamed. But the symbolic value assigned to colors by different cultures and the various uses that are made of color to convey cultural information are not genetically determined. The perhaps apocryphal story that during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards wanted to reverse the order of traffic lights so that red, the color of Marxist progress, would signal "go," illustrates the independence of symbolic meaning from genetic determination. More damaging to their case is the fact that Lumsden and Wilson present no convincing evidence that epigenetic rules vary among human populations displaying different cultures. Only if such variation exists to a significant degree can it explain cultural variation. All their examples of genetically caused variation in preferences are based on the study of individual variation within populations, in most cases derived from the study of twins. They offer no evidence for the existence of major genetic differences in cultural preferences among different human populations. Such differences may possibly exist but convincing evi-

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dence of any culturally significant genetic variation among populations is conspicuous by its absence from the work of these sociobiologists. The individual human organism is perhaps the most commonly suggested biological unit of selection in cultural evolution. This reflects the assumption that since culture cannot exist without individuals to carry it, these individuals must simultaneously benefit from culture and exercise control over it. The sociobiological approach that Donald Symons (1989) labels "Darwinian anthropology" is one currently influential model of cultural evolution in which the individual is viewed as the unit of selection. This approach is based on the reductionist application of a number of Darwinian assumptions to the cultural realm. The first assumption is that culture is an adaptive mechanism of human organisms and is consequently subject to the same type of selection as operates to produce somatic adaptations. The second assumption is that different cultural adaptations display varying degrees of effectiveness. The third assumption is that the relative success or failure of a cultural adaptation will be reflected in the biological success or failure of the individuals employing it. Therefore, it seems intuitively obvious that selection must occur at the level of individual people who choose those new cultural practices or traits that best serve their needs and reject those that are less satisfactory. Those individuals that make the correct cultural choices, either as a result of conscious decision-making or trial-and-error experimentation, are presumed to enjoy differential reproductive success compared to individuals choosing less adaptive cultural beliefs and practices. If these assumptions are valid, biological success should lead to the replacement of adaptively inferior cultural traits by adaptively superior ones as the more successful individuals raise more offspring than the less successful. Culture will evolve, therefore, to the extent that it promotes the biological success of its human carriers. As Boyd and Richerson (1985:173) summarize this view, "To demonstrate that natural selection is a force in cultural evolution, we must ... show that individuals characterized by alternative cultural variants differ in their probability of surviving and becoming effective models." This is, in my view, a remarkably wrong-headed way of looking at cultural evolution. The biological reproductive fitness of individuals is certainly affected by culture, often negatively, but the fitness of a cultural variant is not measured in terms of the biological success of its human carriers. Instead, it can only be measured in terms of its own replication within the total pool of cultural variants. Cultural variants can and often do multiply or become extinct independently of the biological fate of particular individuals or populations. Successful cultural variants need not, and often do not, enhance the fitness of their carriers.

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In fact, many highly successful cultural practices, such as modern warfare, lower the reproductive fitness of virtually all who participate in them. Culture and individual biological survival. That any scientist writing in the latter part of the twentieth century could hold to the view that culture serves the biological interests of individual human beings is to me little short of amazing. A century that has seen the sacrifice of whole armies in the trenches of World War I, the mass slaughter of civilians in the Nazi death camps, the Soviet Gulag, and the Khmer Rouge killing fields, and the nuclear annihilation of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki does not offer convincing evidence that culture exists to enhance individual survival. lules Henry's analysis of contemporary America, entitled Culture Against Man (1965), offers a view of culture more in accord with the evidence of recent history. Henry finds the dynamic of cultural change in "the tendency of human culture to provide remedies for the conflict and suffering it creates." In his opinion, "Homo sapiens has thus made of misery itself an evolutionary force; it is the misery man himself creates that urges him up the evolutionary tree. We perceive that Homo sapiens has the capacity to extort new adaptations from his suffering, and that if he does not destroy himself too soon, he may eventually come upon a destiny of great beauty. I say 'may' rather than 'will' because of Homo sapiens' well-known capacityfrom bow and arrow to atomic nucleus-to use his discoveries against himself" (Henry 1965:10). The extent to which culturally determined activities threaten rather than enhance individual survival is perhaps most clearly evident with regard to the military aspect of human affairs. Physical strength, bravery, and skill in warfare may have enhanced individual reproductive success in some tribal societies, as Chagnon (1988) asserts is the case among the Yanomamo. It is doubtful, however, that any such correlation exists under conditions of modern warfare. Indeed, contemporary military organization and training are cultural mechanisms employed to motivate soldiers to behave in ways directly contrary to their individual interest in survival. As William H. McNeill (1982:133) has remarked, "The feats of arms that European armies routinely performed, once drill had become soldiers' daily experience, were in fact quite extraordinary .... Consider how amazing it was for men to form themselves into opposing ranks a few score yards apart and fire muskets at one another, keeping it up while comrades were falling dead and wounded all around. Instinct and reason alike make such behavior unaccountable." Participation in modern warfare can thus hardly be thought to result in maximization of reproductive potential, even of those combatants lucky enough to survive the carnage.

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Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the view that culture exists to serve humanity remains strongly entrenched in the thinking of social scientists, however. It was only late in his long career that even such a firm believer in the autonomy of culture from biology as Leslie White rejected his earlier belief that "The purpose and function of culture are to make life secure and enduring for the human species" (White 1975:9) in favor of the view that rather than serving the needs of humans, "Culture goes its own way in accordance with laws of its own. Man lives within the embrace of cultural systems, and enjoys or suffers, whatever they mete out to him" (ibid., 159). White concluded that "cultural systems, like the stars and planets, are indifferent to the welfare--or the very existence--of man" (ibid., 11). The assumption that cultural success and biological success are directly linked, which seems plausible when applied to small-scale primitive societies, is revealed as absurd in the context of large-scale complex cultural systems. It is possible, as Van Parijs (1981) observes, that some cultural practices, such as spacing of births, which evidently enhance cultural adaptation, can be spread in simple hunting societies as a result of helping to increase the inclusive fitness of individuals who employ them, and can thus become genetically based over a sufficient period of time. There are, however, as he also observes, no possible genetic bases for the cultural patterns involving interaction between multiple different individuals, such as social classes, which are characteristic of complex societies. Complex societies are also characterized by the increasing separation between individuals who plan and initiate actions and those who implement them. Members of elite groups are in large measure protected from negative selection, regardless of the success or failure of their social management efforts. It is the implementors of these policies-soldiers, slaves, corvee workers-whose fitness is directly impacted by elitemandated cultural changes. 4 But it seems unlikely that the slaves who toiled to raise the pyramids of Egypt or the Great Wall in China enjoyed greater reproductive success as a consequence of their efforts. On the other hand, there is little reason to believe the claims of Laura Betzig (1986) in Despotism and Differential Reproduction to the contrary, that members of elites generally achieve enhanced fitness as a consequence of their high social position. Social success does not invariably translate into genetic success as is shown by the existence of elites, such as the Catholic clergy in medieval Europe, in which celibacy was a condition of membership. The upper classes in all contemporary industrial societies have markedly lower fertility rates than the lower classes. As Vining (1986) has pointed out, this challenges the central premise of the sociobiological approach to cultural evolution. 5

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Believers in eugenics such as R. J. Herrnstein (1989) would not be concerned about declining national IQ levels if cultural success was always reflected in increased biological fitness. Even in those cases when members of political or economic elites translate their social power into sexual success, this does not necessarily have genetic consequences. Cultural inventions such as birth control pills and abortion have effectively delinked sexual activity from reproduction. There are also many cultural traits that have little or no adaptive significance for individual biological performance. The specific features manifested by different languages, for example, as opposed to the general capability for speech, are presumed by most scholars to lack any adaptive value (Hockett 1985). Thus, phonetic shifts and loss of vocabulary items occur in all languages at predictable rates, independently of the population dynamics of particular speech communities. Surely, as Van Parijs (1981:106) asserts, "The selection of linguistic variants is a selection which operates within idiolects, dialects, and languages, rather than through the selection of the individuals or groups which speak them." I doubt that even the most stalwart advocate of sociobiology would argue that the rather marked changes in English pronunciation and vocabulary since Shakespeare's time can be explained in terms of differential rates of reproduction among its speakers. The continued resort to reductionist explanations by sociobiologists suggests that they do not recognize the incredible diversity that characterizes culture. Biology can possibly explain the pan-human capacity to participate in cultural systems. It can also suggest why certain universal patterns of belief and behavior characterize our species. But biology does not provide explanations for the development of cultural differences-the origin of cultural "species"-that is the central question addressed by anthropology. That sociobiology is inadequate to this task is evidenced by Laura Betzig's plaintive comment made in the face of the observed failure of modem cultures to conform to the predictions of "a Darwinian view of human behavior," that "Variation in behavior across cultures needs to be explained" (Betzig 1988:6). It does, but the explanation of cultural diversity cannot be found by studying the reproductive success of individual human organisms.

Cultural Units of Selection Selection in biological evolution may operate in terms of several different kinds of units at different hierarchical levels (Eldredge 1985). These include selection at the molecular level, selection based on competition among genes within the genetic pool of the species, and selection among species at the level of the community or ecosystem. All three

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units of selection have their cultural evolutionary analogs. Molecular selection is equivalent to the poorly understood processes of innovation within individual minds. When a new sensory perception interacts with an existing component in the memory, it triggers formation of multiple new "ideas." Only a tiny fraction is retained for more than a fleeting instant and then transmitted to other minds, thus potentially entering the cultural pool. Selection in terms of genes is equivalent to the competition between traits within any cultural pool. And selection in terms of species is equivalent to the Spencerian view that evolution occurs as the result of competition and warfare between cultures. Each of these units will be reviewed in turn, beginning with the level of whole cultures or societies, then cultural traits as a selection unit, and finally ideas or information units.

Cultural Systems or Societies as the V nit of Selection Whole cultures or societies have generally been the favored unit of selection in theories of cultural evolution. This is probably a reflection of the fact that the mainstream theories of cultural evolution developed for the most part out of the work of Spencer and Marx, not Darwin and Wallace (Keller 1947). In the nineteenth century, when the countries of western Europe were rapidly conquering most of the globe, and "native peoples" were seen as fated to either vanish into extinction or become assimilated into the dominant culture, the idea that total societies or cultural systems were the primary units of evolution must have seemed virtually self-evident. In this view, the concept of the "survival of the fittest" is raised to the level of inter-societal competition, with war and military conquest a primary means by which selection occurs (Otterbein 1973:943-944). E. B. Tylor's explanation of the widespread practice of exogamy in terms of selection having favored those tribes that widened their alliance networks by marriage with members of other tribes typifies this view. The choice confronting these groups was, in Tylor's (1888:267) dramatic phrase, "between marrying-out and being killed out." Those tribes that chose correctly survived; those that failed to adopt exogamy are not represented in the ethnographic record. The number of documented cases in which defeat in warfare and incorporation into other societies has resulted in the destruction of whole cultures is sufficiently large to demonstrate that selection at the level of cultural systems does occur. The Spanish conquest of the Indian states of Mesoamerica and the Andes in the sixteenth century offers a dramatic illustration of selection among competing societal units. Span-

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ish success reflected not only their possession of superior weaponry (firearms, horses), but also superior tactics and military organization. These factors, combined with ideological pressures and massive depopulation resulting from disease and maltreatment, largely destroyed the high cultures of the Indian societies. The very rapid loss of Hawaiian cultural patterns following incorporation of the Polynesian kingdom into the European sphere offers another example of selection at the societal level. The complete extinction of the aboriginal cultures of the varzea zone in Amazonia brought about by war, slave raiding, and epidemic diseases that followed in the wake of European conquest is an extreme case of selection discussed by Betty Meggers in her chapter in this volume. These cases of selection at the societal level also suggest that the extinction of cultures is distinct from the survival of the human populations that are their carriers. Although demographic losses were extremely heavy as a result of these inter-societal conflicts, in no case did the population of culture carriers become totally biologically extinct. The total extermination of the Tasmanians, in which cultural destruction was accompanied by biological extinction, would seem to be an exceptional case. Certainly, conflicts among large-scale societies, although resulting in millions of deaths, have not resulted in either total cultural or biological extinction. Inter-societal competition was probably most important as a selective factor in the tribal stage of the cultural evolutionary sequence. Tribal warfare, as described ethnographically for New Guinea (Rappaport 1968) and the Amazon (Chagnon 1968) does sometimes result in the virtual destruction of local communities. 6 The kind of situation that Jules De Raedt describes in his chapter in this volume about the multiple politically autonomous "tribal" communities in the Cordillera of the Philippines represents an ideal setting for such selection. The extent to which warfare and conquest result in cultural selection when the competing societies are at the state level of political organization is more problematic. Certainly, in the case of precolonial mainland Southeast Asia, it is necessary to question the extent to which the defeat of states in the endemic inter-kingdom warfare that constitutes the formal history of the area had any significant implications for the survival of cultures. Leach (1960), in his paper on "The Frontiers of 'Burma, '" suggests that states rose and fell with no necessary effect on the cultural identity of the local populations on which they were based. Conquest by a different state simply meant that one paid tribute to a new ruler. As Opart Panya suggests in his chapter, the constantly changing political and adminstrative system of the Thai state represented a major environmental force to which peasant villagers had to adapt.

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As the preceding discussion indicates, whole cultures or socIetIes have been, under certain limited circumstances, the unit of selection in the process of cultural evolution. That such selection can have dramatic impact on the course of cultural evolution is evident from the long-range consequences of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru. The cultural impact of such selection can be compared to the impact of catastrophic geological events on the course of biological evolution. Selection in terms of macro-systems cannot, however, explain most cultural evolutionary change. The number of units involved, the rarity of such events, and the limited amount of time available for the working of this kind of selection all suggest that cultures or societies are not the principal unit of selection. A major constraint on the extent to which evolution can occur at this macro level is the very limited amount of variation available on which natural selection can act. For the Darwinian model to operate, there must be an immense number of individuals engaged in intensive competition for a limited number of resources with consequently high rates of extinction. 7 If numbers are smaller and selection pressures weaker, an almost infinitely long period of time must be available for selection to work. These conditions are met when selection is working in terms of memes or cultural traits but not when whole cultures are the unit of selection. The lack of a sufficiently large population of these macro-units to make their differential survival a plausible explanation for the existence of most cultural variation is the most telling objection raised to whole cultures or societies as the primary unit of selection. In the case of all but the rarest plant and animal species, there are many hundreds of thousands, even millions, of individuals per generation from which to select. The number of cultural systems present in the world is several orders of magnitude smaller. According to some admittedly crude estimates made by Robert Carneiro (1978), the number of autonomous political systems at the beginning of the Neolithic period did not exceed 200,000 units. This increased to a maximum of 600,000 units by about 1000 B.C. This number has declined exponentially since the emergence of the first states so that today there are less than 200 units remaining. From this standpoint, Michael Mann's choice of the title "The End of General Social Evolution" for the chapter on the rise of the first states in his book The Sources of Social Power (Mann 1986) seems well advised. There simply are not enough separate cultural systems to allow natural selection to work effectively at the level of inter-societal competition among states. 8 Not only does cultural evolution as the result of selection at the societal level require a very large number of competing units if it is to

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explain very much of the observed variation, it also requires that these units be engaged in sufficiently intense competition that they suffer a high rate of extinction. For there to be evolutionary winners, there must be a very much larger number of losers. As Van Parijs (1981 :88) concludes, "The fact that nothing like such a rate of societal mortality has been observed certainly deprives this ... approach of any relevance for cultural traits which change rapidly." If numbers are small and selection pressures are weak, then the time required for evolutionary processes to work is correspondingly lengthened. The processes of biological evolution have had several billion years in which to work, whereas cultural evolution has only occurred for the past million or so years. During most of this period, cultural systems remained simple and relatively undifferentiated. It is only in about the last ten thousand years that a rapid rate of change has been evident. Paradoxically, the rate of change has increased as the population of competing units has fallen and the time available for selection to work has been foreshortened. A final limitation on the possibilities of whole cultures or societies serving as units of selection is the somewhat doubtful empirical status of such entities. Individual organisms, populations, and species exist as clearly bounded units, at least in the case of most animals, although more dubiously so in the plant kingdom. The boundaries of cultural systems and societies are much less well defined, if such units exist at all outside the minds of social scientists. Geoffrey Benjamin (pers. com.) has suggested that in our efforts to draw boundaries between ethnic units, we have imposed on an amorphous primitive world a model of discrete bounded social systems derived from the nation-state of modern Europe. Karl Hutterer takes a similar position in his chapter in this volume questioning the existence of tribes as social units in the precolonial Philippines. Michael Mann (1986:1) has rejected the idea of unitary social systems in favor of "multiple overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of power." If he is correct, primitive societies conform to Gertrude Stein's view of Oakland, California, as a place with "no there there" and cannot serve as a unit of selection. Selection at the level of whole cultures or societies must be, for all of the foregoing reasons, a relatively rare event in the process of cultural evolution, just as mass extinctions caused by meteor strikes have been rare in biological evolution. Such rare events cannot explain the existence of most observed diversity. But, as in the analogous case of biological extinction resulting from global catastrophes, it is a very significant happening when it does occur, one that can have profound implications for the course of cultural evolution.

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Cultural Traits as Units of Selection If culture is viewed as a collection or bundle of discrete traits, which can vary independently of one another, then the trait would constitute the primary unit of cultural evolution. This is the "shreds and patches" view of culture that was advocated by Boas and his students, especially Lowie and Kroeber (Ingold 1986). There is abundant evidence that some types of traits do diffuse from culture to culture as individual units. The phenomenon of loan words is a familiar example of such diffusion from linguistics. All languages seem able to incorporate new words from unrelated languages (although modifying them to conform to existing phonetic constraints). Individual items of technology also diffuse readily across cultural boundaries as do folktale motifs, songs, and rituals. In the case of technology, a plausible argument can be made that selection occurs quite frequently at the level of individual cultural traits. People can directly observe the differing efficiency with which tools perform desired jobs. This is particularly evident with regards to weapons of war where even minor variations can mean the difference between victory and defeat in battle. Native peoples everywhere in the world quickly recognized the superiority that firearms conferred on European forces and readily adopted modern weapons themselves whenever they could obtain them. The use of hand-held antiaircraft missiles by tribal guerrillas against Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan is a recent example of such assimilation of improved weapons technology. Even in the case of weapons, however, where minor differences in effectiveness would seem to be readily apparent, the actual selection process appears to be quite complex. This is well illustrated by Thomas Esper's (1965) account of the replacement of the longbow by firearms in the English army in the 1600s. This occurred although the longbow was in most respects still the superior weapon, having longer range, a higher rate of fire, and greater resistance to weather, as well as being cheaper and easier to manufacture than the musket. The critical factor favoring firearms was a social one: Effective use of the longbow required prolonged, virtually lifelong training; the musket, however, could be mastered by conscripts in a relatively short period of intensive training. Thus, despite the technical superiority of their weapon, poorly trained English longbowmen were repeatedly defeated by French armies employing crude matchlock muskets. Adoption of new technological traits which can be obtained by trade or capture from the culture where they originated is one thing; being able to manufacture new ones is a very different matter. Again, military technology provides numerous examples of cultures that have been able

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to effectively use imported weapons successfully on battlefields but have been unable to maintain them or manufacture replacements, let alone support continued innovation of new technology. William McNeill (1982) suggests that East Asian and European artillery technology developed at about an equal rate until 1500 A.D. Thereafter, the conservative bureaucracies that managed weapons manufacture in Asia continued to produce obsolete siege cannon, whereas the more flexible private entrepreneurs of western Europe experimented with lighter and more powerful field guns: "Asian regimes accordingly fell behind European military and technological development in a way that cost them dearly in the long run" (ibid., 112). As the Asian experience with artillery suggests, the extent to which selection can operate at the level of individual cultural traits is strongly constrained by the very great extent to which these traits are linked together into more or less coherent systems or configurations. A new cultural trait may be recognized as being manifestly superior to traditional designs, but unless the industrial and managerial capabilities exist to procure and employ the new type, it cannot be successfully adopted. As Julian Steward and Demitri Shimkin (1961:483) have pointed out, "The exposure of Japan, with its well-developed foundation of elemental industrialization, to complex industrialization was followed by rapid selective borrowing and an adaptive restructuring of existing social and economic institutions. . .. In most of Africa, without these foundations, complex industrialization can not be readily assimilated." Culture involves much more than technology, however. It is questionable to what extent its ideational aspects such as values can even be broken down into meaningful trait units. The persistence of distinct cultural minorities within most nations despite hundreds of years of assimilative pressure suggests that cultural values are not selected at the level of discrete individual traits. John Bennett in his Northern Plainsmen (1969) reports that a group of American Indians who had been nomadic hunters of buffalo in the past today continue a nomadic lifestyle but one now based on using automobiles to shift from short-term job to short-term job. There has been wholesale replacement of material cultural traits but no change in values in this case. In other situations, when groups have undergone radical cultural reorganization, change seems to occur in terms of one coherent set of values wholly replacing another set. David Riesman et al. (1950) suggest such a transformation has been occurring in the United States with the displacement of the traditional "inner-directed" values orientation by an "other-directed" orientation.

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Cultural "Genes" or Units of Information In the Darwinian model, the form and behavior manifested by organisms are a reflection of inherited genetic instructions interacting with the environment. Dawkins (1976) has suggested that it is the genes themselves rather than the organisms that carry them that are the primary unit of selection in biological evolution. Individual organisms are simply the vehicles employed by the "selfish genes" to ensure their own replication and survival. Dawkins (1976, 1982) made the further suggestion that cultural evolution also occurred in terms of transmissible units of information conveying behavioral instructions. He named this hypothesized unit of cultural information the "meme." The meme is "a completely non-genetic kind of replicator, which flourishes only in the environment provided by complex, communicating brains." He stresses the need to distinguish the meme itself, as replicator, on the one hand, and its "phenotypic effects" or "meme products" on the other.[9] A meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain ... just as genetic information is stored in the DNA. Its phenotypic effects, in contrast, are its consequences in the outside world .... The phenotypic effects of a meme may be in the form of words, music, visual images, styles of clothes, facial or hand gestures, skills such as opening milk bottles in tits, or panning wheat in Japanese macaques. They are the outward and visible (audible, etc.) manifestations of the memes within the brain. They may be perceived by the sense organs of other individuals, and they may so imprint themselves on the brains of the receiving individuals that a copy (not necessarily exact) of the original me me is graven in the receiving brain. The new copy of the meme is then in a position to broadcast its phenotypic effects, with the result that further copies of itself may be made in yet other brains. [Dawkins 1982:109]

Other scholars (Cloak 1975; Hill 1978; Ruyle 1973) have also suggested that the unit of selection in cultural evolution is a packet of information analogous to the gene in biological evolution. Eugene Ruyle (1973) sees ideas as the functional equivalent of genes: "The behavioral tradition of a population is made up of the activity of individuals and depends on the ideas existing in the minds of individuals. The variable behavior of individuals, then, may be seen as the expression of the ideas of the individuals [much as differing phenotypes of individual organisms reflect their differing genetic endowments]. The sum total of the ideas, including psychological drives, motives, cognitive maps, symbols, behavioral rules, norms, values, and so forth, of all members of a population constitute the cultural pool" (ibid., 202-203). Cloak (1975:167-168) suggests that "Culture is acquired in tiny, unrelated snippets, which are specific interneural instructions culturally transmitted from generation to generation." These "corpuscles of

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culture," as he calls them, constitute "what can be called i-culture of a people ... [which is] ... the set of cultural instructions they carry in their central nervous systems." He contrasts i-culture with what he refers to as "The m-culture of the people [which] encompasses the material structures, relationships among material structures, and changes in these relationships which are actually brought about or maintained by behaviors of those cultural instructions." The nature of these replicating information units is not very clearly described, although Dawkins (1982:112) concedes that there may be significant differences between meme-based and genetic evolution: "Memes are not strung out along linear chromosomes, and it is not clear that they occupy and compete for discrete 'loci,' or that they have identifiable 'alleles.'" The lack of any convincing specification of the nature of these information units is a major obstacle to development of this approach to cultural evolution. Cloak (1975) may speak of "tiny snippets" and "corpuscles of culture," Dawkins (1982) of "memes," and Lumsden and Wilson (1981) of "culturgens," but none of them has clearly described the nature of these units. How will we know a "meme" or a "culturgen" if we discover one? Formulation of a theoretically plausible, and empirically usable, characterization of a unit for storage and transmission of cultural information is, in my view, the major task that must be completed before further advance can occur in the study of cultural evolutionary processes.

Concluding Remarks on Selection Units in Cultural Evolution The failure of social scientists to identify appropriate units of selection has always constituted the most fundamental flaw in attempts to conceptualize the cultural evolutionary process. It is as if the development of evolutionary biology had had to proceed until now without genetics. It was only when Darwin's ideas about natural selection fused with Mendel's ideas about genes that the modem synthesis emerged. The occurrence of such a synthesis is unlikely in cultural evolutionism until agreement is reached on the nature of selection units. Perhaps the gravest obstacle to achievement of such agreement is the continued confusion resulting from the failure to separate biological from cultural processes. Unfortunately, the rise of "methodological individualism" on the one hand and of sociobiology on the other has only added to the confusion and made acceptance of a culturological approach to cultural evolution more difficult. Dawkins (1982) observes that even W. D. Hamilton, who first proposed the model of the "intelligent gene" manipulating the behavior of organisms to ensure its own reproduction, and who he sees as one of the

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founding fathers of gene selectionism, drew back from treating the gene as the selection unit in place of the individual organism. He suggests that "individual-level thinking is superficially attractive because individuals, unlike genes, have nervous systems and limbs which render them capable of working in obvious ways to maximize something," in this case, inclusive fitness. "But what makes this so dangerous is that it too is really a metaphor. Individuals do not consciously strive to maximize anything. They behave as if maximizing something. It is exactly the same 'as if' logic that we apply to 'intelligent genes.' Genes manipulate the world as if striving to maximize their own survival. They do not really 'strive,' but my point is that in this respect they do not really differ from individuals. Neither individuals nor genes really strive to maximize anything. Or, rather, individuals may strive for something, but it will be a morsel of food, an attractive female, or a desirable territory, not inclusive fitness" (ibid., 188-189). Conceptualizing the cultural evolutionary process in terms of changing populations of memes runs directly counter to the growing emphasis in social science on what has been labeled "methodological individualism." As described by Jon Elster (1985:5), this is "the doctrine that all social phenomena-their structure and their change--are in principle explicable in ways that only involve individuals-their properties, their goals, their beliefs and their actions." This orientation is manifested in anthropology in terms of "growing interest in analysis focused through one or another of a bundle of interrelated terms: practice, praxis, action, interaction, activity, experience, performance. A second, and closely related, bundle of terms focuses on the doer of all that doing: agent, actor, person, self, individual, subject" (Ortner 1984:144). "Y uppie anthropology" of this sort has difficulty in accommodating an approach that denies a central role to individual decision-makers and calls into question "the importance and efficacy of the individual human personality in our view of the universe" (Cloak 1975:178). Tim Ingold (1986:67-68) is distressed by the view that "Human beings are no more than contrivances by means of which [cultural 'genes'] propagate themselves." He dismisses this idea as "an example of the bizarre aberrations of a scientific imagination that has long taken leave of the reality of human experience," and claims that "We human beings do not work for our instructions; rather they work for us," a position he supports with the not wholly convincing assertion that his view "accords well with the experience of common sense." Of course, the idea that the sun rotates around the earth also accords well with the experience of "common sense" so that it might seem unwise to base acceptance or rejection of a scientific position on such a basis. As John Kenneth Galbraith has wryly observed, "When not able to grasp an idea, practical men take

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refuge in the innate superiority of common sense. Common sense is another term for what has always been believed" (Galbraith 1975:243). Individual actors, however rational they may seem, must always act within a preexisting cultural matrix. It is this matrix, rather than the individuals, that defines the rules for action (Rambo 1983). As Leslie White so cogently argued, "Culturology is concerned with the interaction, not of human beings, but of cultural elements and cultural traits .... This difference may seem small and unimportant to some .... But the difference is tremendously important: focusing upon culture, a distinct order of phenomena, making it the object of scientific scrutiny and interpretation, is a far cry from focusing upon individual human beings or societies of human beings because the behavior of peoples is a function of their respective cultures. The proper study of mankind is not man, but culture" (White 1975:128-129). Or to paraphrase Durkheim (1938), cultural facts can only be explained in terms of other cultural facts. The inclusion of biological units of selection in models of cultural evolutionary processes continues to obscure our ability to clearly perceive what is primarily, if not wholly, a culturological phenomenon.

THE ORIGIN OF VARIATION Regardless of the unit of selection involved, the evolutionary process can proceed only if sufficient variation exists among these units for natural selection to act on. The greatest weakness of Darwin's theory at the time he proposed it was the lack of any plausible explanation for hereditable variation. It was only with the discovery of the principles of genetics that this problem was overcome. Only then could what Mayr (1959) refers to as "population thinking" fully displace "typological thinking. " The social sciences have been slow to adopt population thinking, however. Their focus has been on construction of ideal types. Anthropologists have almost always described cultures as if they were homogeneous entities. lo Existence of internal variation has been for the most part ignored or explained away as resulting from recent diffusion and acculturation. The fitting, often forced, of ethnographic cases into cultural evolutionary stage typologies has also served to obscure the existence of variation among cultures assumed to be at a common level of development. Leach's Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) and Geertz's paper (1959), "Form and Variation in Balinese Village Structure," are among the few ethnographic accounts to explicitly recognize internal

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variation within cultural units. The evolutionary implications of such diversity are obscured, however, by their authors' adherence to a "structuralist" view that a single "culture" can contain several variant configurations among which social units oscillate. Thus, Kachin villages can shift from gumlao to gumsa and vice versa or a Balinese village can be tightly integrated or socially centripetal, depending on which set of underlying structural rules are being manifested. Such an approach is still fundamentally typological. That diversity may be a much more fundamental property of culture has been suggested by several recent ethnographic studies. Jules De Raedt's chapter in this volume describes the existence of considerable variation among the hundreds of local "tribal" communities scattered across the Cordillera of the Philippines. Gertrude Dole's chapter describes the great diversity in kinship systems in Amazonian aboriginal societies. Frederick Dunn's study of Temuan classification and naming of mammal species in the Malayan rain forest indicates that even individuals living within the same small community display considerable variation in their assignment of names to common species and that overlap in species-naming among adults living in communities located 10 miles apart is only 50 to 60 percent (Dunn 1975:76-77). Robert Dentan's analysis of Semai Senoi medical knowledge asserts that "local and idiosyncratic variations in expressed belief abounded" (Dentan 1988:860). He suggests that the widespread existence of such heterogeneity in the belief systems of aboriginal cultures has been obscured by the efforts of ethnologists "to neaten non Western systems of thought, to make them comprehensible in linear, parsimonious ways ... " (ibid., 857). Unfortunately, most ethnographers still seek to identify central tendencies in the diverse data yielded by their field observations. Their objective remains the construction of ideal typical descriptions of cultural patterns. Archeologists have always, to a much larger extent, recorded the existence of variability in artifactual materials but have still emphasized the identification of central tendencies in their analytical descriptions. If culture is normally diverse rather than uniform, a fundamental change in the way we observe, record, and report cultural diversity is required. Hitoshi Watanabe's (1975) detailed census of variation in arrows employed with a single Papuan village exemplifies the kind of approach that may be needed. Recognition of the extent to which diversity exists in the domain of culture is an important first step in developing a satisfactory model of the evolutionary process. Finding an explanation for the origins of cultural diversity represents a much greater challenge. In genetics, the sources of diversity are now well understood. The discovery of DNA has

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made it possible to link the concepts of theoretical genetics to observable biochemical structures and processes. Even before the discovery of the double helix, however, the basic operative factors in genetic change had been worked out. Mutation-the creation of new genes as a result of errors in copying existing genes-is the ultimate source of novelty. Recombination-the formation of new sets or configurations of interacting genes in the process of sexual reproduction-is the major source of variation on which natural selection works. It is not an understatement to say that the origins of diversity in culture are not as well elucidated. Studies of cultural change have emphasized processes analogous to recombination. There is a vast literature on diffusion and acculturation that deals with the transfer of existing traits between cultures. In many cases, the cultural implications of diffusion have been trivial (e.g., the adoption of popcorn by European settlers from the American Indians), but in other cases, such as the spread of horses and guns from Europeans to the Plains Indians, massive cultural change has resulted. Innovation, which is the cultural analog of mutation-the generation of wholly new ideas, traits, or cultural patterns-is a process that is still poorly understood. This is not for lack of effort-the search for the "causes" of cultural change has long preoccupied social theorists. A particularly vexing question has been that of the extent to which innovation is the result of deliberate human activity as opposed to representing blind or accidental variation. Do people make culture or does culture make culture? The debate between those like Kroeber and White who viewed culture as a superorganic phenomenon and those like Boas and Lowie who asserted the contrary is too well known to require summarizing here. It is curious that positions in this controversy seem to be held independently of views on other critical questions regarding the nature of cultural evolution. Thus, Leslie White and V. Gordon Childe both advocated a materialist view of culture; yet, the former denied any role in cultural change to conscious invention, whereas the latter gave the title, Man Makes Himself(1951), to his best-known book. Kroeber (1917), in many ways an idealist, was aligned with White in his advocacy of culture as a superorganic phenomenon and denial of any historical efficacy to the "great man." Albert Keller (1947:54), although asserting that "Human evolution is not an individual matter, but one of societies," at the same time claimed that "the individual has an indispensable function in societal evolution, for that process, like organic evolution, cannot start without variation. Where there is a case of maladjustment, it is the individuals who feel it-generally a good many of them at the

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same time; then, under a common stress, they begin to throw out tentatives toward readjustment" (ibid., 68). The idea that innovation increases in response to stress, that "necessity is the mother of invention," is also advanced by Murdock (1971). This view of cultural change, of course, is wholly incompatible with the standard Darwinian model in which mutation is random and undirected by environmental pressures. Mutations happen all of the time at a more or less constant rate. It is purely fortuitous if any particular mutation happens to prove more adaptive than existing alleles. Genetic systems do not seek solutions to new environmental problems; solutions occur, if they do occur, purely by chance. Cultural systems may conceivably be different in this regard. It is possible that the deliberate search for solutions in response to increased stress or novel problems is the principal source of cultural variation. But it is also possible that Leslie White (1949b) is correct in considering this to be an illusion induced by our peculiar observational position. Despite the continued controversy about the sources of cultural variation, I am not sure that in attempting to understand the process of cultural evolution it greatly matters whether innovation results from conscious human effort or not, nor whether the rate of innovation is linked to the extent to which a society is under stress. New ideas, traits, and behaviors, whether arising by accident or from design, whether appearing randomly or at times of need, will still be subject to selection by a multitude of environmental forces, many of them unforeseen by the innovators. The evolutionary process requires variation in order for natural selection to work; there is no necessity that all variation be randomly generated (Boyd and Richerson 1985). To conclude this section, there is much evidence that diversity is a common property of cultural phenomena. No one questions that diversity exists at the level of whole cultures or societies; indeed anthropology came into existence as a distinct discipline as a consequence of that recognition. There is also a considerable body of evidence that diversity is the norm among other potential units of selection. Such variation is best documented in terms of cultural traits such as folktales, vocabulary, and artifacts. Investigations of ethnoscience and folk taxonomy also indicate that even within small communities there can be very great diversity in beliefs and knowledge. This high level of cultural diversity is compatible with Cavalli-Sforza's (1988:245) suggestion that vertical transmission between parents and offspring is the dominant mechanism employed in primitive societies and that this mechanism is simultaneously highly conservative and preserves a high degree of individual variation.

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Our understanding of the origins of diversity is much less developed. The work of H. G. Barnett (1953) on innovation remains almost alone in its field. Certainly, a comprehensive theory of the process of cultural evolution demands a much better conceptualization of the mechanisms by which new cultural traits or memes are generated than we now possess. But, just as Darwin could develop his theory of natural selection without possessing a knowledge of genetic change, a preliminary model of the process of cultural evolution can be constructed simply on the basis of recognizing that diversity is a common attribute of all cultural systems.

THE SELECTION OF CULTURAL VARIATION In the Darwinian model of evolutionary process, genetically transmitted instructions for physical or behavioral attributes are expressed in the phenotype of the organism. Each individual within a species will display distinctive characteristics reflecting the instructions carried in its unique genotype. Assuming that the supply of food and other critical resources is limited in comparison to the demand of the total population, competition will ensue between these different individuals. Those best able to gain access to resources will raise the largest number of offspring. Less well adapted individuals will have lower reproductive success or, in more extreme situations, may not survive to breed at all. Survival of the fittest, therefore, is measured in terms of reproduction under any given set of environmental conditions. Fitness is always relative, however. It varies according to the nature of the competition and the environment in which selection occurs. Natural selection does not directly work on genetic instructions. Instead it works at the phenotypic level by eliminating those organisms whose physical or behavioral traits prove to be least effective in the competitive environment. It has been experimentally demonstrated, for example, that hawks kill a much higher percentage of light-colored chicks than dark-colored ones when they are exposed in equal numbers against a natural vegetation background (Cott 1940). Negative selection of these organisms removes the genes they are carrying from the total gene pool of the species. Only those genes carried by organisms that survive the multiplicity of selective pressures are transmitted to succeeding generations. Thus, if most light-colored chicks are killed by hawks and only dark-colored ones survive to breed, then, given sufficient time, the mean shade of chicks will become darker. If selective pressure is severe enough, and if appropriate mutations occur, elaborate and effective camouflage patterning may evolve. It is appropriate to

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speak of such protective coloration as constituting a genetically controlled adaptation to the threat of predation by hawks. If a population of these fowl were to become isolated in a desert area where the predominant background was light colored, the coloring that had been adaptive in the old environment would be highly maladaptive. In the new situation, selection by predators would favor the survival of lighter colored chicks over darker ones. Over sufficient time, genes for light color would come to greatly outnumber genes for dark color and the observed mean shade of the population would become lighter. This is what happened in the well-known case of the rise and decline of industrial melanism in moth populations in England (Koehn and Hilbish 1987). The nature of selective pressures on the gene pool and the adaptive value of phenotypic adaptations are always environmentally specific. This is one of the reasons that prediction of evolutionary change is necessarily imprecise.

Cultural Adaptation In the case of protective coloration, adaptive value can be empirically assessed. In most cases, however, biologists have started by observing the existence of some unusual physical or behavioral attribute of a species and have then tried to find a plausible role that it may play to enhance the survival chances of the species. This approach, which reflects the assumption that if a characteristic exists it must necessarily be adaptive, has been criticized by Gould and Lewontin (1979) as the "Panglossian adaptationist program." They point out a number of fallacies in this program. All species have a complex evolutionary history so that there is no assurance that traits evolved under past environmental conditions are necessarily adaptive under current conditions. Genes, and the phenotypic traits they generate, also interact in complex ways; some observable characteristics may reflect the outcome of these interactions rather than having been directly shaped by environmental selection. The analysis of adaptation is thus very difficult, and imputing selective value to observed characteristics is an intellectually risky game. That this is as true with regard to culture as it is with biology was pointed out by Morris Ginsburg (1951) in his introduction to Hobhouse's Morals in Evolution. According to Ginsburg (1951:xiv), "Customs, like instincts, may be conceived as arising under the conditions of natural selection. They must, on the whole, make for the survival of the group. Nevertheless, their adaptive character can be easily exaggerated. It is true that a society which forbade courses of conduct necessary to its maintenance and encouraged courses detrimental to it would perish. But it is equally true that societies do not necessarily have the institu-

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tions best suited to their needs. In this, as in other connections, natural selection acts only as a limiting factor, and, until the limit is reached, societies can put up with malfunction and misfunction in plenty before they reach the breaking-point." Ecological anthropology has had a long running and frequently incautious love affair with the concept of cultural adaptation. Often, the principal concern has been to suggest more or less plausible ways in which seemingly strange or bizarre cultural practices can contribute to the survival of individuals or societies. The existence of all kinds of cultural traits, ranging from divination using burned caribou bones in Labrador (Moore 1965) to warfare and ritual feasting in New Guinea (Rappaport 1968), has been explained in terms of their imputed adaptive value. Marvin Harris's (1974) collection of essays-Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches-is perhaps the best-known work in this genre. Although such studies are fun to read, they are all too often in the nature of Kipling's "just so" stories. Many suffer from the functionalist fallacy of assuming that existence of a trait is proof that it must serve a positive function. Adaptive value has, on this basis, been attributed to Aztec human sacrifice (protein supply in a meat-scarce environment) (Harner 1977), Dayak head-hunting raids (gaining access to easy-to-clear second-growth forest in a labor-scarce environment) (Vayda 1961), and even the drinking of tea by Chinese settlers in Malaysia (ability to colonize brackish water environments) (Dobby 1951). Direct empirical verification of such assumed cases of cultural adaptation has been uncommon. The seemingly endless controversies generated by claims of adaptive value for the keeping of sacred cattle in India (Harris 1966) and pig-feasting rituals in New Guinea (Rappaport 1967) are revealing of the weak empirical basis for such adaptationist studies (see Rambo 1983 for a brief critical review of these alleged cases of adaptation). The extreme difficulty in empirically testing such adaptationist hypotheses is shown by the long-running debate about the validity of the "protein hypothesis" in Amazonian cultural ecology (Sponsel 1985), a debate that continues in the chapter in this volume by Meggers. Despite considerable effort, attempts to measure the sustainability of wild game sources under hunting pressure have failed to resolve the argument about whether or not the availability of protein is a limiting factor for human agricultural populations in the Amazonian rain forest. Success has been no greater with the counterpart "carbohydrate hypothesis" that scarcity of wild sources of starch limited occupation by hunters and gatherers of interior rain forests in Southeast Asia. According to this hypothesis, it was only when the spread of agriculture into the region allowed forest foragers such as the Agta and the Semang to trade wild products with their settled neighbors in return for rice and other carbo-

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hydrates that hunting and gathering became a viable adaptation (Headland 1987; Headland and Reid 1989; Rambo 1988). The argument is plausible in that wild plant sources of starch seem to be relatively rare in the Southeast Asian rain forests, although no one has yet done a systematic census of yams and other tubers in an undisturbed tract of forest. It is further supported by ethnographic evidence that most rainforest foragers in Southeast Asia either engage in trade with neighboring agriculturalists or plant their own swiddens on at least a sporadic basis (Hutterer 1976), as is done by the Kubu of Sumatra as described by Ali Rachman and many of the Philippine Negrito groups decribed by James Eder in their chapters in this volume. But it remains no more than a plausible hypothesis at this time. Empirically testing the validity of hypothesized connections between environmental factors and cultural traits in a single society is difficult, if not impossible. As Hallpike (1986:147) points out, all that such single case functionalist analyses can possibly reveal is that "In the societies concerned the people can in practice organize themselves to perform such subsistence activities as they actually perform!" These case studies of cultural adaptation tell us little more than that the world is the way it is because that is the way it is. More productive are comparative analyses of two or more cases of adaptation. One such approach is to assess adaptation in terms of the differential success enjoyed by two or more unrelated populations when they are introduced into a common environment. 11 For example, African slaves were able to survive in the malarial lowlands of Central America where all attempts at white settlement failed. It is now known that the black populations had a selective advantage in an environment with endemic malaria due to their having high gene frequencies for sickle cell which the whites lacked. Natural experiments, in which comparisons are made between related cultures that have occupied different habitats, have been successfully utilized in a number of studies of cultural adaptation. Perhaps the most ambitious effort was the multidisciplinary Project on Culture and Ecology in east Africa organized by Walter Goldschmidt (1965). Robert Edgerton's analysis of commonalities and differences in values under differing environmental circumstances done as part of this project is a classic application of the comparative approach (Edgerton 1971). He compared a pastoral and an agricultural tribe having a common origin but following different ways of life in distinct environments with another pair of pastoral and agricultural tribes in the same environments but with different cultural origins. He showed that certain common values appear in the unrelated pastoral tribes and certain other common values appear in the unrelated agricultural tribes. This suggests that these

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cultural values have adaptive significance in specific environmental circumstances. Other values, however, are shared only by the tribes having common ancestry, despite their inhabiting distinct environments.

Environmental Selective Forces and Cultural Evolution In Edgerton's study, as in many analyses of cultural adaptation, the environment is described in very gross terms. The means of subsistence employed by the tribes-in this case, pastoralism or agriculture--is employed by Edgerton as a surrogate for a detailed description of specific aspects of the environment to which the cultures are presumed to be adapteci. Hallpike's (1986) critique of adaptationism as environmental determinism reflects his unwarranted assumption that modes of subsistence provide a satisfactory surrogate for a fine-grained description of the environment of adaptation. Did Hallpike ever really expect to find any significant correlation between forms of social organization and what he refers to as "the main types of subsistence--gathering, hunting, fishing, pastoralism, shifting agriculture, intensive agriculture, and irrigation agriculture"? To think that all gatherers or all hunters form a single type of society inhabiting a common environment is suggestive of not inconsiderable ethnographic naivete. 12 In a paper published in 1936, Julian Steward showed how the social organization of hunting-and-gathering bands systematically varied in differing environmental circumstances. The type that he labeled as the "patrilineal band" was, in his view (Steward 1955:135), the product of several cultural ecological factors, including (1) a population density of one person or less per square mile, (2) an environment in which the principal food is scattered nonmigratory game, and (3) a transportation technology based exclusively on human carriers. The socially fragmented "family bands" such as the Shoshonean Indians of the Great Basin were the product of different cultural ecological factors, primarily an environment characterized by very sparse resources, the local appearance and abundance of which were unpredictable from year to year due to variations in rainfall (ibid., 105). He saw "composite bands," such as Bushmen or the Montagnais, as associated with the hunting of game that occurred in large herds (ibid., 149-150). Steward's specific formulations of different types of hunting-and-gathering bands and the ecological factors he saw as causal in their formation have been extensively criticized, most notably by Elman Service. But the underlying idea in his "method of cultural ecology" that explanations for specific cultural adaptations must be sought in terms of specific environmental factors is still a sound one. The need in studies of cultural adaptation is,

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if anything, for much more detailed description of environmental selective forces than Steward provided. I refer to the need for a better description of environmental selective forces, rather than simply of the environment in general, advisedly. In biology, the term "environment" is used to mean only those aspects of an organism's surroupdings that can be shown to impinge on it in a significant way (Mason and Langenheim 1957). The researcher is concerned with only those identifiable and measurable physical factors that actually influence an organism or species. In anthropology, however, environment has often been employed in a much broader and vaguer sense, as the totality of observable phenomena surrounding a cultural group or community, regardless of whether or not these phenomena can be shown to impinge on the adaptation of the group. Thus, ethnographic monographs commonly open with a chapter on the "habitat" or "environment," in which information is presented on topography, climate, soil types, vegetation, and so forth. Rarely is this information directly related to specific aspects of the group's culture. In Pigs for the Ancestors, for example, Rappaport (1968) presents detailed information on a number of aspects of the Tsembaga habitat including rainfall (Appendix 1), soils (Appendix 2), and floristic composition of primary forest (Appendix 3), although he does not systematically employ this information in his analysis of the role of ritual in environmental management. Such ecological holism has not been very useful in the identification and measurement of selective forces in cultural evolution. In a comparative study of peasant social systems in northern and southern Vietnam (Rambo 1973, 1977), I attempted to identify specific differences in the two environments that could help to explain the emergence of several important differences between the two social systems. The Vietnamese frontier settlements in the Mekong Delta took the form of open communities in contrast to the closed corporate villages of the long-settled Red River Delta. This difference in social structure among regional groups derived from a common ancestral one can be explained in terms of considerable differences in the selective forces in the two regions. Nineteen major environmental variables, which favored the existence of differing forms of social organization in communities of the Red River Delta and the Mekong Delta, were identified. Key natural environmental factors included degree of intraregional physiographic and biotic diversity, population carrying capacity or sustainability, capital cost of initial development of productive resources, quality of intraregional communication and transportation system, and threats to individual survival. Key aspects of the social environment included intensity of resource utilization, intensity of competition for resources, frequency of armed conflicts, coercive power of the central government,

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weight of administrative overhead, and frequency of contact with differing ethnic groups (see Rambo 1977:184 for a summary list of key selective factors). Natural threats (floods, inundation and waterlogging, droughts, typhoons, human diseases, and crop diseases and pests), when scaled in terms of frequency of occurrence, social cost of occurrence, and social cost of protective measures, represented a survival risk of 45 (out of a possible 60) in the Red River Delta compared to 29 in the Mekong Delta (Rambo 1973:419-422). Social threats (banditry, competition for land) to individual survival were also much greater in the north than in the south. In the hostile environment of the Red River Delta, membership in a corporate community provided essential security for individual peasant households, whereas in the more benign conditions of the Mekong Delta individual households could adequately cope with most risks on their own. In the latter situation, the high economic and psychological costs of participation in a corporate group were no longer justified by the limited benefits it provided in enhanced security against greatly lessened survival risks. I cite my own work in this case, not because I consider it to be a model study of environmental selective forces in the process of cultural evolution, but because I know of no other equally detailed assessment of the influence of these forces. If cultural evolution is to be understood using a Darwinian model, much more attention will need to be paid to selection pressures in future studies. In conceptualizing the selective forces that shape cultural evolution, the importance of expanding the definition of environment to include social and cultural factors has received increasing recognition. In his initial formulation of his method of cultural ecology, Julian Steward limited his concept of the environment to the physical and biotic characteristics of the territory inhabited by a society. Steward never really transcended this rather narrow concept of cultural ecology, although he did come to recognize that adaptation in large-scale societies involved more than just biophysical factors. 13 Marshall Sahlins expanded the concept of environment in cultural ecology. He saw that "Societies are typically set in fields of cultural influence as well as fields of natural influence. They are subject to both. They adapt to both" (Sahlins 1964:134). Yehudi Cohen (1983) espouses a similar view in suggesting that all cultures interact with two types of habitat: "The local milieu which provides local resources ... [and] ... the milieus of other groups with which a society maintains boundary-cultural relations and which provides locally unavailable resources, goods, and skills" (ibid., 174). Cohen (1983: 179) makes the further interesting suggestion that "An outstanding feature of social and cultural evolution-if not a precipitat-

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ing factor-is that social elements in the habitat increasingly supersede physical ones as the forces to which local groups must adapt." That social forces, especially those related to the activities of government and the global market, are of dominant importance in the shaping of Thai peasant culture is a central theme in the chapter in this volume by Opart Panya. It is a view that also finds support in Karl Hutterer's chapter in which he asserts that tribes in the Philippines "evolved" in response to activities of the American colonial authorities and in James Eder's chapter examining the different social and ecological contexts of Philippine Negrito adaptation. Identification of selective forces is, of course, closely related to the question of units of selection in cultural evolution. Many cultural ecological studies, beginning with Steward's work on band societies, and including my own previously cited study of Vietnamese peasant communities, have treated social units-villages, tribes, nations-as the unit of selection and adaptation. Others, such as Rappaport's work on the Tsembaga, have viewed the local population as the adaptive unit. Cultural traits, often in the form of tools, weapons, and other technological artifacts, have also been seen as the unit of selection and adaptation (Basalla 1988). In all of these cases, selection is visualized as acting directly on observable manifestations of culture, as represented by traits, local communities, or whole cultures. The action of environmental forces on cultural variation is thus also, at least in principle, subject to direct scrutiny. If, however, one seeks to understand cultural evolution in terms of changes in populations of information units (i.e., "memes"), selection must be visualized in a different way. Competition occurs between memes rather than organisms. Competition, in this case, is not for food or shelter, but for mental space and for energy for transmission from mind to mind. Fitness is measured by the number of minds accepting a meme and its persistence in these minds once accepted. We do not have a clear understanding of why some memes are more successful than others. Certainly, as was discussed in an earlier section on cultural traits as a selection unit, in the case of some memes, especially those relating to technology, observed differences in the efficiency with which resultant artifacts perform tasks are a likely determinant. It is also possible that the replacement of one scientific concept by another, as exemplified by the recent rapid acceptance of the theory of continental drift in geology, once plate tectonics offered a workable causal mechanism, can be explained by the comparative efficiency of the ideas in organizing the thinking of members of the scientific community. It seems much less plausible, however, that replacement of one rock hit by another on the "top forty" can be explained by their relative

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adaptive efficiency. As Dawkins (1982:110) suggests, however, "There are many ways in which memes may work phenotypically for their own preservation. If the phenotypic effect of a meme is a tune, the catchier it is, the more likely it is to be copied. If it is a scientific idea, its chances of spreading through the world's scientific brains will be influenced by its compatibility with the already established corpus of ideas. If it is a political or religious idea, it may assist its own survival if one of its phenotypic effects is to make its bodies violently intolerant of new and unfamiliar ideas. A meme has its own opportunities for replication, and its own phenotypic effects, and there is no reason why success in a me me should have any connection whatever with genetic success." Our understanding of the working of selection in the process of cultural evolution is still rudimentary. Even when macro-units of selection such as societies or cultural traits are employed in models of cultural evolutionary process, their adaptive value is often simply presumed rather than demonstrated. Conceptualization of the process by which units of information are selected is wholly inadequate. Development of a plausible model of competition and selection among memes is one of the most important tasks facing cultural evolutionists.

TRANSMISSION OF CULTURAL TRAITS It is frequently asserted that biological and cultural evolution employ fundamentally different means of transmission of heritable variations. Thus, Lenski and Lenski (1978:64) claim that "The most important difference between the two modes of evolution is the way information is transferred and spread. The only way genetic information can be transmitted is through the process of reproduction. Because different species can not interbreed, they can not share genetic information with one another.... Cultural information, by contrast, is easily exchanged between members of different sociocultural systems. Not only can human societies exchange information, but two or more can merge into a single system-the equivalent, were it possible, of the merging of separate species in biological evolution." Sahlins (1960:27) also states that a fundamental difference between biological and cultural evolution is that "Cultural variation, unlike biological, can be transmitted between different lines by diffusion. Separate cultural traditions, unlike separate biological lineages, may converge by coalescence." Moreover, he asserts, "backward" cultures can, by "borrowing wholesale the achievements of higher forms, push on to new evolutionary heights without recapitulating all intermediate stages of development. ... Replacement of a less highly developed by a more progressive cultural form can be

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accomplished by diffusion or acculturation, which has the advantage for people that a higher culture may dominate without total destruction of the population, or even loss of ethnic or social integrity, of the lower" (ibid., 27-28). The conventional model of transmission of cultural information is thus a Lamarckian one, something that many cultural evolutionists find disturbing since such a process does not exist in biological evolution. In biological evolution, the only time that new information can be introduced into the genetic system is at the time of reproduction, when genes from each parental organism are joined together to produce potentially new combinations of traits and when mutations can generate wholly new genetic information that can be transmitted to the resultant offspring. An organism, once conceived, however, cannot assimilate any new information into its genetic system. Cultural evolution is also said to differ from biological evolution in that a single individual can continue to assimilate new cultural information throughout his life, employing this information in his struggle for survival, and passing it on to other individuals. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981:10) state that "We accept as culture those aspects of 'thought, speech, action, and artifacts' which can be learned and transmitted." They go on to assert (ibid.), "The feature common to all of the above 'cultural entities' is that they are capable of being transmitted culturally from one individual to another" [italics added]. The Lenskis (1978) also claim that cultural evolution is unique in that it "involves a population's ability to incorporate into heritable form the useful information its members have acquired through the process of individual learning. In sociocultural systems this is easily done; it is, in fact, the basis of their evolution. But it has no counterpart in biological evolution." Thus, "In the cultural world ... a kind of Lamarckian evolution does occur. Just about anything a population learns and considers worth preserving can be incorporated into its sociocultural heritage." The belief that cultural evolution is Lamarckian reflects the failure of many theorists to make a distinction between the human populations that carry culture and the cultural system itself. There is no doubt that an individual socialized in one culture can also learn the ways of a second culture. But such bi-cultural individuals do not actually mix or fuse the two cultures together. Instead, they keep them in largely separate mental compartments so that they can behave appropriately when placed in either cultural context. 14 To function successfully, the bicultural individual must be, in effect, a schizophrenic, behaving one way when operating in one cultural context, and in another, often wholly contradictory way in the other. Individuals who do not keep the two cultures separate are freaks, whose behavior is unacceptable to natives

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of either of the two original cultures. Much of the fictional literature of colonialism is built around the tragicomic results of inappropriate cultural blending. This suggests that, far from the flow of information between cultures being easy and common, it is rare and extremely difficult. Acculturation, in the conventional approach, is viewed as a process of trait blending, much as inheritance was conceptualized in pre-Mendelian genetics. The religions of colonized cultures in Mesoamerica and Southeast Asia, for example, are referred to as syncretic, with the implication that Christian and pagan traits have been blended together. This is a peculiar way to conceptualize the process since the most carefully studied realm of acculturation, that of linguistics, offers no evidence that blending occurs. Mixed languages are nonexistent, even in zones of active cultural contact. Vocabulary diffuses readily from one language to another, usually providing terms for new items of material culture (automobiles, television) or concepts (democracy, nuclear physics) that were lacking in the recipient language. Basic vocabulary is much less likely to be accepted, however, which is why glottochronology is a useful technique. Grammar is almost never borrowed. Anthropologists who, at least in theory, have done extended fieldwork in alien cultures as part vf their professional training should hardly be surprised by rarity with which cultural blending occurs. After all, we devote a great deal of time and effort to learning the language and cultural patterns of the peoples we study. To have undergone "culture shock" is a measure of the depth of our fieldwork experience. Most of us derive a great deal of personal satisfaction from the extent to which we are successful in "going native." There is no higher honor than being told by our informants that we have learned to think and act like "they" do. In some small number of cases, this may actually be true. The best fieldworkers actually do assimilate a second culture to a considerable degree. From the standpoint of cultural evolution, however, the question is "so what?" The enculturation we undergo as part of our fieldwork has no significant effect on our own native culture. As soon as we leave the field and return to our universities, we revert to behaving as Western academics; slightly deviant ones, perhaps, who may carry exotic shoulder bags and inflict strangely prepared meals on our friends when they come to dinner, but Western academics nonetheless. None of the peoples we study, after all, spend their time writing dissertations or struggling to get tenure. Nor, for our part, do we spend our time hunting caribou or clearing swidden fields, however much we treasure our private memories of time spent doing so while in the field.

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It is doubtful, in fact, if a single exotic cultural trait has been introduced into American culture by anthropologists. American culture may have been influenced by Margaret Mead's (1928) analysis of Samoan culture, an analysis done within the conventions of Western scientific culture, but no Samoan cultural traits were introduced into American culture as a result. In this sense, Derek Freeman's (1983) critique of Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa is correct; Mead did not give us a description of Samoan culture completely faithful to the original. If she had, her book would have had absolutely no influence on American culture. Instead, she used information about Samoan culture, however distorted, to illuminate her discussion of an important controversy within American culture. Her work may have helped to change American cultural patterns, but it was her analysis that did this, not Samoan culture itself. American and Samoan cultures have in no way merged as a result. That an individual's learning of a second culture does not directly change his primary culture is dramatically demonstrated by the case of the young Fuegians who were on the Beagle with Darwin. According to Darwin (1962:207-209), the three were the survivors of a group kidnaped by Captain Fitz Roy on his earlier voyage to Tierra del Fuego. He took them to England "to educate them and instruct them in religion." During their three years in foreign captivity, they had learned to "speak and understand a good deal of English. " They had also successfully assimilated proper British manners to a considerable degree. As individuals they simultaneously carried two distinct cultural pools, that of Native American hunters and gatherers and that of nineteenth century English civilization. The naive hope of their sponsors was that on their return to Tierra del Fuego they would transmit English culture to their compatriots, thus civilizing the whole tribe in one stroke. As is well known, this is not what happened. Instead, the young Fuegians almost immediately reverted to behavior appropriate to their native culture. The most intelligent among them disappointed the hopes of his sponsors by leading a raiding party in an attack on a missionary post. Should we be surprised at this outcome? I hardly think so. The idea that the Fuegian culture pool could have rapidly absorbed any significant number of English cultural traits is as absurd as the idea of cross-breeding amoebas with cats. Note carefully that this is not a racist statement in any sense. I am not suggesting that Fuegians were mentally inferior to Englishmen. All living human populations belong to the same biological species. All display the same range of mental capabilities. The minds of individual Fuegians were just as evolved as the minds of individual Englishmen, as was conclusively demonstrated by the ability of the Fuegian children to assimilate English culture.

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It was the Fuegian cultural system that could not assimilate information from the English cultural system. Darwin (1962:227) himself, whose understanding of the situation of the Fuegians was beclouded by the racist conceptions of his time, observed that "Our three Fuegians, though they had been only three years with civilized men, would, I am sure, have been glad to have retained their new habits; but this was obviously impossible. I fear it is more than doubtful, whether their visit will have been of any use to them." What traits could a hunting-andgathering culture assimilate from the culture of an industrial state? Certainly not the Christian theology, which is what the sponsors of the Fuegian children had hoped they would disseminate to their fellows on their return. How could Bible stories told in the language of a stratified society involving kings, priests, and slaves be intelligible in the egalitarian context of a Fuegian band? The idea of God the Father might be barely intelligible, but hardly that of Christ the King. It is difficult to transmit information from one culture to another because cultural systems, like genetic systems, are highly structured interactive systems in which the individual components have achieved a high degree of integration from extended coevolution. In plant and animal breeding, most attempts to introduce new genes into established lines are failures because they disrupt the smooth functioning of the total system. Is not the same to be expected in the case of cultural systems? The existence of strong obstacles to transmittal of information among different cultures has been obscured by the evident ease with which some traits of material culture are transferred. Aboriginal Americans had only to see firearms used once, and they wanted to obtain them for themselves. But this is not cultural change, although it can lead to it in time. So-called material culture is not culture: It is the product of culture. The eighteenth century Iroquois who purchased muskets from British fur traders did not acquire English culture in the process anymore than buying F16 jet fighters from the United States gave Iranians access to modem American culture. Acquiring material products can be done independently of acquiring the complex cultural knowledge on which their production is dependent. That is why attempts at modernization based on "technology transfer" so often end in failure.

Mechanismsfor the Transmission of Cultural Information Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson (1985) and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and M. W. Feldman (1981) have developed a number of intriguing models to describe the transmission of cultural information vertically from generation to generation and horizontally from individual to indi-

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vidual and group to group. Cavalli-Sforza (1988:244) distinguishes four mechanisms of transmission: 1. parent to offspring (vertical), 2. between unrelated individuals (horizontal if they are in the same generation; oblique if they are in different generations), 3. between one teacher or leader and many followers, and 4. from many persons of a group to one individual.

Each of these mechanisms has different implications for the extent to which culture changes readily or is highly conservative. Transmission from parents to offspring tends to be especially conservative. That from many to one individual, as happens in the process of enculturation in most primitive societies, is also conservative. Horizontal transmission, the standard process of trait diffusion between neighboring individuals, favors rapid change. Transmission from one to many, as in the case of religious prophets and their followers, can produce the most rapid rate of change of all. Cavalli-Sforza (1988:245-246) suggests that transmission in traditional societies is largely vertical, from parents to offspring and from many elders to one child, hence the essential conservatism of these cultures. In contrast, modern civilizations are especially dependent on horizontal transmission between peers and one to many transmission from leader to followers, which may explain the increasing pace of cultural evolution. Transmission models of this type are still constructed employing the individual organism as the fundamental unit of cultural evolution. As a "thought experiment," it may be useful to distinguish the individual as an organism from the pool of cultural information that is stored in the memory of that individual. It is certainly true that culture cannot exist without individual human beings to act as its carriers. H. G. Barnett's criticism of the concept of culture as a superorganic collection of collective representations is essentially correct in asserting that "The only possible locus for the existence of representations is in the mind" (Barnett 1953:11). The individual organism is essential to provide the material structure of the mind and to supply the energy required for it to function. It is also almost certainly the case that not all minds are exactly the same. Significant individual variation exists in information storage and processing capabilities. Such mental variation may underlie the existence of observed differences in the ability of individuals within any population to receive, store, process, and transmit cultural information. The structure of the individual mind does not determine the substantive content of the cultural information it contains anymore than the

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architecture of my word processor has determined the contents of this chapter. Like a microcomputer, a mind can process whatever kinds of information are entered into its memory. This memory can be conceptualized as a pool of cultural information. Each time new information is entered into this pool, the existing information within it is altered to some extent. It is this alteration of the units of information in the individual memory as the result of assimilation of new information that constitutes the cultural equivalent of sexual reproduction in biology. New information is linked to existing units of information within the memory in ways that generate new configurations. Or, as Pitt-Rivers suggested almost a century ago, "The propagation of new ideas may be said to correspond to the propagation of species. New ideas are produced by the correlation of previously existing ideas in the same manner as new individuals in a breed are produced by the union of previously existing individuals" (Pitt-Rivers 1906:18). Individual behavior that results from having such new ideas does not constitute cultural reproduction. It is only when this behavior is perceived by the mind of another organism, with consequent alteration of its own stored cultural information, that cultural reproduction can be said to have occurred. Observable behavior can be thought of, therefore, as playing a role in the process of cultural transmission, analogous to that played by sex cells in biological reproduction. Many more such cells must be produced than actually yield new organisms. Human males must generate millions of sperm, and women hundreds of eggs, during their reproductive lifetimes, in the hope that just a few will unite to become viable fetuses. Similarly, individuals engage in many thousands of behavioral actions for each one that is perceived and entered into the memory of another individual. From this perspective, communication of symbolic information between the minds of two or more individuals is the functional equivalent in the cultural sphere of sexual intercourse in the biological realm. Information, coded in the form of cultural symbols rather than DNA, passes from the mind of one culture-bearer to that of another. There the newly introduced cultural information can link with information already stored in the mind of the recipient to produce unique combinations, the equivalent of heterozygosity in genetics. Successful transmission of symbolic information is, of course, dependent on the parties sharing a common "vocabulary." Otherwise, the symbols that they emit are meaningless to others, and no cultural information is conveyed in the transaction. The glyphs carved on Maya stelae are more than decoration. They are, as has recently been recognized, a complex form of writing that once conveyed large quantities of symbolic information among literate Maya. Unfortunately, because we do not

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know the symbolic referents of most of the glyphs, we can derive only very limited cultural information from our attempts to read them. And even if we were to discover a complete dictionary for the glyphs equivalent to the Rosetta Stone, we would still have great difficulty in interpreting the deeper meanings contained in the Maya writings. Transmission of ideas between highly divergent cultures is extremely difficult, since they share so few values or beliefs. 15

CONCLUDING REMARKS ON THE PROCESS OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION Our understanding of the cultural evolutionary process is much less developed than that of questions of sequence. This is a reflection of the fact that most research on cultural evolution over the past century has been concerned with reconstruction of stages. Recognition that the process by which cultural evolution occurs is in itself problematic is relatively recent. Consequently, few coherent models of process have been formulated, although a number of programmatic statements calling for their formulation have been issued. Empirical testing of such models has yet to be undertaken in any systematic way. The greatest obstacle to theoretical advance in this area is the continuing confusion about the nature of culture as an evolutionary phenomenon. Is it a secondary phenomenon that can be explained in terms of the working of natural selection on the biological organisms that are its carriers, or is it a superorganic phenomenon that evolves according to a process unique to itself? The continuing controversy regarding the unit of selection in cultural evolution is a reflection of this fundamental difference in views about the nature of culture. Understanding the process of cultural evolution in terms of cultural units of selection, however, is constrained by the lack of even the approximation of an adequate description of the nature of such a unit. The meme and its equivalents are still at best metaphorical suggestions. Much work will be required to convert this idea into an empirically useful construct. Development of understanding of problems of variation, selection, and transmission is in large measure dependent on progress in defining the unit of selection.

5, THE CONTINUING EVOLUTION OF CULTURAL EVOLUTIONISM Cultural evolutionism has traced an unusual trajectory in the history of science. Unlike most paradigms, which once rejected are forever

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after relegated to the status of intellectual curiosities, cultural evolutionism has lost and then regained legitimacy on an almost cyclical basis. It is currently undergoing a modest revival, its second in the past half century. If this is to be more enduring than the brief moment during which it held the intellectual spotlight in the early 1960s, students of cultural evolution must avoid the theoretical pitfalls that have trapped us in the past. Social scientists have tended to ask the wrong kinds of questions about cultural evolution. Looking at the observed evolutionary trajectory, they have tended to assume that because a particular sequence occurred, it of necessity had to occur. This has led to concentration on the search for the "causes" of specific cultural evolutionary events (e. g. , the origin of agriculture, the origin of the state). But the course followed by cultural evolution, like that of biological evolution, is indeterminate. The outcome we observe is the result of a multiplicity of stochastic events. It happened only because all of these events occurred as they did. It would have happened differently if they had not. The search for "laws" of cultural evolution is thus ultimately futile. Likely to prove more productive is effort spent in attempting to fonnulate a synthetic theory of cultural evolution. Such a synthesis must go beyond the simple assertion that culture evolves. That has already been established. It must also go beyond description of the course of cultural evolution, although understanding questions of sequence will always retain a major place in the research agenda. It must ultimately incorporate concern with questions of process. A model of cultural evolutionary process as powerful as that offered to students of biological evolution by the combination of Darwin's theory of natural selection with Mendelian genetics is needed. In science as in other cultural domains, existence of a need-even an explicitly recognized one--does not ensure that the desired innovation will emerge, however. The social sciences needed a plausible theory of cultural change when Darwin proposed his theory of natural selection. Instead, they got the formalistic sequences of Spencer and Marx. The social sciences still needed such a theory when the modern synthesis was emerging in evolutionary biology. Instead, they got the linear sequences, whether uni- or multi-, of White and Steward. Interesting and valuable work was done relating to sequence, but the study of cultural evolution continued along the same trajectory it had always followed. No intellectual mutation occurred. No new theories of the process of cultural evolution were offered. Are there any reasons to think the outcome will be any different this time around? I think that conditions now may be as favorable as they have ever been for the emergence of a new theoretical synthesis. Simply recogniz-

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ing that the study of cultural evolution has until now almost wholly concentrated on questions of sequence to the virtual exclusion of concern with questions of process helps to focus attention on the latter area. The gradual development of consensus among anthropologists that culture is ideational-a set of symbols-rather than behavioral-artifacts and behavior-is an important positive factor. Such a view of culture is essential if it is to be treated as composed of units of information playing a role analogous to that of genes in biological evolution. Such an approach offers the best chance of success in developing an improved understanding of the process of cultural evolution. Conceptualization of the nature of these cultural units of information is admittedly still wholly unsatisfactory but, at least, I think we now can see clearly the direction in which we need to try to move. The increasing recognition of the extent to which diversity is a fundamental and inherent characteristic of culture is another positive factor. Natural selection can only work in the cultural realm if it has sufficient diversity with which to operate. We have begun to move beyond the concern with idealized patterns and configurations, modal personalities, and other homogenized abstractions that for so long constituted ethnographic reporting to acknowledging the existence of tremendous variability in the cultural knowledge of individuals and subpopulations within the larger units traditionally treated as "cultures" by anthropologists. Documentation of this variability is essential if conceptualizing units of cultural information in terms of populations or pools of memes. We still lack adequate methods for observing, recording, and reporting diversity, but such technical problems can be transcended once we become convinced of the significance of acquiring such information. A final, positive factor is the much greater sophistication with which environmental variables are now conceptualized by social scientists concerned with human ecology. To a considerable extent, we have moved beyond use of gross environmental variables (e.g., rain forests, deserts) into making of quite fine-grained descriptions of the specific local habitats within which specific cultural groups are functioning. This opens the way to making detailed analyses of how selective forces operate in the process of cultural evolution. Although I think that we are currently well situated to advance our understanding of cultural evolution, I am much less sure that the intellectual environment is a favorable one for the propagation of new ideas of this kind. A plausible model of the cultural evolutionary process will be complex and counter-intuitive. The recent success of the simplistic formulas offered by sociobiology and cultural materialism suggests that the social sciences do not offer a very receptive environment for more complex and problematic modes of explanation.

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Above all, however, understanding cultural evolution necessitates abandoning many of our most deeply held beliefs about the nature of humanity and our place in the universe. It has been difficult enough for people to accept that we are not in fact the center of all things-Cod's chosen species in the whole universe. Even now, the philosophical implications of Darwinism for understanding our species' place in nature are accepted by only a minority of the human population. To accept that we as individual beings are not very important in the process of cultural evolution is even more painful. None of us enjoy being told that it is our culture that evolves, not we as individual human beings. It is not the task, however, of science to make us feel better about our fate. The universe did not explode into existence 10 billion years ago with the ultimate goal of making the human race happy. Life did not emerge on earth with the goal of creating a species capable of bearing culture. Nor did culture evolve with the promotion of the well-being of Homo sapiens as its ultimate objective. Culture evolves for the same reason that life evolves: Once a process involving variation and selective retention of self-replicating units of information is set in motion, it will automatically continue for so long as sufficient free energy is available to support it. It is simply our peculiar fate as individuals to be the transitory vehicles selected by evolutionary history to carry the units of information that constitute culture. The study of cultural evolution cannot change the human condition, but it can help us to understand the strange and terrible position we occupy. This seems to me to offer sufficient justification for continued pursuit of research on cultural evolution.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Although I am wholly responsible for the contents of this chapter, most of the ideas that it contains are taken from the literature or derived from discussions over the years with friends and colleagues. I have done my best to provide complete citations to published sources. Ideas inspired by conversations are more difficult to identify, but over the years, the evolution of my thinking about cultural evolution has been especially strongly influenced by continuing exchanges with Aram Yengoyan and Karl L. Hutterer. Karl and I had originally planned to coauthor this chapter; its current form is in part a reflection of the preliminary outline we developed before other commitments forced Karl to withdraw from the project. Neil L. Jamieson, Michael R. Dove, and Kathleen Gillogly have all read various drafts of this chapter and offered detailed suggestions for its improvement. Kate's careful critical editing of the final version is especially appreciated.

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My deepest thanks are reserved for my daughters Charmaine and Claire, who understood my need to spend so much of my time for the better part of two years pursuing this undertaking, and supported my efforts to do so despite the accompanying disruption of our family life.

NOTES 1. The distinction between evolutionary process and sequence that I suggest here is similar to that drawn by evolutionary biologists between the "process" and the "products" of evolution (e.g., see Ehrlich et al. 1974:xiii). Donald T. Campbell (1965:20) is one of the few social scientists to have recognized that it is useful to distinguish "between theories describing the course of evolution and theories focusing on social processes that lie behind social evolution." Philippe Van Parijs (1981:51) suggests a similar distinction between what he refers to as an "evolutionist" perspective, which looks at history "as development, as progress, as a succession of stages of increasing complexity or perfection," and an "evolutionary" perspective, which "focuses on mechanisms of filtering or trial-and-error, i.e., on mechanisms of selection between actual ... alternatives." Campbell and Van Parijs, however, view the study of evolutionary processes as being of greater value to the social sciences than the study of sequences, whereas in my view both approaches are legitimate and, indeed, mutually reinforcing ways of looking at cultural evolution. 2. According to Spencer's full definition, "Evolution is not an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation" (Spencer 1976:358). 3. Ironically, the example of color naming, which Lumsden and Wilson employ to try to show the existence of epigenetic rules, actually better supports the contrary view that all human populations share a common genetic capability to perceive the same segments of the spectrum but that the way that they divide this spectrum and assign names to it is wholly cultural. What Berlin and Kay's study showed was that cultures vary in the type and number of color categories they employ. This appears to reflect in an orderly way the evolution of cultural complexity. Larger scale, more complex cultures tend to have larger named palettes (Brown 1989). As simpler cultures become more complex, they rapidly assimilate additional color categories. Complex cultures require complex ways of coding information, of which color naming is one. Selection would favor retention of additional color categories as these randomly occurred. 4. In teaching an introductory anthropology course during the Vietnam War, I employed the change in military uniforms from the bright, primary colors characteristic of the eighteenth century to the drab browns and greens of our own time as an example of an adaptive change enhancing individual human survival. Only much later did I come to see how badly I had misunderstood the way selection worked in this case. Brightly clad soldiers died, not because the enemy could see them more clearly-at the range a musket is effective, a camouflage-suited soldier would be equally visible--but because their own commanders could see them. "The black clouds of smoke over the battlefields required bright colours to enable the disposi-

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tion of troops to be visible" (Bleckwenn 1978:33). This enabled officers to more effectively guide their units into contact with enemy units, thus ensuring that a high percentage of the soldiers would die or be wounded in the ensuing exchange of volleys. Selection occurred at a higher level than the individual. Those armies with more efficient command and control were more likely to win battles, regardless of the loss of lives of many of their individual soldiers in the process. The design of uniforms was, of course, centrally controlled. Choice of color was not decided by the individual soldier but instead was imposed by the king or senior officials of the war ministry. In this regard, in the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, which were waged under much more decentralized control than the earlier European wars, and where individual units were free to innovate with uniforms and equipment, more comfortable and more concealing clothing was rapidly adopted. Thus, khaki uniforms were first used by British units fighting rebellions in southern Africa and India in the 1830s: "Adoption was for reasons of serviceability rather than the need for camouflage, a factor of less significance in those days of shortrange firearms, although in bush-fighting concealment was a necessary adjunct to surprize" (Barthorp 1978:145). Despite the demonstrated superiority of khaki uniforms, the British army at home continued to wear red coats for field service until the 1880s. It was only after the First Boer War of 1881 that the final conversion to khaki was made (ibid., 150-156), reflecting the belated recognition of the dangers presented by long-range rifles. The invention of smokeless powder weapons capable of long-range killing made use of massed blocks of troops prohibitively expensive, but commanders continued to do so (witness the infantry tactics of World War I) until new command-andcontrol technologies (e.g., portable field radios), allowing them to direct small, highly dispersed units also evolved. Only then did the use of camouflage uniforms become widespread. And even then, the change was slow. In Vietnam, only special units with independent procurement systems used camouflage uniforms until as late as 1968. In fact, the initial contingents of American advisors were required to wear white name tapes on their shirts and brightly colored unit patches on their shoulders. Several years passed before regulations were changed to permit less conspicuous black-and-green versions. 5. Confirmed believers in sociobiology, as Vining (1986:179-180) and Symons (1989: 138-139) point out, try to finesse this empirical challenge to their theoretical assumptions with the argument that human biological drives evolved in the very long period that our species spent living as nomadic hunters and gatherers, and these evolved behavioral tendencies have not yet had time to change in response to the new "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" created by life in complex societies. Exactly how "evolved behavioral tendencies" suited to Pleistocene hunters and gatherers generated behavior that resulted in complex civilizations would seem to be something of a puzzle. There is also some question about how closely the behavior of nomadic Paleolithic hunters and gatherers may have fit the model of maximization of reproductive success posited for them by the sociobiologists. Alberto Gomes's (1982) study of contemporary Semang foragers in Malaysia found that they preferred to have a small number of children and took deliberate measures to control fertility. Having more than one infant to carry when the band moved camp was an impossible burden for a woman so that a postpartum abstinence period of at least two years was ritually enjoined. Presumably, child transport was at least as great a problem for our Pleistocene ancestors as it is for the Semang. If that was the case, one must wonder why a human behavioral tendency toward wide birth

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spacing failed to evolve during all the millennia in which the demands of nomadism constituted "the environment of evolutionary adaptedness." Ironically, the Tsembaga, a local population that Rappaport (1968) portrayed as being kept in perfect balance with their environment by ritually regulated warfare, had been decimated and driven from their territory after losing several battles with neighboring groups. Only the intervention of the colonial power restored them to their territory and saved them from extinction as an identifiable social entity. Rappaport deserves credit as an ethnographer for including this information in his book, although he did not perceive its negative implications for his concept of homeostatic human ecosystems. (See Rambo 1983:13-18 for a critical discussion of the Tsembaga example.) Ingold (1986:106-107) points out that Darwinian theory is based on the existence of discrete individuals with finite life spans: "Every organism is conceived in the terms of this theory as a singular entity, endowed with a specific project coterminous with the boundaries of its own existence. Its birth represents not a moment in a gradual process of becoming, but the abrupt appearance of something absolutely new. And what it passes on to the future is not its life ... but a set of elementary instructions that may be recombined in the formation of other projects for other lives." If the cultural system is treated as the unit of selection, as it is in many theories of cultural evolution, there is no equivalent to the individual in Darwinian theory. Ingold continues: "Clearly cultures do not die every generation, but instead are persistent over long spans of time. They are compatible with Bergson's idea of continuous evolution, of living beings as thoroughfares along which the impulse of life is transmitted. A culture is analogous to a personality which is continuously changing as it is built up out of gradually accumulating experience." In large, complex societies, as Van Parijs (1981 :89-91) points out, "sub-societies" such as firms, gangs, and religious sects may be significantly numerous and subject to sufficiently powerful selective pressures to be meaningful units of selection. The multitude of competing revolutionary organizations in Czarist Russia or colonial Vietnam appear to exemplify the workings of "natural selection" at the level of the sub-society. Thus, the Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and numerous other splinter clandestine factions in the former case, and the Vietnamese Communist Party, the Trotskites, the Dai Viet, and the VNQDD in the latter case, all sought with varying degrees of success to mobilize and control the population as a base from which to overthrow the existing government authorities. In each case, only a single organizational form ultimately survived the long struggle. That this took the form of the Leninist "combat party" in both cases suggests that this pattern of organization enjoys an enhanced fitness in an environment of clandestine struggle. More recently, the displacement of "traditional" criminal organizations such as the Mafia by new, more efficient and ruthless drug gangs, and the bloody turf wars between street gangs in Los Angeles, would seem to be manifestations of natural selection operating at the sub-societal level. Recently, David Hull (1988) has greatly clarified the selection unit controversy by drawing a distinction between units of "replication" and those of "selection." Replication units are informational in character, the plan or instructions for assembly and functioning of the phenotype, that are transmitted from generation to generation. Selection does not work directly on the units of replication but instead can only act on them through the physical vehicle that carries them. It is this vehicle, most often represented by individual organisms, that constitutes the unit of selection. Genes, therefore, are units of replication; individual organisms are units of selection. If a similar distinction can be applied to units involved in the process of

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cultural evolution, memes or ideas would seem to be replication units, while observable behavior and items of material culture would seem to represent units of selection. There is more than a little irony in the observation by Tim Ingold (1986) that the early field research of Franz Boas and his students was characterized by concern with cultural diversity. The Boasian approach, pejoratively labeled as "cultural particularism" by Marvin Harris (1968), could have provided the kinds of data needed to apply Darwinian models to the study of cultural evolution, if it had been pursued far enough. For obvious reasons, deliberate controlled experimentation has been rarely if ever attempted in studies of cultural adaptation, although this method has been frequently used to study human biological adaptation. Examples of such experimental investigations include measurement of the effect of racial variations in skin color on solar heat load in tropical Africa (Weiner et al. 1964), acclimatization to heat by different racial groups in Southeast Asia (Hellon et al. 1956; MacPherson 1958), differential responses to cold stress by Australian aborigines and Europeans (Newman 1961), and the relationship between having sickle cell trait and the severity of malarial infection in Africans (Allison 1954). The fact that Hallpike devotes 60 pages to demonstrating that there are no strong correlations to be found between very grossly categorized modes of subsistence and patterns of social organization, a conclusion already reached by Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsburg (1930) and C. Daryll Forde (1934), leads one to suspect that anthropological theory may be uniquely exempt from the progressive development characteristic of other sciences. According to Steward, "Societies having supracommunity (state or national) institutions and the technological ability to expand the effective environment beyond that of the local or primary group can utilize resources within and outside the area controlled by the larger society. The adaptive responses of complex societies are thus very unlike those of a tribal society, which adapts primarily to its own environment" (1977:44-45). This statement raises questions about what Steward meant by the term "environment." One must ask, "How can a society extend beyond its own environment?" Cases of massive "cultural change" in which a population shifts rapidly from one configuration (e.g., gumsa Kachin to gumlao Kachin), to cite Leach's famous example, may represent situations where the entire population already was, in effect, bi-cultural. Thus, the culture did not actually change, but the people simply switched from behaving according to one set of patterns to behaving according to another set which they already carried in a separate compartment of their minds. This difficulty in cross-cultural transmission was early recognized by Pitt-Rivers (1906:19) who observed, "We find that, as in the breeding of animals, when the di vergence of races has gone so far as to constitute what is called distinct species, they can not interbreed, so when the development of ideas has run in distinct channels far enough to create a hiatus, no intercommunication can take place. Two men of very different culture may travel in the same coach together, and though speaking the same language, may find themselves unable to communicate except upon commonplace topics in which the simple ideas are common to both. Or two nations in very different stages may be brought side by side, as is the case in many of our colonies, but there can be no amalgamation between them."

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A.D.

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THE EVOLUTION OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES IN TROPICAL SOUTH AMERICA

CHAPTER 3

Cultural Evolution, Human Ecology, and Empirical Research ROBERT D. DRENNAN

For the past 20 years or so, the combination of human ecology and cultural evolution has been by far the most productive theoretical force in empirical research on long-term sociocultural change, at least in the New World tropics. This is partly because cultural evolution has always been concerned primarily with the kind of far-reaching, long-term changes on which archeology, more than any other discipline, is and must be focused. Far more than any other approach, cultural evolution has stimulated and guided the archeological research on which our knowledge of long sequences of change is based. Although it should, perhaps, be superfluous in a volume dedicated to cultural evolution, I suspect it is necessary to make clear what I mean by the term. The number of different meanings attached to "cultural evolution" by different scholars and the diverse connotations that the phrase has collected (increasingly pejorative in recent years it seems) have made me somewhat reluctant to use it. Discussion at the symposium from which this volume grew made it clear that, even in such a group of scholars as this, we do not all mean the same thing, sometimes not even nearly the same thing, when we say "cultural evolution." I use the term "cultural evolution" to refer to the tradition that comes to us principally through White (1949, 1959), Steward (1955), Service (1962, 1971, 1975), and Sahlins and Service (1960) with all their assorted contradictions, and I include the subsequent proliferation of often contrasting approaches from numerous scholars (cf. Alland 1970; Durham 1976, 1982; Dunnell 1980; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981). I should emphasize that some of these more recent authors, whom I include under the cultural evolutionary rubric, have themselves rejected it, seeing what they do as a reaction against cultural evolution. To identify cultural evolution with the writings, say, of Elman Service, however, and to insist on 100 percent agreement with these precepts as

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a condition of membership is to take an excessively narrow view of what a school of thought is. For me the essence of cultural evolution is not directionality of change through a prescribed set of stages but the way processes of change are modeled. These processes, in a cultural evolutionary model, must include mechanisms to generate variability and mechanisms to select from among that variability the patterns that are perpetuated. In discussions of cultural evolution (in the New World tropics and elsewhere), the common shorthand for this has been to show why certain patterns of organization are successful solutions to particular problems that arise in given (usually environmental) circumstances. The empirical research that cultural evolution, especially in combination with ecological approaches, has stimulated in the New World tropics has focused very heavily on the development of complex societies. Whatever anyone may now think of the validity or utility of the "chiefdom" and "state" stages, these concepts as formulated and popularized by Elman Service have forcefully directed our attention to important social facts available from previously little-noticed aspects of the archeological record. We have seen the elaboration of models that attribute the development of complex societies in one way or another to the growth of population, to specialized production and exchange, to particular agricultural technologies or ways of organizing agricultural production, and to several other factors acting singly or in combination. The theoretical debate about which of these factors was of prime importance has focused an enormous amount of methodologically innovative archeological research on relevant topics. The result has been a rapid expansion of our knowledge of these aspects of developing complex societies in the New World tropics. This expansion is attributable in very large measure to the stimulating and focusing effect of cultural evolutionary and ecological approaches to the study of long-term social change. Whatever criticisms of cultural evolution may be voiced, they cannot include the charge that it has been either difficult to operationalize or unproductive in stimulating empirical research. This is not to say that we have now arrived at all the information we need about complex societies in the New World tropics to thoroughly evaluate these contending models within the realm of cultural evolution. There continues to be vigorous debate around these subjects, and there continues to be no shortage of potentially highly productive research projects waiting to be done. For instance, there are especially the gaps left by a very lopsided focus on the earliest and most elaborate chiefdoms and on the largest and most complicated states. In this respect cultural evolution has heightened an already exaggerated emphasis in archeological research on the first and the biggest. Only research on areas and periods where the development of social complexity came

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more slowly or not at all can complete the investigation of popular cultural evolutionary models. The development and application of new methodologies continue to offer exciting possibilities for expanding our fund of knowledge relevant to these models as well. In short, cultural evolutionary theory has provided us with a concrete and productive program for empirical research on sociocultural change, especially as concerns the origins of complex societies. I perceive, however, a growing gulf between empirical research on the one hand and interesting models of long-term social and cultural change on the other. My thoughts on this subject are certainly influenced by the fact that much of this paper was written during the day-today throes of an archeological field project. It gives me pause to pass a single afternoon trying to write about processes of social change, trying to identify the peculiar pink mineral that appears as temper in a certain pottery type, and trying to tum a Land Rover right-side up again and make it run and steer. These, of course, are the usual occupational hazards of the archeologist. That the distance between theories of social change and collecting and analyzing primary archeological data is great is not news at this point. A more vexing disjuncture between empirical research and models of sociocultural change is the extent to which the models that have become something of a standard in guiding such research are no longer really the ones about which the most interesting and productive theoretical discussion revolves. In what follows, I will discuss selective mechanisms for cultural behavior in complex societies using data on the rise of chiefdoms in the Colombian Andes. I believe we must look explicitly at what the level of selection is, especially at how selection works on the group and the individual, or in biological and cultural reproduction.

MODELS OF CULTURAL EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES We have a number of cultural evolutionary/ecological models of complex societies that conjure up a host of factors that seem related to varying degrees in different instances; among them are population growth, redistributive economies, specialized production, environmental diversity, and intensive agriculture. It has, by now, become almost a tradition that comparative studies of developing complex societies discover that some of these factors are important in some cases and others are important in other cases. We routinely conclude such comparative studies by saying that general statements about the processes by which complex societies develop will not take the form of finally resolving the question of which factor or combination of factors was

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really responsible, but rather that we must forge through to some different level of discourse to make useful, general statements about processes. It has been almost 15 years since Flannery (1972) issued such a call, relegating these much-discussed factors to the lowest of his three hierarchicallevels of generality-the "socio-environmental stresses." Progressively more general statements were about "mechanisms" and "processes." Although this paper is cited approvingly and regularly, it is still the norm that grant proposals for field research focus on investigation of factors such as the ones listed earlier, without firm connection to more general models. Flannery's suggestions about mechanisms and processes have not really been operationalized in empirical research strategies. In a much more recent attempt to summarize and compare empirical research on the origins of complex societies, Wright (1986:358) notes that we have a number of interesting ideas but "no way of expressing the principles we dimly perceive, nor of deducing testable consequences from such expressions." Such a view, espoused even by proponents of cultural evolutionary approaches (by my broad definition at least), has naturally led to widespread attacks on cultural evolution. Those that label cultural evolution as passe (as if scholarly approaches came in and out of style like other Paris fashions) merit no serious attention. Others offer directions even less conducive to the rigorous empirical testing without which analysis of sociocultural change is reduced to word games. Despite a certain grasping for something that seems to remain just out of reach, it is still the tradition of cultural evolution that offers the greatest promise for building toward more successful models of general principles in such a way as to make those principles subject to empirical tests. Those who pursue cultural evolutionary directions have the substantial advantage of being able to build directly on the quite considerable accomplishments of the research thus far spawned by such approaches. Discussion of general models of cultural evolution continues to be vigorous, to say the least, although much of it leads in directions that have been difficult to operationalize in the arena of empirical research. I concentrate here on one aspect of this discussion that has rather direct and as yet undeveloped implications for empirical research.

EVOLUTION VERSUS ECOLOGY? Cultural evolutionary studies of complex societies in the New World tropics, as I previously noted, have been inextricably bound to ecologi-

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cal approaches, and this has been a major aspect of their stimulating effect on empirical research. In biology the relationship between ecological and evolutionary studies has never been so close. Indeed, there has often been considerable tension between ecological and evolutionary approaches. Dunnell (1980), among others, has argued that evolutionary explanations and ecological-functional explanations are of a fundamentally different and incompatible logical sort, and thus that cultural evolution has never proposed truly evolutionary explanations at all, only ecological-functional ones. Since this issue is at the heart of the principles of processes and selective mechanisms I want to discuss, it is important to show why this distinction between evolutionary explanations and ecological-functional explanations is neither valid nor useful. We all know that it is difficult to consider the myriad functional interrelationships of the elements in a large system and simultaneously to consider the mechanisms by which such a system changes and develops. This difficulty, however, should not be taken for a fundamental incompatibility. Indeed, if there is some fundamental incompatibility between these two modes of explanation, as Dunnell (1980) and others have argued, then the logic of both modes of explanation collapses. Let's consider just the realm of biology at the moment. Evolutionary explanations are in their very essence functional. To understand selection for a particular characteristic, one shows how it functions ultimately to enhance reproduction. This functional explanation serves because it is clearly coupled to the selective mechanisms of evolutionary theory. This set of mechanisms makes it necessary that those characteristics, from the available choices, that most enhance reproduction become increasingly common in a population. (I am aware that this is the barest skeleton of the logic of evolutionary explanation and that I have ignored a large body of important qualifications and current debates. I do this intentionally for brevity and clarity because the debates I am ignoring concern the extent of the applicability of such explanations but not their basic structure.) The point, in short, is that evolutionary explanations are functional in nature. It remains difficult to discuss evolutionary (selective) mechanisms and functions at the same time--that is, really to effectively combine the modeling of function and selection-but not because of any underlying logical contradiction. The difficulty is of the same sort that an architect has in designing a building whose exterior presents a pleasing form and appearance at the same time that the interior provides a practical and esthetically satisfying arrangement of rooms. In biology, both frontiers have been avidly and productively pursued. Both ecologists and evolutionary biologists thrive, and both fields have substantial ac-

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complishments to which their practitioners can point with pride, even if examples of the successful integration of the two complementary approaches are rare. In the realm of culture and society, however, the situation is less balanced. Although I cannot accept Dunnell's (1980) argument about the logical incompatibility of evolutionary and ecological explanations, I do share his observation that the major accomplishments of the cultural evolutionary school emphasize the ecological-functional side of things rather than the evolutionary one, properly speaking. Clearly the main current of cultural evolutionary studies has been, and largely continues to be, delineation of the functioning of ecosystems, broadly construed to include much human behavior that many other social scientists consider unrelated to ecology. Explicit discussion of actual mechanisms of change, though not altogether absent, lags far behind. Given the traditional stress on smoothly functioning ecosystems and, in general, on successful adjustment of culture to environment (the term "adaptation" is often used), one is compelled to assume that, underlying cultural evolution, there are some (generally unspecified) mechanisms assuring the perpetuation of ecologically successful patterns of behavior at the expense of ecologically less successful ones. Unless one makes such an assumption, then the notions of adaptation and the descriptions of smoothly functioning ecosystems that have been the stock in trade of cultural evolution offer us no understanding at all, because there would be no reason to suppose that things would work out that way except by purest coincidence. Mechanisms of change, and especially of selection, have long been discussed, particularly by those concerned with elucidating and clarifying the nature of the "analogy" between cultural evolution and biological evolution (cf. Gerard et al. 1956; Meggers 1959; Campbell 1970; Alland 1972). These discussions, however, have been characterized by a remarkable sterility so far as applications are concerned. Although various scholars have advanced conflicting formulations at this level, empirical research directed at resolving these disagreements is conspicuous principally by its absence. The White-Steward-Service tradition, by contrast, is very present in the bibliographies of numerous studies of long-term social and cultural change and has been especially influential in archeological studies of complex societies in the New World tropics. The cultural evolutionary theory that has most influenced and guided the archeology of New World complex societies, though, has left a gap where we ought to find explicit discussion of processes of change. The stress on smoothly functioning ecosystems and the frequent use of terms like "adaptation" and "selection," together with the natural

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emphasis on the organization of the behavior of often very large groups of people, invite one to fill this gap in evolutionary thought along the following lines (at least in the case of explanations of emerging social complexity). Particular environmental circumstances, be they diversity of resources, population growth, advantages of cooperative intensive agriculture, or others, "select for" certain patterns of complex social organization because groups of people that are so organized (however that might have come to pass) are more successful (in the most fundamental sense, at feeding themselves) and thus expand at the expense of groups not so organized. It has often been pointed out that, unlike non-human species, human groups can be replaced by other human groups either as their members die off or as their members choose to join other (and therefore more successful) groups. These selective mechanisms of change are usually not spelled out, but the majority of the cultural evolutionary models that have been such a major spur to research on New World complex societies are most easily understood if supplied with such an account of the processes by which the changes actually take place. An example of explicit discussion of just such processes of group replacement is Carneiro's (1970) theory of state origins. Carneiro casts the "voluntarism" he sees in other cultural evolutionary models of state origins in an unfavorable light, portraying models emphasizing, for example, specialized production in heterogeneous environments as dependent on a social contract between people who agree to set aside their differences for the greater economic good of complex organization. The general silence of many authors associated with such models (including Service [1975:71-80]) on the subject of actual processes of change does invite the imputation of such "voluntarism" to them. Regardless of what the original authors of such models might have thought, the more important point here is that they can just as easily be supplied with a set of processes involving the replacement of one group by another in hostile competition (the kind of "coercive" process Carneiro prefers) as with a set of processes involving the success of a group through voluntary recruitment of members who choose to join because they recognize the benefits of membership. In either case, the essential feature of the processes of change envisioned is that a group organized to solve more successfully the problems presented by its environment progressively expands by replacing other less successfully organized groups. Whether labeled as such or not, both "coercive" and "voluntaristic" processes hinge on the process of selection. Such processes are, of course, well known in biology under the heading of group selection. These models, often associated with V. C. Wynne-Edwards (1962), were very popular in biology during the 1960s,

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but since the 1970s they have corne under increasingly critical examination. In particular, selection for altruistic behavior that benefits a group but is detrimental to the altruistic individual is difficult to understand. While the advantage to a group of having altruistic individuals is clear, within the group altruistic individuals should be steadily losing out to their more selfish competitors. Thus, whatever the advantages to the group of possessing altruistic individuals, it should be very difficult for such a group to corne into existence or to perpetuate altruism within it. lt seems that the conditions permitting group selection to be a major force are rare, at least among non-human species, and the notion of inclusive fitness enables many superficially paradoxical characteristics or behaviors (such as altruism) to be understood in terms of selection operating at the level of the individual (cf. Williams 1966, 1971; Hamilton 1971; Trivers 1971; Dawkins 1976). The ferment that this reorganization of evolutionary thinking in biology represents has, of course, spilled over into the realm of cultural evolution as well, touching off a new round of theoretical attention to mechanisms of change. This round is thoroughly evolutionary in even the strictest sense, since the focus is explicitly on selective mechanisms, their nature, the units of selection, and the level at which they operate in cultural evolution. Most important, these issues pose questions about the nature of sociocultural change that have implications relevant to empirical research. That is, they involve empirically testable propositions and offer an opportunity to refocus studies of sociocultural change toward the more general issues whose slippery nature we have grown accustomed to lamenting (as discussed previously).

SELECTION IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION If we are to continue to model long-term social change in selective terms, as cultural evolutionists explicitly or implicitly have been doing for some time, then we are faced with some major choices about the nature of those selective processes. Archeological study of long-term sequences of sociocultural change, especially those involving complex societies, can provide vital information for evaluating the alternatives. I am going to pose three major alternative approaches to these issues, around which much of the remainder of my discussion will revolve. The first of these is the notion that the concept of inclusive fitness so broadens the ability of evolutionary biology to deal with social behavior that much of what has traditionally been regarded as outside the realm of biology can now be understood simply in terms of biological evolution as conferring sufficient reproductive advantage to an individual and his

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kin that no further explanation is necessary (cf. Chagnon and Irons 1979). The level of selection is the individual, and calculation of the selective advantage his behavior confers includes not only benefit to himself but to his relatives as well, since they share some proportion of his genes. The prevalence of kinship as a principle of human social organization, in relatively simple societies at least, has given much encouragement to advocates of this approach. Such a direction, of course, represents sociobiology on the half-shell: raw and unadulterated. The second approach is one that seeks to model cultural evolution as a precise analogy to biological evolution, operating in parallel but separate fashion (cf. Dawkins 1976; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Lumsden and Wilson 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1985). This is a more direct outgrowth of the cultural evolutionary tradition in anthropology, but it has received a considerable invigoration from developments in evolutionary biology during the last decade or so. The basic idea, in one form or another, is to model human societies as resulting from a cultural code consisting of a very large number of individual instructions that (like genes) can be more or less successful at replicating themselves. Here the level of selection is the individual or perhaps even the cultural trait. The approach certainly contains much sociobiology, but it is well cooked and often served in a thick cream sauce. The third approach seeks to perpetuate the emphasis on group selection largely implicit in the White-Steward-Service tradition of cultural evolution (cf. Alexander 1974:376-377; Dunnell 1980:65-66). Here a parallel but separate realm of cultural evolution is joined by a set of conditions showing why the reservations concerning group selection that seem so convincing for non-human species do not apply to humans or especially not to complex human societies. As specified by Dunnell (1980:65-66), the conditions, given cultural transmission of traits separate from genetic transmission of traits, are (1) a fast rate of change; (2) a group that is "a functionally interdependent unit rather than an ... aggregate of redundant functional units"; and (3) a cultural system so complicated that no one individual possesses enough knowledge to pass it on alone. This approach is for those who have tasted sociobiology but decline to partake, at least insofar as complex human societies are concerned.

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON LEVELS OF SELECTION The distance from formulating these alternative approaches to delineating empirical research questions whose answers can contribute to re-

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solving conflicts between them is not very great. Taking up the contrast between the second and third approaches leads us directly to the topic to which archeologists under the influence of cultural evolution have already dedicated so much attention: the emergence of complex societies. If the third approach is correct, then the emergence of complex societies heralds a significant shift in the level on which the selective processes of cultural evolution focus. We ought to be able to find archeological evidence of such a shift in level if it exists and to say something about when, in any particular sequence of sociocultural change, the conditions underlying such a shift developed. Certainly the necessary conditions specified by Dunnell (fast rate of change, functionally interdependent groups, and very complicated cultural systems) are implicit if not explicit in any conception of complex society. As noted earlier, Carneiro (1970), for one, has argued that the mechanisms of state emergence are exactly those of group selection: In a situation of competition between a number of groups over scarce agricultural resources, the group with the most effective military organization wins out at the expense of the others, either obliterating or incorporating them. Sanders (1972) has seen a similar dynamic operating, for example, in the Basin of Mexico during the period of the formation of the Teotihuacan state. In the nearby and roughly contemporaneous case of the Valley of Oaxaca, it is much more difficult to see empirical evidence of a process of competition between groups that results in the emergence of the Monte Alban state. The debate (Sanders and Santley 1978; Santley 1980; Blanton 1980; Kowalewski 1980) over whether there is evidence of such a dynamic of change in the Oaxaca sequence is perhaps more directly relevant to fundamental questions of the processes of cultural evolution than is at first obvious. As prehistoric states get large, however, it is more difficult to see how the replacement of one group by another more successfully organized group can provide the major mechanism by which change takes place. To continue with the cases of Teotihuacan and Monte Alban, for example, each sequence provides something on the order of a millennium of sociocultural change after the respective capitals had bested whatever serious rivals they might have had in their immediate regions and beyond. Each seems to have dominated a larger and larger territory and population (at least for a few centuries), and in the process both seem to have undergone several substantial changes in organization. But these changes clearly did not come about as either capital was eclipsed, destroyed, or incorporated by some other polity. While group selection approaches may be applied to the initial emergence of these two states, their application to the significant sequences of change following initial

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emergence is not nearly so straightforward. If these changes came about by the kind of group selection envisioned by the third of the evolutionary approaches previously outlined, then the groups involved must be envisioned as existing and competing with each other within their respective polities rather than as external competing polities. Attempting to apply group selection models in this way, and especially finding the empirical evidence necessary to support such an application will, however, be very difficult. A more direct route to empirical evidence relevant to this issue is to concentrate on that great cultural evolutionary grab-bag: the chiefdom. Superficially, at least, the conventional wisdom about chiefdoms offers us considerable encouragement to think in terms of group selection. Dunnell's three conditions for making selection at the group level important are fulfilled. Social change comes fast: chiefdoms are often noted for their lack of stable patterns of organization. At least the larger and more complicated examples form functionally interdependent groups with cultural systems too complicated to be fully mastered by a single individual. And yet chiefdoms would seem to be large enough that the competition between groups would be played out primarily at the intersocietal level rather than between groups within a single society, making it easier to find archeological evidence of the relevant groups and their competition. An area like the Colombian Andes provides an ideal setting in which to explore this aspect of the processes of cultural evolution. There is a sequence of at least two thousand years involving societies roughly classifiable as chiefdoms. Even though we customarily label the societies encountered here by the Spanish conquistadores as chiefdoms, the ethnohistoric record suggests substantial variety in form of organization across the region. Although the archeological record of the Colombian Andes is only sketchily known, it tends to confirm this suggestion and extend it to chronological variety in form of organization as well. Perhaps the earliest chiefdoms of the Colombian Andes, those of the Alto Magdalena (the region of San Agustin), focused intensive public effort on the construction of elaborate tombs and related funerary monuments. Later societies include those of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, whose monumental public works centered conspicuously on residential terraces and road networks. The Muisca of the area around modern Bogota, known in some considerable ethnohistoric detail, left such a dearth of monumental remains that superficial examination of the archeological record would provide little obvious evidence of complex patterns of organization at all. One's attention is automatically drawn, not to the monolithic question of the origin of the chiefdom, but rather to the nature of a much wider array of social and cultural changes

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resulting in such variety. One is especially encouraged to seek evidence of the two different cultural evolutionary dynamics advanced in the second and third approaches contrasted previously. If selection at the 'group level is the fundamental process of cultural evolutionary change (for complex societies at least), then the Colombian Andes should see repeated replacement of one society by another in the matrix of inter-chiefdom competition. Change in form of organization should come about as one society organized in a particular way expands at the expense of another, organized differently. If, on the other hand, cultural evolutionary change results from processes of selection operating at a level more like that of the individual, then there is no reason to presuppose any correspondence between changes in form of organization and shifts in dominance by particular societies. The kinds of empirical archeological evidence relevant to the pursuit of this contrast include both those leading to the reconstruction of forms of social, political, and economic organization as well as those pertaining to cultural identification. If the situation is one of competition between different cultural groups marked by unique forms of social, political, and economic organization, then the differentiation of these spheres of human behavior and the delineation of their various patterns become of paramount importance. The sort of archeological work identified in recent years with cultural evolution and human ecology has specialized in the reconstruction of social, political, and economic organization. The issue of identifying cultural groups, however, has largely been left aside as associated with an outmoded brand of archeological theory. If a major research issue flowing from advances in modeling cultural evolution, however, is the identification of cultural groups and the specification of relationships between them, then there is a better reason for paying attention to archeological evidence for cultural identities than previously existed. In the kind of situation that the group selection approach to cultural evolution envisions-a situation of competition between different cultural groups-one could reasonably expect to find the traditional stylistic demarcators of cultural groups that have been discussed both archeologically and ethnographically (cf. Wobst 1977). The facility with which one can distinguish different groups, then, by such traditional archeological hallmarks as ceramic styles is itself a piece of evidence tending to confirm the existence of competition between groups. Under such conditions, the cultural frontiers, marked by distinctive styles, should be quite clearly defined (although also often quite rapidly moving). In contrast, if it is difficult to define clearly bounded stylistic regions, an environment in which competition between cultural groups is less marked is indicated.

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It is not sufficient, however, simply to find evidence of competition between chiefdoms. There seems almost always to be competition between chiefdoms, and the Colombian Andes are no exception (cf. Trimborn 1949). The critical issue for group selection models (which may be of the sort Carneiro has labeled "voluntaristic") is not hostility and warfare per se but rather correspondence between changes in form of organization and replacements of one cultural group by another. That is, if one is able to identify particular points of significant change in social, political, or economic organization, then they should ordinarily correspond to points at which one cultural group was expanding at the expense of another. This should take the form not only of chronological coincidence in a region between major stylistic change in artifacts and significant organizational shifts, but also of a particular pattern of stylistic change. One must distinguish between stylistic changes that are simply shifts of taste within a single cultural group and stylistic changes that reflect changing patterns of cultural relations. For example, the successive waves of clothing fashion that emanate semi-annually from Paris and Milan are examples of shifts of taste. The rise to popularity of blue jeans on the international fashion scene, however, reflects a change in cultural relations; and the introduction and spread of blue jeans represent a different spatial pattern focused on a different cultural center. By making just such distinctions in the archeological evidence, it should be possible to distinguish successive changes in style within a stable cultural situation from the stylistic shifts that reflect archeologically the expansion of one cultural group at the expense of another. The identification of centers of stylistic innovation and detailed documentation of patterns of spread through time are critical. For archeologists, this means renewed attention to a way of looking at artifact styles that has been out of style in the last couple of decades. Such attention, however, must also include making some new distinctions. It is not enough simply to assume that a new style means the arrival of a new culture. Rather, in each case, we must decide whether or not a change in style means a change in cultural relationships (that is, whether it is blue jeans or just the latest from Paris). This cannot be done with the kind of data from excavation at a few sites that formed the core of traditional archeological identification of cultures. Rather it must rely on data from systematic large-scale regional survey. In order to map out style distributions and changes in them at the necessary scale, one must locate an appropriate sample of the sites in a fairly large region and subject them to rather detailed chronological control. In two different senses this means a simultaneous broadening and narrowing of the geographical focus. Instead of discussing styles in half a continent

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on the basis of, perhaps, a few dozen sites, it means carefully delineating changing stylistic distributions in a region of a few thousand square kilometers or less on the basis of hundreds of sites. Regional survey 011 such a scale has become a fairly standard item in the repertoire of the cultural evolutionary archeologist, but such surveys have not often paid much attention to the possibility of synchronic spatial variation in ceramics except occasionally to treat it as a nuisance that must be got around. For getting at the issue of relationships between cultural groups, however, and their connection to social, political, and economic change, such data on spatial variation in style are the very essence. Concentrating on such data from regional surveys implies no diminution of attention to the kind of data on demography, politics, and economics that have come to be the mainstay of conclusions from regional survey. It simply means adding another kind of analysis to the mix, one that has usually been absent from systematic regional surveys (but see Garcia Cook 1978 or Byland 1984 for a counter example). What is already known of the Colombian Andes makes it very easy to think in terms of such patterns of group selection. It is also an area that seems to offer a prime opportunity to recover archeological evidence to document such a process of change. It witnessed a long sequence of change in patterns of social, political, and economic organization, but all at a scale that should leave the major relevant competition between groups at the inter-societal level. This small social scale is especially important in providing the best possible opportunity to find the kind of pattern predicted by the group selection approach to cultural evolution. It is, for example, in the context of the Formative period of relatively small-scale chiefdoms that such group selection scenarios are most plausible for Mesoamerica. In the Colombian Andes such a context persists for a minimum of two thousand years instead of being replaced after only a few hundred years by a much larger scale sociocultural unit. Such reasoning is, in part, behind my own current fieldwork in the Valle de la Plata of Colombia's Alto Magdalena region (cf. Drennan 1985). It is my own prejudice that we will probably fail to find the kind of correspondence we would expect if group selection models accounted for the development of and change within complex societies. The logic and potential power of models focusing on selection at an individual level seem more persuasive to me--hence the selection of an area that seems to offer good opportunity for discovering evidence of the contrary pattern if it existed. In such an area, a failure to find the relevant evidence of group replacement as the major cultural evolutionary process is more convincing than in a less propitious area. The question, however, is ultimately an empirical one, to be decided by evidence about what actually happened. We do not now have enough such evi-

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dence to argue conclusively either way. That is why I am doing the fieldwork that I am doing. At this point we are back to the enormous advantage that cultural evolutionary approaches have always had-they lend themselves concretely and practically to empirical research aimed at testing their implications, without which there really can be no progress toward more accurate and adequate models.

STAGES VERSUS PROCESSES? Before moving from the subject of empirical research to that of the level of selection in cultural evolutionary models, I would like to dwell on one other implication of the kind of research program I have discussed. To this point, I have emphasized one aspect of it: that this program represents empirical research dealing with models of general processes rather than specific factors. Models of cultural evolution that truly come to grips with general processes offer us much more powerful tools for understanding the specifics of a wider range of individual instances. The kind of cultural evolutionary research I have been discussing does not focus on the emergence of chiefdoms or states but rather on processes of sociocultural ehange. My own research in the Valle de la Plata (which provides propitious conditions for the kind of program I have outlined) does include the emergence of chiefdoms, as well as considerable change within a chiefdom context thereafter. The models I have discussed, however, are not models of the emergence of chiefdoms, but models of sociocultural change. It is almost purely coincidental that a context in which productive empirical research seems possible does include such emergence. A general cultural evolutionary model of the emergence of complex society strikes me as just as much a contradiction in terms as a general biological evolutionary model of the emergence of mammals. Just as the vast majority of biological change that has occurred has nothing to do with the emergence of new orders, the vast majority of cultural change that has occurred has nothing to do with the transition from one stage to another. Models focused on explaining such transitions offer us little in the way of understanding basic processes of change which must be more widespread. (This is not the place for a discussion of whether biological evolution is gradual or proceeds by fits and starts or whether it matters which mode predominates.) In this view I suppose I am concurring with one of the most persistant criticisms of cultural evolution: that it has reified a set of stages and thereby overlooked considerable amounts of societal variability that

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need to be explained. I consider the kinds of models and research I have been discussing, however, to belong properly to the cultural evolutionary tradition for several interrelated reasons. I have never seen Service's band-tribe-chiefdom-state scheme as the essence of cultural evolution, no more than Morgan's savagery-barbarism-civilization scheme before it. The kinds of models I have focused on are evolutionary in the much narrower sense that the term "evolution" has taken on in biology. Although these models do not focus on stages and transitions between them, neither do they obviate the utility of recognizing such stages and their transitions. It is thus not necessary or desirable to throw out the notions of stages and the numerous insights that their application has provided. We can, rather, build on these insights, and continue to use the various stages in the general descriptive context in which they are useful while moving on to add other concepts that will serve us as more precise and powerful tools. This simultaneously directs us away from a focus on transitions from one stage to another and provides a new scope for understanding other kinds of social change-for example, the enormous variety of patterns of organization that we find in chiefdoms at roughly the same level of complexity. Understanding this kind of variability simply requires taking a broader view than that provided by models focused on the "emergence of chiefdoms. "

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON CRITERIA OF CULTURAL AND BIOLOGICAL SELECTION Up to now I have dealt only with the contrast between models built primarily on selection at the individual level and those involving a major role for group selection (at least for complex societies). Both involve processes of cultural evolution that, while they may parallel those of biological evolution in one way or another, are separate. For both these approaches, the fact that cultural patterns are transmitted by a mechanism different from that of genetic transmission means that different processes and selective criteria are involved. The first approach I outlined, however, makes reproductive success in the unvarnished biological sense the criterion for selection, whether the subject is culturally or biologically transmitted features. Certainly one of the basic tenets of cultural evolution and human ecology is that cultural patterns must, at least in the long run, provide for reproductive success. The real issue dividing the first approach from the second and third is just how long this run is. Several nineteenth-century religious groups that prohibited their members from producing offspring did not become religious groups of the twentieth century. Such examples indi-

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cate the difficulties of perpetuating cultural patterns by strictly cultural means. On the other hand, the persistence and frequency of occurrence in numerous cultures of celibate priesthoods have attracted some attention in theoretical debate and even empirical research over the subject of whether this apparently paradoxical phenomenon can be understood in terms of reproductive success and inclusive fitness or whether its explanation requires cultural evolutionary processes that are substantially divorced from those of biological evolution. The "declines" or "collapses" often noted in complex societies also relate to this issue of the extent of separation between biological and cultural evolutionary processes. Certainly studies of prehistoric statelevel societies are replete with instances in which an apparently successfully functioning state, often with a history of several centuries, suffers destruction or abandonment of its capital and general disruption of its patterns of political and economic organization. Among chiefdoms such events are, if anything, even more common, since chiefdoms often occur in contexts of numerous neighboring chiefdoms, among which the ascendancy of anyone tends to be short-lived. These "declines" are often viewed as calamities with at least ecological roots. The paradox, clearly, for cultural evolution and human ecology is how processes that work to produce such successful meshing of social and ecological systems in the development of complex societies can fail to continue to do so. There seem to be three possible types of explanation. First, a pattern of organization could cease to provide for reproductive success in the face of environmental change so severe and rapid that cultural evolutionary processes fail to keep pace. Second, even a successful pattern of organization could be replaced by a still more successful pattern through evolutionary processes of the same sort that led to its development. And third, if cultural evolutionary processes are separate enough from biological ones, they could produce a pattern that ran counter to fundamental biological success, perhaps for some time, until brought up short by fundamental biological needs with rather more sudden and catastrophic effects than those ordinarily visualized for processes labeled "adaptation." The first of these possibilities is difficult to accept on empirical grounds. Despite sometimes inventive attempts to explain much of the sociocultural change observed in the archeological record by reference to exogenous environmental changes, we know of too many cases of "declines" occurring in the absence of any such events. Although ecological/evolutionary archeologists often raise ecological problems in connection with such "declines," the most plausible accounts seem to center on ecological problems generated not by exogenous environmental change but by socioeconomic processes.

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The second possibility, that "declines" are really transformations in which one pattern of organization is replaced by another more successful one, is also far-fetched on empirical grounds. The replacement of one pattern of organization by another more successful pattern, however it happens, is the stock in trade of evolutionary anthropology. If "declines" looked like this, they would not be called "declines." They would simply be classed with other episodes of cultural evolution in action. The essence of classification as a "decline" or a "collapse" is that it appears to be a reversal in the evolutionary process. A development of complex patterns somehow seems to fail, and the result is not a new and yet more successful pattern but apparently a return to a pattern of organization that had existed previously but been replaced by the pattern that subsequently "collapsed." From this aspect of the situation comes the paradox for cultural evolution. If the pattern that eventually "collapsed" was more successful than what it replaced (and that is how we explain its development and persistence), then a return to the less successful pattern cannot be understood in the same terms. The third possibility really is the only one that seems consistent with the empirical reality that the notion of "decline" or "collapse" is conjured up to characterize. At the very least, the idea that cultural evolution is separate enough from biological evolution to allow some divergence of optimal results fits best with the broad understanding we have of what the essence of "declines" is. This means that, in the short term at least, cultural evolution is not maximizing the criterion of biological reproduGtive success but cultural reproductive success-that is, the success a cultural trait or pattern has at reproducing itself by cultural means. Ultimately, biological reproductive success may be a more important criterion because, in the long run, a cultural trait or pattern is not likely to be very good at reproducing itself if it does not provide well for the biological reproduction of the people in whom it has its only existence. The speed with which both change and transmission are possible in the cultural realm, however, means that if the immediate selective criterion of cultural evolution is cultural reproduction, there could be substantial divergence of the immediate interests of cultural reproduction and those of biological reproduction before the inevitable day of biological reckoning. On empirical grounds, then, the third possibility accords best with our general view of what the nature of a "decline" is. This has implications for the three major evolutionary approaches I have been discussing because they are not all compatible with this third possibility. In particular, the first approach (the use of inclusive fitness, in the straight biological sense, as the immediate criterion of cultural as well as biological evolution) provides for no criterion of cultural evolutionary selec-

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tion separate from the biological one. The divergence envisioned by the most likely account could not arise. The empirically observed nature of "declines" or "collapses" of complex societies, then, seems inconsistent with an evolutionary model that sees cultural evolution as directly maximizing inclusive fitness. (The same could be said of the practices described in several chapters in this volume concerned with the Asian tropics-practices that do not lead to long-term ecological stability. Humans, especially those in complex societies, apparently do not always act in the short term in accordance with their overall long-term best reproductive interests.) The other two approaches both provide for the requisite intervention of criteria of cultural selection not precisely coterminous with biological ones. Thus, my characterization of the empirical nature of complex society "decline" does not provide sufficient grounds to choose between them. Consideration of the other two approaches, however, does provide some indication of how empirical studies of cultural "declines" could contribute to their relative evaluation. The major distinction between those two approaches is whether the level of selection, in the case of complex societies, focuses on groups or individuals. "Declines" provide another purchase point for distinguishing these processes. If the level of selection is focused on the individual, then one might expect to find empirical evidence of substantially greater cultural continuity through a "decline" than if selection is focused at the group level. The processes by which a sequence of cultural evolution that diverged too radically from the satisfaction of biological selection criteria is brought up short should parallel those through which it emerged in the first place. If it was the group qua group that was the principal unit of selection, then the group qua group should be the unit that "declines." The pattern of its replacement by something else should look like the replacement of one group by another group. If, on the other hand, it was cultural selection on the individual level that was principally responsible for the development of the complex pattern of organization that ultimately "declined," then the "decline" should have an appearance of considerable group continuity. Which of these patterns most accurately characterizes the "declines" of complex patterns of organization is, once again, an empirical question. Most of the information we have about such "declines" comes from the study of such events among highly developed states. In this context the archeological definition of the relevant groups poses serious problems, since large states are composed of so many subgroups among which group-level processes can operate, and since these subgroups are hard to distinguish in the archeological record. This aspect of the empirical evidence, then, like the parallel aspect in processes of develop-

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ment, should be easier to work with among the simpler and smaller scale complex societies-that is, chiefdoms.

CONCLUSION Although this chapter is certainly not a report of empirical research, it has tried to be about doing empirical research. The thoughts it represents about doing empirical research that contributes directly to the resolution of interesting and significant questions about processes of sociocultural change spring directly from empirical research that currently occupies the majority of my time. The issues I have dealt with primarily concern the level and criteria of selection for cultural behavior in complex societies. By focusing on these issues, I do not mean to suggest that they are the only or even the most important issues in cultural evolution. In particular, I have completely ignored the question of sources of variability in cultural behavior, which is at least as important. My intention has not been to provide a complete cultural evolutionary formulation or even really to contribute to the continuing (not to say continual) theoretical debate over mechanisms, levels, and criteria of selection for cultural behavior. Rather, my intention has been to forge links between some issues in that ongoing debate and the kind of empirical research that can contribute to the resolution of the contention surrounding them. In such a direction lies progress toward better understanding of long-term sociocultural change.

REFERENCES Alexander, Richard D. 1974 The evolution of social behavior. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 5:325-383. Alland, Alexander, Jr. 1970 Adaptation in Cultural Evolution: An Approach to Medical Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press. 1972 Cultural evolution: The Darwinian model. Social Biology 19:227-239. Blanton, Richard E. 1980 Cultural ecology reconsidered. American Antiquity 45:145-150.

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Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson 1985 Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Byland, Bruce E. 1984 Boundary recognition in the Mixteca Alta. In: Essays in Otomanguean Cultural History, edited by J. Kathryn Josserand, Marcus Winter, and Nicholas Hopkins. Vanderbilt Publications in Anthropology, No. 31. Pp. 109-140. Campbell, Donald. T. 1970 Natural selection as an epistemological model. In: A Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology, edited by R. Naroll and R. Cohen. New York: Natural History Press. Pp. 51-85. Carneiro, Robert L. 1970 A theory of the origin of the state. Science 169:733-738. ~

Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., and M.W. Feldman 1981 Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Monographs in Population Biology 16. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Chagnon, Napoleon A., and William Irons, editors 1979 Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior. North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press. Dawkins, Richard 1976 The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press. Drennan, Robert D., editor 1985 Regional Archaeology in the Valle de la Plata, Colombia: A Preliminary Report on the 1984 Season of the Proyecto Arqueologico Valle de la Plata. University of Michigan, Technical Reports, No. 16. Ann Arbor: Museum of Anthropology. Dunnell, Robert C. 1980 Evolutionary theory and archaeology. In: Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Volume 3, edited by Michael B. Schiffer. New York: Academic Press. Pp. 35-99. Durham, William H. 1976 The adaptive significance of cultural behavior. Human Ecology 4:89-121. 1982 Interactions of genetic and cultural evolution: Models and examples. Human Ecology 10:289-323. Flannery, Kent V. 1972 The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3:399-426. Garcia Cook, Angel 1978 Tlaxcala: Poblamiento Prehispanico. In: Comunicaciones Proyecto PueblaTlaxcala 15, edited by Wilhelm Lauer and Konrad Tyranowski. Puebla, Mexico: Fundacion Alemana para la Investigacion Cientifica. Pp. 173-187.

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Gerard, R. W., C. Kluckhohn, and A. Rapoport 1956 Biological and cultural evolution: Some analogies and explorations. Behavioral Science 1:6-34. Hamilton, W.D. 1971 Geometry for the selfish herd. Journal of Theoretical Biology 31:295-311. Kowalewski, Stephen A. 1980 Population resource balances in Period I of Oaxaca, Mexico. American Antiquity 45:151-164. Lumsden, Charles J., and Edward o. Wilson 1981 Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Meggers, Betty J., editor 1959 Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal. Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington. Sahlins, Marshall H., and Elman R. Service, editors 1960 Evolution and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sanders, William T. 1972 Population, agricultural history, and societal evolution in Mesoamerica. In: Population Growth: Anthropological Implications, edited by Brian Spooner. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pp. 101-153. Sanders, William T., and Robert S. Santley 1978 Review of Monte Alban by Richard E. Blanton. Science 202:303-304. Santley, Robert S. 1980 Disembedded capitals reconsidered. American Antiquity 45: 132-145. Service, Elman R. 1962 Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Random House. 1971 Cultural Evolutionism: Theory in Practice. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1975 Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. New York: Norton. Steward, Julian H. 1955 Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana-Champaign, Ill.: Uni versity of Illinois Press. Trimborn, Hermann 1949 Senorio y Barbarie en el Valle del Cauca: Estudio sobre la Antigua Civilizacion Quimbaya y Grupos Afines del Oeste de Colombia. Translated from the Gennan by Jose Maria Gimeno Capella. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Instituto Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo.

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Trivers, R.L. 1971 The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology 46:35-57. White, Leslie A. 1949 The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 1959 The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. New York: McGraw-Hill. Williams, George C. 1966 Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1971 Group Selection. Chicago: Aldine. Wobst, H. Martin 1977 Stylistic behavior and information exchange. In: For the Director: Research Essays in Honor of James B. Griffin, edited by Charles E. Cleland. Anthropological Papers, Museum of Anthropology, No. 61. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan. Pp. 317-342. Wright, Henry T. 1986 The evolution of civilizations. In: American Archaeology Past and Future: A Celebration of the Society for American Archaeology, 1935-1985, edited by David J. Meltzer, Don D. Fowler, and Jeremy A. Sabloff. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Pp. 323-365. Wynne-Edwards, V.C. 1962 Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behavior. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.

CHAPTER 4

Coevolution and the Development of Venezuelan Chiefdoms CHARLES S. SPENCER

My concern in this paper is the cultural evolution of chiefdomsthose societies that have centralized authority and institutionalized social status differentiation, but which lack the bureaucratic government of states (Service 1962; Peebles and Kus 1977; Wright 1977; Spencer 1982; Earle 1978; Steponaitis 1978; Flannery 1972; Drennan 1985). While systems of this kind seem to have emerged in many parts of the prehistoric world, they were especially prevalent in the Circum-Caribbean area (Carneiro 1981:48). I will discuss a project on chiefdom development that Elsa M. Redmond and I are conducting in Barinas, Venezuela. But first, I would like to make a few remarks about the extent and significance of ethnic diversity and intersocietal relationships in this part of northern South America. I will go on to suggest that such relationships may play a crucial role in the genesis of chiefly systems, and I will outline a framework for the investigation of chiefdom development from this perspective.

A DIVERSITY OF CULTURES Let me begin with some empirical observations. If you examine the ethnohistorical and ethnographic literature for northeastern South America, one conclusion is unmistakable. Before the European incursion had distorted the aboriginal situation, this area exhibited a remarkable degree of cultural heterogeneity. Nancy Morey, in a fine ethnohistorical study, notes that the plains of the Orinoco basin (or llanos) were "a distinct and highly complex area inhabited by a number of interdependent and related cultures that ranged from nomadic hunting and gathering societies to complex horticulturalists" (1975:303).

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This mosaic of ethnic diversity was first penetrated in 1530 by a European expedition under the command of Nicolas Federmann (1962). He was most impressed by the Caquetio, who were widely distributed across the llanos. Caquetio villages often contained thousands of inhabitants, and each community was led by a village chief who owed allegiance to a regional chief. F edermann described one river valley in which 23 villages were united under the leadership of a single paramount chief who could muster a temporary fighting force of 30,000 men (Federmann 1962:191-192, in Morey 1975:108). Along with this centralization of authority was considerable social status differentiation. Status differences in Caquetio society were marked not only by the size of one's house, but also by the number of wives one had and the quantity of shell necklaces (quiripa) that one wore (Morey 1975:100-101, 109, 259). Slavery was practiced by the Caquetio. Slaves, called naborias, were captured in warfare and then bought and sold (Federmann 1962:213; Morey 1975:110). The Caquetio cultivated a wide range of crops, of which maize was the most important. Several varieties were grown, including one called mapito that had a growing season of just two months (Gumilla 1963:431, in Morey 1975:46). There is evidence that the Caquetio practiced intensive agriculture. Canal irrigation was used in at least one river valley, and harvests reaped by the Caquetio on the llanos were said to be better than those obtained by neighboring groups in adjacent intermontane valleys (Morey 1975:51). Moreover, Gumilla (1963:429-434) described several types of gardens for llanos groups generally that might also apply to the Caquetio. In addition to clearing gardens in the gallery forests along rivers and streams, they also established artificially raised fields out in moist areas of the savanna (Morey 1975:49, 309). Before European iron tools became available, the Caquetio cleared the forests and worked the soil with wooden tools, often fitted with heads of worked flint or other stone (Morey 1975:50). Another agricultural people in this area were the Jirajara (also known as the Jirara), who lived along the southeastern piedmont slopes of the Andean Cordillera, at the edge of the llanos proper (Jahn 1927:fold-out map; Morey 1975:34). In contrast to the Caquetio pattern of individual family dwellings, Jirajara communities had one or more long communal houses, which could measure up to 200 feet long and 30 feet wide, with a low entrance at each end (Rivero 1956:117; Mercado 1966:28, 34). Jirajara villages generally seemed to have had fewer people than the larger Caquetio settlements. One sixteenth century Jirajara village was described as having 700 adult men (Rivero 1956:79, in Morey 1975:192).

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The Jirajara had the capacity for uniting beyond the local village level. This was often done for conducting wartare, but they also maintained intervillage alliances during peacetime, and even formed ties on occasion with other ethnic groups (Morey 1975:111-112). Groups of Jirajara villages are reported as recognizing the leadership of a principal chief who directed battles, arbitrated disputes, and organized communal activities; he was advised by a council of elders (ibid.). The taking of captives and slavery are not reported for the Jirajara (ibid., 284-288). Jirajara subsistence practices differed from those of the Caquetio in that yucca and plantains seem to have been more important in their diet than maize (Rivero 1956:120, in Morey 1975:51). They did cultivate some maize, however, along with a variety of melons and other crops, and they acquired animal protein through fishing and hunting (Morey

1975:69). Interspersed among these agricultural societies were other ethnic groups who made their living primarily by fishing, hunting, and gathering. The Guayquerf were a non cultivating fishing people who inhabited the same general territory as the Caquetio, though in different villages (Morey 1975: 196). While Federmann mentions Guayquerf village "chiefs," their powers were evidently negligible, apart from marriage rites where they acted as master of ceremonies (ibid., 230). There are no reports of political unification above the level of the individual village. Social differentiation was not marked among the Guayqueri nor were slaves kept (ibid., 196-197, 228-230). The Taparita were nomadic hunter-gatherers known for their prowess at archery and were said to keep poisoned arrows in caches throughout their foraging territory. Subsisting entirely on wild game and gathered plant foods, they lived in the gallery forests (sometimes sleeping on platforms in trees) during the rainy season and hunted along small savanna watercourses in the dry season (Morey 1975:217-218). The Amaiba also alternated dry-season wandering with rainy-season occupation of the riverine gallery forests, but they seem to have been somewhat more sedentary during the rainy season than the Taparitathey went to the trouble of making portable palm huts. They also collected freshwater shells and produced the beaded necklaces called quiripa which they traded with the cultivating Caquetio for crops (Morey

1975:218). The Guahibo were highly nomadic and did not make shelters, preferring to sleep on the ground or in hammocks. They subsisted on an exceedingly wide variety of plants and animals (Morey 1975:218-224). In contrast to the Taparita and Amaiba, the Guahibo moved to the major rivers in the dry season, where they set up camp on the beaches and fished, hunted for birds, caught caymans, and collected turtles and

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turtle eggs (ibid., 223-224). The sources occasionally mention Guahibo "captains" or headmen, but they had little power, and the maintenance of their position appears to have been contingent on the will of the group (ibid., 236-237). The Guahibo did not keep slaves, but they sometimes took captives and exchanged them with slave-holding groups for tools and other desired goods (ibid., 237). Intersocietal exchange was quite extensive. As was also the case in other parts of eastern South America, different local groups tended to emphasize the production of certain products which they then traded with other groups both near and distant (Lath rap 1973). Actual exchanges were often conducted in a highly ritualized context by chiefs or headmen (Morey 1975:274). Quiripa was used all through the llarws and beyond, as a medium of exchange and symbol of wealth or prestige. In the northern llanos zone, the nomadic Amaiba are known to have produced quiripa, which they traded with nearby Caquetio communities for agricultural produce (ibid., 258). Elsewhere, quiripa was produced by the Achagua, a cultivating group that lived on the llanos to the southwest of the Caquetio and by the Otomaco, who lived along the Apure River (ibid.). Among the Caquetio, social status differences were often symbolically expressed through the wearing of varying amounts of quiripa. The Jirajara required quiripa for use in marriage transactions (ibid., 259-260). Turtle oil and eggs were also widely traded, and ceramic turtle oil cooking pots were produced for exchange by the Otomaco (Morey 1975:265). The Guayqueri traded fish with nearby Caquetio villages for agricultural goods (ibid., 266). In exchange for garden produce, the Guahibo brought cultivating groups palm fruit products, fish, meat, and a special tree sap that was used to hold feathers during ceremonial dances (ibid., 266-267). They also traded palm fiber cords, vanilla, hammocks, and other tree products (ibid., 267). From the Andes, the Caquetio and other llanos groups obtained salt, gold, and probably flints, cherts, and semiprecious stones (Morey 1975:252-255). Workable stone for clearing and gardening tasks would have been an important trade item for groups in the stone-poor llarws, and the Jirajara may well have served as middlemen in such exchanges (Spencer and Redmond 1984). There was also widespread trade in slaves, which became even more extensive after European contact (Morey 1975:260-264). Aboriginally, slaves were often war captives, and the Caquetio were particularly notable for the taking, keeping, and trading of slaves (ibid., llO, 282-283). Warfare was another major form of interaction among the various ethnic groups of the llanos. The Caquetio, according to Federmann, frequently warred with their neighbors, especially those in the adjacent

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mountains (Federmann 1962:189-192, 215-219). The Caquetio fortified their villages, and each regional paramount could raise a large fighting force from the villages in his domain on short notice. In general, most Caquetio warfare took the form of surprise raids on villages for looting and taking captives (Morey 1975:282-283). The Jirajara, though considered quite adept at war, preferred not to take captives but rather sought to kill their enemies (ibid., 284-288). The nomadic Guahibo were said to be the most aggressive people of the llarws, and they alternated between trading and raiding to obtain the agricultural products they desired from sedentary groups (ibid., 289-290).

TOWARD A COEVOLUTIONARY VIEW OF CHIEFDOM DEVELOPMENT These data suggest that a proper culture-historical understanding of the llarws in the sixteenth century requires a perspective which focuses not on a single society or regional system but on networks of interacting societies. In this section I will explain why I think an intersocietal framework should also be adopted if our research interest is the evolution of prehistoric chiefdoms. Let us define the chiefdom as a form of human decision-making organization in which there is a permanently centralized authority, but in which there is negligible internal administrative specialization (Wright 1977; Spencer 1982, 1987). This definition distinguishes chiefly authority (as seen, for example, among the Caquetio) from the ephemeral, personalized, context-dependent leadership found in egalitarian societies (such as the Guayqueri and Guahibo). It also differentiates between the centralized but generalized nature of chiefly decisionmaking and the bureaucratic governments of states. The evolutionary precursor of the chiefdom, it seems to me, is the achieved or big-man form of leadership (Spencer 1987:371). It demonstrates the capacity of egalitarian societies to generate variability in leadership behavior, which may then be differentially preserved or "institutionalized" through the operation of evolutionary mechanisms, the most important of which is undoubtedly selection. This pre-existing behavioral variability is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for evolutionary change. Other contextual factors will also come into play and help determine whether centralized decision-making will be selected for and thus become a permanent feature of the system in question. It is not yet possible to specify just what these other factors might be; but if we look at the ethnography of certain egalitarian societies which are exhibiting tendencies toward centralized leadership, we can

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find some hints that intersocietal factors may be central to leadership development. The Mekranoti-Kayap6 Indians of central Brazil, for example, were studied by Dennis Werner (1980) in an effort to elucidate the factors determining the acquisition and maintenance of leadership status in this egalitarian society that was undergoing change, starting to show some incipient centralized authority and social differentiation. Werner concluded that "contacts with foreign groups may encourage leadership inheritance by making families of 'culture brokers' important in cooperation between societies .... Just what kinds of intersociety contacts result in the use of 'culture brokers' is unclear. But presumably, it is where limited, but important, contact takes place between groups of people that the use of culture brokers would be most effective .... Perhaps factors like trade over long distances are most conducive to 'culture broker' arrangements for intersociety communication" (1980:325, 329). The Yanomamo are another egalitarian group that manifest achieved leadership with a "culture broker" dimension. In the village of Upper Bisaasi-teri, the most prominent leader is Kaobawa, though Paruriwa also has leadership ambitions. Yet, "it is obvious who the real leader is: when visitors come to Upper Bisaasi-teri, they seek out Kaobawa and deal with him, no matter how amibitiously Paruriwa attempts to emulate his position" (Chagnon 1983:124). Nevertheless, Kaobawa's position is context-dependent and not a permanent, institutionalized office, for he "is usually distinguishable in the village as a man of some authority only for the duration of the incident that calls forth his leadership capacity. After the incident is over, he goes about his own business like the other men in the group" (ibid.). In contrast to the evanescent, personalized leadership of the big man, chiefly authority is institutionalized and permanent, and decision-making functions are centralized in the chiefly office, which has various duties and prerogatives that are not primarily determined by the personal qualities of the individual who is filling that office (Flannery 1972:403; Steponaitis 1978:419). Moreover, to reinforce the authority of the chief and facilitate the social reproduction of the political order, centralized authority is generally accompanied by institutionalized social status differentiation (Johnson 1978). Chiefly authority also differs importantly from big-man leadership in that, while the latter may loom large in the affairs of a single autonomous village, chiefdoms are usually regional political entities, with a single paramount chief ruling over a series of dependent villages, each with its own community chief. Carneiro, in fact, defines the chiefdom in this way, as "an autonomous political unit comprising a number of

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villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief' (Carneiro 1981:45). If we accept that evolution is an opportunistic-not deterministicprocess (Stanley 1979:206, 1981:181), how should we go about trying to explain the evolution of chiefdoms? Dunnell (1980:66) has made the interesting suggestion that "the appearance of complex society is a consequence of a shift in the scale at which selection is most effective." Speaking generally, I would argue that chiefly organization evolves when effective big-man leadership happens to converge with a series of propitious contextual factors so that a new multivillage entity, the permanently centralized political region, is not only born, but survives selection and persists as an important unit for further selection (Spencer 1987:380-381). I would go on to suggest that the contextual factors most significant in selecting for this development will be those involved with the articulation between internal and external organizational processes. I say this because I think that intersocietal contacts may be even more critical to the internal operation of chiefdoms than egalitarian societies. To illustrate, let us consider some of the limitations of chiefly authority. Since chiefly decision-making is not associated, by definition, with internal administrative specialization, it theoretically follows that effective delegation of authority will be difficult to achieve in a chiefdom. This can be seen to have several consequences for the dynamics of chiefly leadership. First, there is undoubtedly a size limit to the territory that a regional chief can effectively rule; I have suggested elsewhere that in a preindustrial context this may be an area with a radius of about one-half day's travel from the regional center (Spencer

1982:6). Another consequence, even more important for our purposes here, is that regular intervention by a regional chief into the affairs of local communities is largely precluded (Wright 1977; Spencer 1982:42). This precipitates a structural contradiction that I think is a key feature of chiefly organization. The chief, on the one hand, is in the position of having to encourage local communities to be as self-sufficient as possible, in order to lessen the need for frequent interventions which are incompatible with his regional decision-making structure. On the other hand, to keep himself and his descendants in power, he must maintain regional political cohesion, which is often expressed through the regular flow of surplus labor or goods from the member villages to the paramount center. Various strategies may be employed to help surmount the chiefly contradiction. Among them are sanctification of authority, alliance formation between the regional paramount and village chiefs, and the fostering of intersocietal interaction (Spencer 1987:376).

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The last of these includes prestige-goods exchange and warfare, both especially significant in the operation of chiefly systems. In the first instance, the regional paramount chief procures scarce and hence valuable objects through long-distance exchange and uses these objects both as symbols of his exalted status and as a form of remuneration for the fealty of village chiefs. Surplus can be mobilized by the village chiefs and sent to the paramount center, while the exchange items come the other way. This reciprocal flow of goods reinforces regional political cohesion and enhances the "fund of power" of the chiefly elite. Elsewhere, I have tried to demonstrate that in the Oaxacan Formative the growth of chiefly leadership was systemically related to population increase, surplus mobilization through productive expansion and storage, and elite participation in interregional exchange networks (Spencer 1982:151-197). The protohistoric chiefdoms of Panama are also known to have participated in extensive trade networks, which Helms interpreted "not simply as an adjunct to chiefly activities, interests, and affairs in Panama but as vital to the sociopolitical dynamics of Panamanian chiefdoms" (Helms 1979:37). Although a full-time specialized military would be incompatible with chiefly decision-making principles (because of the extensive delegation of authority that would be required), periodic actions carried out by a temporary force mustered from the villages of the chiefly domain can also serve to reinforce the political hierarchy through the imposition of temporary military discipline and the generation of resources (including slaves) in the form of booty (Gibson 1974:132-133; Morey 1975:282; Morey and Marwitt 1978:256). To sum up, I have suggested that there are important systemic linkages between certain internal structural features of chiefdoms, in particular the regional political hierarchy and its expression through surplus mobilization, and processes of intersocietal interaction. If our goal is to gain an understanding of chiefdom development, then a research design appropriate to the task obviously must be one that encompasses both internal and external dimensions of cultural organization (Kohl 1984; Kristiansen 1981; Spencer 1982). As we do this, it would be well to ponder briefly how we intend to accomplish this goal. Are we seeking to discover "laws" of chiefdom development that can be applied to any cultural situation? Since we archeologists like to regard ourselves as scientists, does this mean that some kind of experimental prediction is our ultimate aim? I think not, because archeology-like paleontology and evolutionary biology but quite unlike the physical sciences-addresses itself principally to historical phenomena (Flannery 1986). Paleontologist Stephen J. Gould has remarked: "Hydrogen and oxygen, mixed in a certain way, make water today, made water billions of years ago, and presumably will

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make water for a long time to come .... The science of complex historical objects is a different, not a lesser, enterprise. It seeks to explain the past, not predict the future. It searches for principles and regularities underlying the uniqueness of each species and interaction, while treasuring the irreducible uniqueness and describing all its glory" (Gould

1983:65). Now, it is clear that cultural evolution has certain features that distinguish it from biological evolution (such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the generation of directed variation through human decision-making strategies), so the relationship between the two must be one of analogy (Stanley 1981:204-205). Yet, analogy can serve a heuristic purpose if it spurs you to think in novel or useful ways about your interpretations or research strategy. With that in mind, allow me to pursue the analogy between evolutionary archeology and evolutionary biology a bit further. Recently, researchers in the latter field have found that many features of natural history are better explained when there is a shift in one's perspective from a single species to networks of two or more interacting species that undergo reciprocal evolutionary change. This phenomenon is called coevolution (Ehrlich and Raven 1964; Janzen 1980; Thompson 1982; Futuyma and Slatkin 1983). Some of the coevolutionists' findings, I think, are of interest to archeologists engaged in intersocietal research. The two decades since Ehrlich and Raven's (1964) seminal contribution have revealed the astonishing variety of co evolutionary relationships that exist in nature (for an entertaining account, see Grant 1984). Perhaps the central message to emerge is that history indeed matters; coevolution is not a monolithic phenomenon amenable to elegant or facile predictive modeling (Futuyma and Slatkin 1983:463). This does not mean, however, that coevolutionists have forever resigned themselves to specific historical descriptions of species interaction. Some general principles or regularities have been proposed, such as the view expressed here by Jonathan Roughgarden that "coevolution itself often, perhaps even typically, destabilizes a community that was stable to begin with" (1983:61). Associated with instability are certain kinds of antagonisms, especially competition, and the form of obligatory symbiosis known as mutualism; instability is thought to co-vary positively with the degree to which symbiotic interactions are obligatory for one or more participants (May 1973:73; Rindos 1984:143; Pianka 1983:184). It is the transfer of resources among interacting species that fosters such instabilities, which are often manifested by increases (or declines) in the population sizes of one or more of the participants in the interaction (Pianka 1983:186, 245). Moreover, if the interactions among species

146

PROFILES IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

are strong, then the rate of coevolutionary change can be quite rapid or "punctuational" in nature (Slatkin 1983:30; Stanley 1979:163). If we wish to apply such ideas to cultural evolution, we should first recognize that all living systems exchange matter, energy, and information across their boundaries (Miller 1978) and that in cultural systems information exchanges are especially important from an evolutionary perspective (Flannery 1972). When resources are exchanged among human societies, whether through trade or warfare, along with the matter and energy flowing to each participant will be information, significant increases of which can foster a selective context amenable to the development of centralized decision-making (Johnson 1978, 1982); the big man as culture broker can become the chief. The degree to which the interaction is obligatory for a given participant (i. e., just how important the incoming resources are) will contribute to the magnitude of change. If the resources are central to the functioning of the participants, and the interactions are strong, then we might expect the tempo of change to be rapid. Another instructive message from the biological coevolutionists has to do with appropriate research designs. In a cautionary note, Janzen (1980) has argued that co evolutionary research will not live up to its potential unless it is explicitly designed to embrace networks of interacting species undergoing reciprocal evolution, rather than the more common focus upon one-sided evolution in response to interaction (see also Thompson 1982:113). Thus, if we wish to use an analogous approach in archeology, we must be sure to plan our research projects so they include within their scope more than just one coevolving social system.

AN ARCHEOLOGICAL RESEARCH DESIGN AND SOME RESULTS In 1983, Elsa M. Redmond and I began a long-term archeological project designed to investigate the relationship between chiefdom development and intersocietal interaction. As a setting for our research, we needed a place where there was evidence for the emergence of chiefdoms well before the contact period and also where there was potential for significant interaction between adjacent societies. It seemed to us that Barinas, Venezuela, would fill the bill perfectly. Although no archeologist had explicitly worked on the problem of prehistoric chiefdoms here, Alberta Zucchi's excavations at La Betania and La Calzada (Figure 4.1) had indicated that monumental earthworks were built for the first time in this area during the La Betania phase (A. D. 650-1200), and possibly as early as A. D. 500-600 during the final years of the preceding Calio del Oso phase ([920 B.C.?]

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230 B.C.-A.D. 650) (Zucchi 1967, 1972, 1973). Moreover, the survey that Adam Garson carried out at Hato La Calzada (1980) produced some evidence for possible settlement hierarchies according to site size and distribution of mounded architecture, also dating to the La Betania phase. For our own study area, we chose a part of Barinas farther to the north, right where the llanos and the Venezuelan Andes meet (Figure 4.1). The environmental differences between the two adjacent zones certainly suggested a potential for exchange and other forms of interaction. Indeed, we learned from ethnohistorical sources that in the sixteenth century the llanos and nearby mountains were inhabited by ethnically different groups who traded and raided with one another. Since we wanted to evaluate the proposition that intersocietal interaction was a significant factor in chiefdom development, and since we were interested in employing a coevolutionary research strategy, we defined a study area of some 450 square kilometers that overlaps sections of both the llanos and the Andean piedmont (Figure 4.1). For each zone, we knew we would have to establish an occupational sequence, recover information on regional settlement patterns and organization of community settlements, and distribution of artifacts both within and between settlements (Spencer and Redmond 1984). Evidence pertaining to exchange and warfare, of course, would be especially significant, as would evidence for chiefdom emergence in either or both zones. The latter might include such features as regional settlement hierarchies of two or three levels according to habitation area and amount of public architecture; pronounced differentiation among residential structures in terms of size, degree of elaboration, and relative quantity of "high cost" items, including trade goods; marked differentiation in burial treatment among individuals of the same age and sex; and differential association between high-status residences and public buildings (Peebles and Kus 1977; Spencer 1982, 1987; Carneiro 1981). We would also have to correlate the chronological sequences with one another and then establish whether any evidence for chiefdom emergence was associated with evidence for increased interaction between the two zones. Our project has consisted of three major phases of fieldwork. The first, occurring during 1983-85, was a regional settlement pattern survey, through which we located about 100 prehistoric sites. The second phase was a program of test excavations at 10 sites, carried out in 1986 and 1988. The third phase of the project took place in 1988 and involved horizontal block excavations at site B12, the largest site we found on survey. Although the fieldwork portion of the project is completed, the analysis phase is ongoing. Thus, I ask the reader to bear in mind that the interpretations presented here could change with further analysis.

148

PROFILES IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

•

Arc haealall ica l Siles

o

Mod e rn C i'lel

--

Okm

j

Tru e Narlh

~ Okm

Figure 4 . 1. Western Venezuela, showing how the study area overlaps sections of the Andean piedmont and the llarws.

During our regional settlement pattern survey, we aimed for complete coverage of the study region, locating sites on aerial photographs and topographic maps. We tried to determine the occupation area of each site, made a surface collection, and recorded data, for example, on visible architectural features , site location with respect to local environmental factors , and present-day land use. However, we were unable to apply without modification the survey techniques we learned as students working in highland Mesoamerica. Barinas, which receives 1100 to 1800 mm of rainfall per year, is notable for its dense vegetation. Artifacts are rare on the ground surface, and sites that lack earthworks or carved boulders can sometimes be virtually invisible to the archeologist. Consequently, we found it necessary to supplement the traditional "field

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by field" approach with informant survey, some shovel-testing, and the systematic examination of road cuts, river banks, drainage ditches, construction sites, and other places where subsurface deposits have been exposed. There are countless privately owned farms and ranches ifundos) in our survey area, and according to the terms of our agreement with the Venezuelan government, we had to obtain the express permission of each owner to survey his or her property. Although the response by landowners to our work was varied, we were generally received with hospitality and even enthusiasm. We tried to move systematically from one fundo to the next, though this can be difficult when fundo owners do not actually live on the premises, or when they are absent on trips or errands. We sometimes had to return several times before we were fortunate enough to intercept a landowner. In each case, we began by introducing ourselves and explaining the nature of our work to thefundo owner, his family, and hired hands. We then asked if anyone had ever seen or heard of archeological remains on the property. This usually elicited tales of such finds, and we recorded them in a field diary along with as much information as was forthcoming about the operation of the fundo itself. We asked permission to survey the entire fundo, regardless of the information we were given, though we usually began by inspecting the locations mentioned by our informants. We have thus far been able to define two broad phases of ceramicusing peoples in both the piedmont and llanos sectors of our study area.

A.D. A.D.

1100-1500 300-1100

Andean Piedmont Caiio Seco Complex Curbati Complex

Llanos ChuponalfCaiio Seco Complex Gavan Complex

Since the Cafio Seco and Chuponal complexes date to just prior to the' contact period, of greater concern to us here are the Curbati and Gavan complexes (see Figure 4.2). We designed our study area to include both the Canagua and Curbati river valleys in the piedmont because the two rivers nearly converge at the northern end of the region, and because several smaller streams on the llanos proper originate near the west bank of the Curbati and feed into the Canagua. Curbati complex pottery is relatively thin walled, well burnished, and often decorated with deep grooves and incisions. Painting is restricted to monochrome applications, usually in red. Vessel shapes include hemispherical bowls, composite silhouette bowls, and necked jars. The stylistic affinities of this pottery are not with the llanos but rather with the Andes and other regions to the north. The material is similar to that of the Lagunillas phase of the Maracaibo Basin, placed in the latter half of the first millennium B.C. by Wagner and Tarble de Ruiz (1975:109-

150

PROFILES IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

N

I •

Curbol o Complex SIle.

o Pelroglyph, Gavan Complo )C Settlement Hierarchy

•

hC~rl~~r

... 3rd O rder Siles

... 2ndOrderSlle.

0 Dro ined Field •

.. ····Colzodo

- --

o km

5 km

Figure 4.2. The study area. Curbatf and Gavan complex siles are indicated, though the B prefix is omitted.

117), and it also resembles the Santa Ana complex in the Andes (Tarble 1977), as well as the Agua Blanca complex of the Andean piedmont in the neighboring state of Portuguesa (Rouse and Cruxent 1963:68). We have a series of radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dates on our own excavated Curbatf material with midpoints ranging from A. D. 350 to A.D. 1000 (see Tables 4.1 and 4.2). We will try to subdivide this time period as our analysis proceeds and as more dates are obtained. Curbatf complex sites never have earthworks and are typically located on remnant river terraces in the piedmont overlooking stretches of low alluvium or vega. Some differences exist, however, between the occupations in the Canagua and Curbatf valleys. There are four sites in the Canagua valley: two of them, 2 hectares (B40 and B36); two, 1 hectare (B47 and B57). No petroglyphs were found at these sites or anywhere else in the Canagua valley. By contrast, in the Curbati valley there are two habitation sites with Curbati complex pottery, B8 (about 8 hectares) and B20 (1 to 2 hectares), and each has a large boulder covered with petroglyphs. Furthermore, there are four additional sites

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SPENCER

TABLE 4.1 Radiocarbon Dates (uncalibrated) Lab

Provenience

Beta

B8-0015 Test 3 (1983) 20-40 cm DBS

(9909)

Age 950 ± 120

Date midpoint

Complex

A.D.

lOOO

Curbati

Beta (16648)

B12-0161 Test 27 (1986) 80-100 cm DBS

1495 ± 80

A.D.

455

Gavan (Early)

Beta (27258)

B12-0759 Test 183 (1988) 187 cm DBS

1300 ± 100

A.D.

650

Gavan (Late)

Beta (16649)

B20-0428 Test 162 (1986) 40-48 cm DBS

550 ± 100

A.D.

1450

Caiio Seco

in this valley where petroglyphs were found without associated habitation debris (B83, B84, B90, B91). We carried out test excavations at B8 and B20 in the Curbati valley, and at B36 in the Canagua valley. Figure 4.3 is a site map of B8 showing the locations of the carved boulder and the test pits, which were distributed according to a stratified, systematic, random sampling design. Gavan complex ceramics are restricted to the llarws and are associated with radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dates that have midpoints ranging from A.D. 338 to A.D. 1040 (Tables 4.1 and 4.2). This pottery is coarse-tempered, and representative vessel shapes include wide-mouthed, S-shaped bowls, many supported on solid or hollow feet, and a variety of jars. Surfaces are usually smoothed or burnished. Incised decoration and applique are rarely found, nor are slipping and painting common. Though we have much analysis ahead, it seems clear that most of our Gavan complex collections are stylistically similar to Zucchi's La Betania material. We are referring to this material as Late Gavan and assigning to it a tentative time span of A.D. 600 to A.D. 1100. Moreover, in the lower levels of some of the test excavations at sites B12 and B21, and perhaps at some of the other Gavan complex sites, we found some ceramics that closely resembled material of the earlier Cafio del Oso phase. This earlier time period, which we are calling Early Gavan, has a provisional time span of A. D. 300-600. Overall, the Gavan ceramics of the llanos and the Curbati ceramics of

152

PROFILES IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

TABLE 4.2 Thermoluminescence Dates Lab

Provenience

U Conn

B8-oo15 Test 3 (1983) 20-40 em DBS

1600 ± 302

A.D.

350

Curbati

Alpha (988)

B8-oo15 Test 3 (1983) 20-40 em DBS

1220 ± 244

A.D.

730

Curbati

U Conn

B8-oo13 Test 2 (1983) 40-60 em DBS

1276 ± 213

A.D.

674

Curbati

Alpha (1277)

B12-oo19 Test 1 (1983) 0-20 em DBS

910 ± 208

A.D.

1040

Gavan

U Conn

B12-oo19 Test 1 (1983) 0-20 em DBS

lll1 ± 384

A.D.

839

Gavan

B12-oo20 Test 1 (1983) 20-40 em DBS

1612 ± 260

A.D.

338

Gavan

lVlC (1088a)

B12-0474 Test 171 (1988) 95-96 em DBS

1460 ± 90

A.D.

490

Gavan

lVlC (1088b)

B12-0759 Test 183 (1988) 190-200 em DBS

1540 ± 90

A.D.

410

Gavan

lVlC (1088c)

B12-0530 Area A (1988) 0-20 em DBS

ll90 ± 120

A.D.

760

Gavan

lVlC (1088d)

B12-0624 Area A (1988) 0-20 em DBS

1050 ± 120

A.D.

900

Gavan

Alpha (3036)

B20-0429 Test 162 (1986) 40-50 em DBS

600 ± 120

A.D.

1350

Caiio Seco

U Conn

Age

Date midpoint

Complex

.

~/

\\ )

\.

/

.

B8

~O~

/'

'--...---

LA ESMERALDA

_~-:-=:JIII

0 .. ,

//

/9'C)

."'~

Figure 4.3. Topographic map of the archeological site of La Esmeralda (BB), showing the locations of the inscribed boulder and the test excavations (the small black squares).

"",'

",1

low alluYium

CJ,J

Cit

~

:;!l

t'1

(")

:z

t'1

fq

I

:;!l

..

t'1

~

C"l

::c;.-

154

PROFILES IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

the piedmont are not only found in spatial proximity to one another, but are also largely contemporaneous. Gavan complex settlement patterns differ strikingly from those of the Curbati complex (see 'Figure 4.2). Our survey discovered a clear regional settlement hierarchy with site B12 at the apex. B12 is a 33hectare site that has 4 other smaller sites (B52, B96, B97, B98) clustered around it, bringing the total occupation area of the 5-site complex to about 48 hectares. It seems that B12 was the elite/ceremonial component, because in addition to its greater area it also contained an impressive array of earthworks (see Figure 4.4, which also shows the locations of the excavations). Included here are two mounds more than 10 meters tall that face each other across a 500-meter-Iong plaza, four other mounds more than 2 meters high, a number of miscellaneous elongated earthworks, and about 130 mounds less than a meter in height. Except for the elongated earthworks and the two tallest mounds, most of these mounds were associated with domestic debris and were thus probably housemounds. It would seem that there was considerable social differentiation at B12, because the housemounds exhibit variation according to mound height, house size, and associated artifacts. A useful comparison can be made between the house remains excavated in Area A and Area D (Figure 4.4). In Area A, we exposed a well-preserved occupation surface with numerous postmolds, sitting atop a house mound 1 meter high; the postmolds defined a rectangular roofed-over area of 27.9 square meters. On the other hand, in Area D, we recovered a rectangular pattern of postmolds defining a roofed-over area of just 16.6 square meters, on a housemound only 55 centimeters high. The occupation area of B12 is ringed by an enormous oval-shaped calzada or earthen causeway-partially destroyed by erosion on its northwest side--that measures almost 950 meters from one end of the oval to the other. This calzada still stands up to I meter high in places and is usually about 8 to 20 meters wide. Other calzadas lead off to the northwest, southwest, and southeast, connecting B12 with a number of other Gavan complex sites (Figure 4.2). We were able to define a second tier in the regional settlement hierarchy on the llanos, represented by sites B17, B21, B25, B30, and B97, each consisting of two to four mounds ranging from 2 to 6 meters high and occupation areas varying from 6 to 12 hectares. There are also 26 third-order Gavan complex sites, which lack monumental earthworks and range from I to 4 hectares. The second-order and third-order sites do not usually have visible housemounds like the first-order center, which is possibly a reflection of the generally higher social status enjoyed by some of the inhabitants of the largest community. Some limited

155

CHAPTER 4 - SPENCER

a

,./ :' ,.

I· I

~k'O ,,"i) ... t':;':. .,

Do

'1: i

r 'j.

~ t.".:"

:;-.. ::"'.

... ~ ... -.. .

'-@ ~.~ ' o.

•

-Figure 4.4. Topographic map of the site of Gavan (B12), showing the locations of the major earthen mounds, causeways, smaller mounds (drawn with dotted lines), the test excavations (the small black squares), and the areas of horizontal block excavations (the capital letters).

additional evidence of social differentiation is provided by two excavated burials. At second-order site B97, we recovered BurialS. This was an adult, buried face up, with its head to the west, on its right side, and with no funerary offerings. This individual was buried beneath the packed-earth floor of a house that was not on an artificial mound. Now

156

PROFILES IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

consider Burial 6, who was found at B 12 below the housefloor in the 1-meter-high housemound that was the focus of our Area A excavations. This person was also buried face up, head to the west, and on its right side, but was accompanied by three relatively elaborate ceramic vessels. A calzada leads of(to the southeast from B12. It connects the firstorder center with a number of smaller sites, including B26, a small third-order village, and also B27, which is an area of drained agricultural fields just southeast of B26 (Figure 4.2). Previous evidence of drained-field agriculture had been located by researchers elsewhere on the llanos (Zucchi and Denevan 1979; Garson 1980:327), though these projects had been unable to relate the drained-field systems they discovered with any nearby habitation sites. In 1988 we mapped the B27 drained-field system and excavated four test pits (see Figure 4.5). We found that the facility covers some 35 hectares and consists of two oxbow lagoons and a tributary cafio that were artificially linked through a canal network. Although we collected soil samples in the B27 test pits, we found no ceramics. However, we also excavated at B26, only 1 kilometer away and the nearest habitation site to B27. Here we found Gavan complex ceramics (Late Gavan on initial inspection), and we would tentatively suggest, based on association, that both B26 and B27 date to Late Gavan. Furthermore, we found no later prehistoric or colonial material in the Gavan locality, and human settlement in the area today is limited to a few farms, nearly all founded in recent decades. Our current interpretation is that the drained-field system was farmed by the inhabitants of B26. We have made some trial calculations which suggest that, while the estimated 10 to 20 households at B26 could have supplied sufficient labor to cultivate the drained fields, the potential yields would probably have been much greater than the subsistence needs of this small community. So, in our judgment, the drained-field system was capable of producing a surplus. Because both the drained fields and B26 are linked by calzada to B12, it seems reasonable to suggest that a fair amount of this surplus was moving into the first-order center. Most of the ceramics we found on the Gavan sites resemble Zucchi's La Betania-not Cafio del Oso--material, which suggests that the regional settlement hierarchy shown in Figure 4.2 is largely a Late Gavan manifestation. It is also important to note that the Early Gavan ceramics which we found in the lower levels of some test excavations at B12 and B21 stratigraphically preceded the earthwork construction at both sites. From the lowest level of artificial fill in the largest mound at B12, our T.183 excavation recovered a radiocarbon date of A.D. 650 ± 100 (Table 4.1) and a thermoluminescence date of A.D. 410 ± 185 (Table 4. 2). We consequently feel that mound construction here probably he-

LA TIGRA

l

Figure 4.5. La Tigra (B27), the drained-field system. A network of canals connects two oxbow lagoons with the Cano Colorado, a tributary stream of the Rio Canagua. Canals shown with solid lines could be accurately mapped; the locations of those shown with dotted lines are approximate due to heavy vegetation.

/TORio Canagua

fI

100 meters

827

\.Jl -..J

I-'

;Ii

trl

("l

~z

I

,j>

~;Ii

::t: ;.-

("l

158

PROFILES IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

gan about A.D. 500-600. This would be consistent with the A.D. 540550 construction date for the largest mound at Hato La Calzada in the lower llanos (Zucchi 1973:186-187). In addition, since pur test excavations followed a stratified, systematic, random sampling strategy, we can say with some confidence that the Early Gavan material at B12 is distributed over a much smaller area (about 3 to 5 hectares) than the Late Gavan pottery (about 33 hectares). This suggests that a considerable increase in population accompanied the construction campaign. Although we have much more analysis ahead of us, it seems clear that between Early and Late Gavan (i.e., about A.D. 600) a dramatic cultural development took place on the llanos, manifested by the emergence of a three-level settlement hierarchy, the construction of monumental earthworks, substantial population growth, and the implementation of complex agricultural and transportation technologies (the drained fields and calzadas). Can we say, in line with the earlier discussion, that intersocietal interaction played an important role in this development? We did recover some evidence for long-distance exchange during our excavations in 1986 and 1988. At both B12 and B21, we found greenstone (possibly serpentinite) pendants in Late Gavan contexts. The nearest natural sources of this material would have been the Caribbean mountains in the Caracas area, or the Paraguana and Guajira peninsulas, flanking the Gulf of Venezuela (Wagner and Schubert 1972). A prehistoric greenstone/serpentinite workshop was excavated by Wagner (1973) near Mucuchies in the high Andes above our study region (see Figure 4.1), associated with a series of radiocarbon dates with midpoints ranging from A. D. 830 to A. D. 1500, partially overlapping our Gavan complex dates. Also pointing to the importance of long-distance trade was our recovery at B12 (mainly in Late Gavan contexts) of sizable quantities of chipped stone tools made of a distinctive red chert, which geologist Carlos Schubert (pers. com. 1986) has provisionally identified as deriving either from the Venezuelan high Andes or from a source on the northwest side of Lake Maracaibo, in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of Colombia. These stone tools would have been invaluable for clearing the forest and making earthworks, and the imp ordtation of the material must have been of great significance to the people of the llanos, a zone which is naturally deficient in good workable stone. Other lithic finds at B12 were identified by Prof. Ramon Sifontes as coming from the Colombian Andes and even Ecuador. There is also some evidence that violence and perhaps warfare became more common in Late Gavan times. We suspect that the oval causeway which surrounds B12 could have served, in part, as a defen-

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sive feature. Our Area B excavation (Figure 4.4) indicated that the oval causeway was used from the beginning to the end of Late Gavan. Moreover, Area B also produced an alignment of carbonized postmolds along the centerline of the causeway. It would seem that in Late Gavan times the oval causeway bore a stockade, which was burned when the site was abandoned. Throughout our excavations at the site, in fact, we found a great deal of burned daub, particularly in the later levels. We also located evidence of possible human sacrifice at B12. In the lowest construction level of the largest mound, we excavated pieces of at least one disarticulated human. In addition, beneath another earthwork that appears ceremonial, or at least nonresidential, in nature, we encountered more disarticulated human bones. We found complete human burials only beneath housefloors. Of course, if we truly wish to use a co evolutionary framework, we must also consider the evidence for cultural development and intersocietal interaction in the piedmont. Here we are on somewhat shakier ground, as we have not yet been able to distinguish clearly between the Early and Late parts of the CurbaH complex. What we can do, however, is compare the occupations of the CurbaH and Canagua valleys, which seem to have undergone an evolutionary divergence during Curbati complex times. Recall that the Curbati valley had a human population that was larger and more concentrated than that of the Canagua valley. Also, the Curbatf valley has six petroglyph locations, whereas the Canagua valley has none. These characteristics take on further significance when we consider the following points. First, the networks of long-distance exchange that brought the chert, greenstone, serpentinite, and other stone from the north to the llanos would surely have had to pass through the piedmont zone. Second, the most feasible natural route through the piedmont in this area is by way of the Curbati valley, not the Canagua. The Canagua valley has a steeply restricted section, passable only with great difficulty, at the northern end of our survey area, between the point where the riverbed bends sharply to the east (if you are ascending) and where it comes to within 1 kilometer of the upper Curbatf (Figure 4.2). When present-day inhabitants of the area wish to climb from the llanos to the high Andes (by foot or on horseback), they go up the Curbatf valley as far as the point where the two rivers nearly meet, and then shift over to the Canagua drainage, and follow it up over the treeless paramo (4000m elevation) and into the 3000-meter-high valley of Mucuchies (Figure 4.1). We have been told the trip takes 2 to 3 days on horseback or foot, depending primarily on the weather. Our current hypothesis is that the petroglyphs served, in part, to mark important communication routes between the llanos and the high

160

PROFILES IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

Andes. A similar function has been attributed to petroglyphs in the Cauca valley area of Colombia by Trimbom (1949:187). We also hypothesize that the Curbatf complex peoples of the Curbatf valley were much more involved in long-distance exchange, perhaps as middlemen, than were those of the Canagua, which may help to explain the more concentrated distribution of population in the former valley. I should point out that we excavated a greenstone pendant at the large Curbatf valley site of B8; perhaps people were attracted to this location by the prospect of participating in the exchange. No evidence of such participation appeared in our excavations at site B40 in the Canagua valley. I would certainly not claim that we have definitive results at this still early stage in the project. But I think we are on the right track, and I expect our continuing investigations to shed further light on the coevolution of these prehistoric cultural systems in the piedmont and llarws of Barinas.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first of all like to acknowledge Elsa M. Redmond, who shares with me the directorship of the Barinas project. Our work has been generously funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (BNS-85-06192), the Connecticut Research Foundation (1171-000-22-00220-35-220), the Wenner-Gren Foundation (4798), and a University of Connecticut Faculty Summer Fellowship. In Venezuela, we are collaborating closely with the Departamento de Antropologia of the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas (IVIC). For their wann welcome and assistance, we are grateful to Dra. Erika Wagner, Dra. Alberta Zucchi, Dr. Carlos Schubert, Dr. Jesus Eduardo Vaz, Rafael Gasson, Ines Frias, Lilliam Arvelo, Luis Molina, and Prof. Ramon Sifontes. During the fieldwork in Barinas, we were helped by many good friends, including Maria Andueza, Pablo Novoa, Alejo Novoa, Lucio Laviano, and Raiza Ron. Dr. Cynthia Peterson graciously carried out thennoluminescence dating on some of our ceramics in her laboratory at the University of Connecticut. Dr. J.E. Vaz also perfonned thermoluminescence dating on our material in his IVIC laboratory. Rafael Gasson, Ines Frias, and Arturo Jaimes are assisting us with the ceramic analysis and artifact illustrations.

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REFERENCES Carneiro, Robert 1981 The chiefdom: Precursor of the state. In: The Transition to Statehood in the New World, edited by Grant Jones and Robert Kautz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 37-79. Chagnon, Napoleon 1983 Yanomamo: The Fierce People. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Drennan, Robert 1985 Regional Archeology in the Valle de la Plata, Colombia: A Preliminary Report on the 1984 Season of the Proyecto Arqueol6gico Valle de la Plata. Technical Reports, No. 16. Ann Arbor: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Dunnell, Robert 1980 Evolutionary theory and archeology. Advances in Archeological Method and Theory 3:35-99. Earle, Timothy 1978 Economic and Social Organization of a Complex Chiefdom: The Halelea District, Kaua'i, Hawaii. Anthropological Papers, No. 63. Ann Arbor: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Ehrlich, P.R., and P.H. Raven 1964 Butterflies and plants: A study in coevolution. Evolution 18:586-608. Federmann, Nicolas 1962 [1557] Historia Indiana 0 Primer Viaje de Nicolas Federmann. In: Descubrimiento y Conquista de Venezuela: Textos Hist6ricos Contemporaneos y Documentos Fundamentales. Torno II. Cubagua y la empresa de los Belzares. Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, No. 55. Reprint. Fuentes para la Historia Colonial de Venezuela. Caracas: Italgrafica C.A. Flannery, Kent 1972 The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3:399-426. 1986 A visit to the master. In: Guila Naquitz: Archaic Foraging and Early Agriculture in Oaxaca, Mexico, edited by K. Flannery. Orlando: Academic Press. Pp. 511-519. Futuyma, D., and M. Slatkin, editors 1983 Coevolution. Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates. Garson, Adam 1980 Prehistory, settlement and food production in the savanna region of La Calzada de Paez, Venezuela. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor.

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Gibson, Jon 1974 Aboriginal wanare in the southeast: An alternative perspective. American Antiquity 39:130-133. Gould, Stephen 1983 Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes. New York: W.W. Norton. Grant, Susan 1984 Beauty and the Beast: The Coevolution of Plants and Animals. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Gumilla, Padre Jose 1963 [1745] EI Orinoco Ilustrado y Definido. Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de Historia, No. 68. Reprint. Fuentes para la Historia Colonial de Venezuela. Caracas: Italgrafica C. A. Helms, Mary 1979 Ancient Panama: Chiefs in Search of Power. Austin: University of Texas Press. Jahn, Alfredo 1927 Los Aborigenes del Occidente de Venezuela. Caracas: Litografia y Tipografia del Comercio. Janzen, D.H. 1980 When is it coevolution? Evolution 34:611-612. Johnson, Gregory 1978 Information sources and the development of decision-making organizations. I.n: Social Archeology: Beyond Subsistence and Dating, edited by C. Redman, M. Berman, E. Curtin, W. Langhorne, N. Versaggi, and 1. Wanser. New York: Academic Press. Pp. 87-112. 1982 Organizational structure and scalar stress. In: Theory and Explanation in Archeology, edited by C. Renfrew, M. Rowlands, and B. Segraves. New York: Academic Press. Pp. 389-421. Kohl, Phil 1984 Force, history and the evolutionist paradigm. In: Marxist Perspectives in Archeology, edited by M. Spriggs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 127-134. Kristiansen, Kristian 1981 Economic models for Bronze Age Scandinavia: Towards an integrated approach. In: Economic Archeology: Towards an Integration of Ecological and Social Approaches, edited by A. Sheridan and G. Bailey. BAR International Series, No. 96. British Archeological Reports, Oxford. Pp. 239-303. Lathrap, Donald 1973 The antiquity and importance of long-distance trade relationships in the moist tropics of pre-Columbian South America. Worid Archeology 5: 170-186.

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May, R.M. 1973 Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Mercado, Padre Pedro de 1966 [1684] Historia de la Provincia del Nuevo Reino y Quito de la Compaiiia de Jesus. In: Documentos Jesufticos Relativos a la Historia de la Compaiiia de Jesus en Venezuela. Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, No. 79. Reprint. Fuentes para la Historia Colonial de Venezuela. Caracas: Italgrafica C.A. Miller, James 1978 Living Systems. New York: McGraw-Hill. Morey, Nancy 1975 Ethnohistory of the Colombian and Venezuelan Llanos. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Utah. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. Morey, Robert, and John Marwitt 1978 Ecology, economy, and warfare in lowland South America. In: Advances in Andean Archeology, edited by David Browman. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Pp. 247-258. Peebles, Christopher, and Susan Kus 1977 Some archeological correlates of ranked societies. American Antiquity 42:421-448. Pianka, Eric 1983 Evolutionary Ecology. 3rd ed. New York: Harper and Row. Rindos, David 1984 The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective. Orlando: Academic Press. Rivero, Juan 1956 [1733] Historia de las Misiones de los Llanos de Casanare y los Rios Orinoco y Meta. Biblioteca de la Presidencia de Colombia, No. 23. Reprint. Bogota: Empresa Nacional de Publicaciones. Roughgarden, Jonathan 1983 The theory of coevolution. In: Coevolution, edited by D. Futuyma and M. Slatkin. Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates. Pp. 33-64. Rouse, Irving, and Jose M. Cruxent 1963 Venezuelan Archeology. New Haven: Yale University Press. Service, Elman 1962 Primitive Social Organization. New York: Random House.

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Slatkin, Montgomery 1983 Genetic background. In: Coevolution, edited by D. Futuyma and M. Slatkin. Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates. Pp. 14-32. Spencer, Charles 1982 The Cuicatlan Canada and Monte Alban: A Study of Primary State Formation. New York: Academic Press. 1987 Rethinking the chiefdom. In: Chiefdoms in the Americas, edited by R. Drennan and C. Uribe. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. Pp. 369-390. Spencer, Charles, and Elsa Redmond 1984 Prehistory of the Andean piedmont and high llanos in Barinas, Venezuela. Proposal submitted to the Anthropology Program, National Science Foundation. Stanley, Steven 1979 Macroevolution: Pattern and Process. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. 1981 The New Evolutionary Timetable. New York: Basic Books. Steponaitis, Vincas 1978 Location theory and complex chiefdoms: A Mississippian example. In: Mississippian Settlement Patterns, edited by Bruce Smith. New York: Academic Press. Pp. 417-453. Tarble, Kay 1977 Comparaci6n Estilistica de Dos Colecciones del Noroeste de Venezuela: Una Nueva Metodologfa. Ernesto Armitano, editor. IVIC-CEA, Caracas. Thompson, John 1982 Interaction and Coevolution. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Trimborn, Herman 1949 Senorfo y Barbarie en el Valle del Cauca. Translated by Jose Marfa Gimeno Capella. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. Madrid: Instituto Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. Wagner, Erika 1973 The Mucuchfes phase: An extension of the Andean cultural pattern into western Venezuela. American Anthropologist 75:195-213. Wagner, Erika, and Carlos Schubert 1972 Pre-Hispanic workshop of serpentinite artifacts, Venezuelan Andes, and possible raw material source. Science 175:888-890. Wagner, Erika, and Kay Tarble de Rufz 1975 Lagunillas: A new archeological phase for the Lake Maracaibo Basin, Venezuela. Journal ofField Archeology 2:105-118.

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Werner, Dennis 1980 The making of a Mekranoti chief: The psychological and social determinants of leadership in a native South American society. Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. Wright, Henry 1977 Recent research on the origin of the state. Annual Review of Anthropology 6:379-397. Zucchi, Alberta 1967 La Betania: Un yacimiento arqueo16gico del occidente de Venezuela. 2 vols. Ph. D. dissertation, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas. 1972 New data on the antiquity of polychrome painting from Venezuela. American Antiquity 37:439-446. 1973 Prehistoric human occupations of the western Venezuelan llanos. American Antiquity 38:182-190. Zucchi, Alberta, and William Denevan 1979 Campos Elevados e Historia Cultural Prehispanica en los Llanos Occidentales de Venezuela. Caracas: Universidad Cat6lica Andres Bello.

CHAPTER 5

The Nature of the Chiefdom as Revealed by Evidence from the Cauca Valley of Colombia ROBERT

1.

CARNEIRO

Elman Service, whom we honor with these essays, has been one of the principal architects of modern cultural evolutionism. And he has helped build the structure at every level, from the microevolutionary, as in his brilliant analysis of the section system of aboriginal Australia (Service 1960), to the macroevolutionary, as in his work on the rise of the state and civilization (Service 1975). But of all he has written on cultural evolution, nothing has been so influential as the sequence of stages of political development he proposed in Primitive Social Organization. This sequence of band, tribe, chiefdom, and state, unremarkable as it may seem to us today, carne at a critical time in the history of anthropology. When it was first proposed in 1962, the Procrustean bed of anti-evolutionism had just been broken and a new willingness-indeed, an eagerness-to find and apply valid evolutionary schemes existed among many anthropologists. Of Service's four stages of political evolution, the most novel and intriguing was that of chiefdom. Service himself did not invent this stage-that had been done 7 years earlier by Kalervo Oberg (1955}but it was he who seized upon the concept of chiefdom and gave it wide currency. Shortly thereafter, William Sanders and Barbara Price, utilizing Service's sequence of stages as their theoretical framework, published their well-known Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization (1968). In their reconstruction of the prehistory of this region, the chiefdom, as the stage that immediately preceded every Mesoamerican state, figured prominently. Sanders and Price's book was itself influential, especially among younger archeologists. Through it, the concept of the chiefdom as an 167

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essential step in political development became more widely recognized, and concern with the chiefdom as a major evolutionary stage has increased steadily ever since. Thus today there is great theoretical interest in the nature and basis of the chiefdom; yet, theoretical interest in the chiefdom has far outrun an empirical knowledge of it. 1 The purpose of theory is, of course, to explain fact, and the most successful theories are those that derive from an acquaintance with the facts. Indeed, there is nothing like a thorough mastery of the facts to help generate robust theory. Consequently, if we are to develop adequate theories about the origin and evolution of chiefdoms, we must acquaint ourselves more fully with examples of their structure and behavior. Fortunately, though widely scattered in the anthropological literature, facts about chiefdoms exist. Furthermore, they exist in greater numbers than is generally supposed. The problem lies in ferreting them out. The time has come, though, to examine the literature on chiefdoms more systematically to see what it can tell us about them. Indeed this is being done to an increasing degree, for example, Helms (1979), Kirch (1984), Marquardt (1987), and Rountree (1989). To see what we can add to the growing body of current literature on chiefdoms and what light we can shed on the question of their origin, let us tum to a group of chiefdoms that once filled the Cauca Valley of Colombia and have until now been ignored by theorists.

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS First, though, we should have in mind a clear definition of both a chiefdom and a state. Only then can we tell when we are dealing with an unequivocal chiefdom and when we are approaching, or have passed, the threshold signaling a state.

A chiefdom is an autonomous political unit comprising a number of communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief (Carneiro 1981:45). A state is an autonomous political unit, encompassing many communities within its territory, and having a centralized government with the power to draft men for war or work, levy and collect taxes, and decree and enforce laws (Carneiro 1981:69; 1970:733). This definition of a chiefdom is more stringent than most. It precludes, for example, the societies of the Northwest Coast, although they

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are commonly referred to as chiefdoms by anthropologists (e. g., Service 1962:150, 153, 169-170; Sanders and Price 1968:49, 81; Flannery 1972:403). By the definition proposed, these societies were not chiefdoms, because although within a Northwest Coast tribe all chiefs were strictly ranked, from highest to lowest, in relation to one another, each village--even that of the lowest-ranking chief-remained politically autonomous (Carneiro 1981:48).

THE CAUCA VALLEY During the early sixteenth century, when the Spaniards began arriving in America, the Circum-Caribbean region contained probably the largest aggregation of chiefdoms anywhere in the world. And one of the most important concentrations of them was in the Cauca Valley of Colombia. When they entered this valley in 1535, the Spaniards found it filled with chiefdoms, and only after a long and bitter struggle were they able to subdue them. During the years of this struggle, and those that immediately followed, a number of Spanish soldiers, priests, and others who journeyed among these chiefdoms recorded what they to learned about the chiefdoms, and much of this written testimony was later published. Chroniclers who wrote about the Cauca Valley included Pascual de Andagoya, Cieza de Leon, Juan de Castellanos, Sebastian de Benalcazar, Jorge Robledo, Pedro Sarmiento, and Pedro Simon. During the 1940s, the German ethnologist Hermann Trimborn studied these early sources and, based on the information they contained, prepared a 500-page volume entitled Sefiorio y Barbarie en el Valle del Cauca (1949). (Sefiorio and cacicazgo were the two terms applied by the Spaniards to a chiefdom. Nowadays, jefatura is also used in Spanish in this sense.) Trimborn's objective was to give as full an account of these chiefdoms as possible, and he succeeded admirably in doing so. Not only was Trimborn a meticulous scholar, but his work has the added merit of having no theoretical axe to grind. Our confidence in the fidelity of his compilation is thus enhanced. The reliability of Trimborn's book, as well as its wealth of detail, makes it a useful source in assessing the nature of the chiefdoms that flourished in this region of Colombia. Since Trimborn's volume is relatively obscure and not readily available, however, I will extract its essence and present it here so that the general outlines of these chiefdoms are clearly visible. Let us look, then, at what the Spaniards found in the Cauca Valley 450 years ago.

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DISTRIBUTION AND POPULATION OF CAUCA VALLEY CHIEFDOMS The Cauca Valley is a long, relatively narrow valley running some 300 miles from south to north between the Cordillera Central and the Cordillera Occidental, two of the three great mountain ranges into which the northern Andes are divided (see Figure 5.1). Today, the Cauca Valley contains important cities such as Popayan, Cali, Armenia, Manizales, and Medellin, and is the leading coffeegrowing region of Colombia. For most of its length, the Cauca River is bounded on both sides by mountains that rise from 5,000 to 10,000 feet. Here and there, though, the valley widens out to some 30 miles or so. Thus, although the Cauca Valley is not as sharply delimited as are many Peruvian coastal valleys, it does show a considerable degree of environmental circumscription. This, as I shall argue later, played a significant role in giving rise to chiefdoms in this region (see Carneiro 1970). Besides the main valley, which runs south to north, a number of smaller, lateral valleys feed into the Cauca from east and west. Some of the chiefdoms mentioned in this paper were located in these lateral valleys rather than in the main valley itself (Trimborn, 1949:208). Some groups, such as the Gorrones, lived on the flanks of the mountains, rather than on the valley bottom, and came down to the Cauca River only to fish (ibid., 64). At one location, a paved road led eastward out of the Cauca Valley, and at various places in the valley irrigation systems had been built (ibid., 255). The names of nearly 50 Cauca Valley peoples were recorded by the Spaniards, the best known being the Quimbaya, whose name is associated with elaborate goldwork (ibid., 65), 2 the Anserma, Lile, Pozo, Guaca, and Popayan (see Figure 5.1). These names designated what Trimborn calls "tribes," which were originally linguistic and cultural groupings. The names thus did not always apply to discrete political entities. A particular chiefdom might or might not be coextensive with a "tribe." Sometimes a "tribe" comprised several formerly independent chiefdoms that had been conquered by the strongest one among them and thus had become politically unified (ibid., 247). For example, a Lile chief named Petecuy had defeated five other Lile chiefs and unified all the Lile into a large chiefdom (ibid., 247). Likewise, the entire lamundi "tribe" had been unified by the chief whose name they then bore (ibid., 247). The Quimbaya, who seemed to be on the decline politically when the Spaniards arrived (ibid., 258), were apparently divided into five separate chiefdoms, each under a paramount chief independent of the others

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