The Ecological-Evolutionary Typology of Human Societies and the Evolution of Social Inequality

4.2Inheritance of Real Property

Another possible measure of social rigidity is inheritance of real property (land). Here we would expect that the nature of the predominant subsistence might have effects on inheritance of land independent of productivity, since the value of owning land must vary in relation to technology of production.
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Looking at the leftmost column of Table 4.2 one can see the familiar monotonic decline in the percentage of societies with no inheritance of land in the sequence HG (83.2%), SH (21.8%), AH (6.9%), and AG (2.7%). Thus, as the productivity of land increases and as the same area of land represents an increasingly valuable investment, one sees a strengthening of inheritance rules. Both FI and HE societies are more likely to have no rules of inheritance, perhaps because land is not a main source of subsistence (as in FI), or because the expenses of land needed for herding preclude close control through private ownership (in HE). In any case, there is no evidence of AG reversal here.

4.3Measure of Social Stratification

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The social stratification scale in the SS combines the presence of slavery and of classes and/or castes to construct a composite scale of social stratification (Murdock and Provost 1971). While the scale is presented as capturing a homogeneous dimension with ordinal steps, one might doubt that the presence of slavery and the number of social classes can be so easily combined. In any case Table 4.3 exhibits again the familiar monotonic pattern of increase in the scale from HG to Ag, with no AG reversal. FI and HE have similar low modal values (score = 2), corresponding to the presence of hereditary slavery.

4.4Slavery

The existence of slavery might appear at face value as a strong indicator of the presence of invidious inequality in a society. In fact, it is quite remarkable how frequent slavery is among human societies represented in the EA and SS. In the EA for example (see marginals of Table 4.4) close to half (48%) the societies in the data set practice some form of slavery. Table 4.4 shows the percentage of societies in which slavery is present (coded 1) versus "absent or nearly absent" (coded 0).
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Looking at the presence of slavery (rightmost column of Table 4.4) one finds another instance of AG reversal. Presence of slavery increases at first monotonically in the sequence HG (11.6%), SH (19.3%), AH (84.1%), and then drops precipitously with AG (43.7%). In this case FI (50.9%) and especially HE (81.7%) are more likely than AG to have some form of slavery. Therefore in the case of slavery, we have another instance of the AG reversal, in which a monotonic trend of increasing "invidiousness" breaks down and is reversed at the AG stage.

4.5Despotism

What is perhaps the most direct measure of invidious social inequality is the presence of despotism coded by Betzig (1986) for a subset of the SS data set. It is unfortunate that the total number of cases available to examine the relationship with type of society is only 83, due in part to Laura Betzig's decision to exclude SS cases that could not be considered fully autonomous politically at the "focal year" (the point in time corresponding to the principal description of the society). Betzig defines the degree of despotism as "the extent to which one individual, at the head of the social hierarchy, is able to exploit his position of strength when a conflict of interests arises, effecting a biased result in his favor. It does not include such asymmetry over slaves nor over members of the household" (Divale 2000:196, V1134). There is no doubt from her descriptions of executions and tortures that what she is talking about is real despotism, not a slightly authoritarian style of government. It is curious that the first attempt to measure this variable, that would seem to represent best what many people have in mind when imagining the worst absence of human rights, the very opposite of freedom, took place so recently (and is still available for so few cases).
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The rightmost column of Table 4.5 shows the percentages of societies in which despotism is present. The monotonic pattern is evident in the sequence HG (0%), SH (11.1%), and AH (64.3%). Then despotism dips noticeable for the AG type (13.3%). FI (11.1%) and HE (0%) have even smaller incidences of despotism, but the numbers of observations supporting these percentages are small (9 and 6 cases, respectively). The evolutionary pattern for despotism thus appears to be another case of AG reversal. It is unfortunate that this intriguing finding is not supported by a larger data set.

5Ideological Aspects of Inequality

A somewhat more indirect way to assess the degree of social inequality is to look for ideological traces of subordination and conflict. Following the example of Human Societies (Nolan and Lenski 1999) this section examines reflections of inequality in the kinds of games people play in different types of societies (Nolan and Lenski 1999:110), and in the values different types of societies inculcate in children (Nolan and Lenski 1999:109).

5.1Games of Strategy

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Table 5.1 shows that percentages of societies having games of strategy, by type of society. A game of strategy is one that, like chess, checkers or tic-tac-toe, does not involve any random element and whose outcome therefore depends entirely on strategic decisions on the part of the players. The connection with social stratification is the observation that games of strategy often seem to represent "simulations" of the human activities of warfare, conflict, and maneuvering within a social hierarchy. (The relationship, such as in the case of chess with warfare, can be of course transparent.) Thus it might be conjectured that more unequal societies, or those characterized by more conflict or rivalries, would also be more likely to appreciate games of strategy. (fn: likewise, one could look at having games of chance, cf N&L; it turns out that HG are especially likely to have games of chance, presumably because their conditions of existence are dominated by uncertainty, absence of control on the movements of wild herds or rainfall)

Table 5.1 reveals the remarkable fact that none of HG societies have games of strategy, presumably because warfare is relatively infrequent in these societies, and there is not much of a hierarchy in which to maneuver. The presence of games of strategy increases in SH (10.4%) and AH (59.1%). The 56.8% for AG represent, if not a reversal, at least the absence of further increase relative to AH. FI have a very low figure (2.9%), similar to HG, perhaps because people in FI societies are similarly subject to the random vagaries of the whether and the unpredictable movements of the game. HE have a high 53.8% figure, similar to AG.