Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs & Steel

FROM EGALITARIANISM TO KLEPTOCRACY • 2. 6 J
world. The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing, and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history's broadest pattern. How did government and religion arise?
fayu bands and modern states represent opposite extremes along the spectrum of human societies. Modern American society and the Fayu differ in the presence or absence of a professional police force, cities, money, distinctions between rich and poor, and many other political, economic, and social institutions. Did all of those institutions arise together, or did some arise before others? We can infer the answer to this question by comparing modern societies at different levels of organization, by examining written accounts or archaeological evidence about past societies, and by observing how a society's institutions change over time.
Cultural anthropologists attempting to describe the diversity of human societies often divide them into as many as half a dozen categories. Any such attempt to define stages of any evolutionary or developmental continuum—whether of musical styles, human life stages, or human societies— is doubly doomed to imperfection. First, because each stage grows out of some previous stage, the lines of demarcation are inevitably arbitrary. (For example, is a 19-year-old person an adolescent or a young adult?) Second, developmental sequences are not invariant, so examples pigeonholed under the same stage are inevitably heterogeneous. (Brahms and Liszt would turn in their graves to know that they are now grouped together as composers of the romantic period.) Nevertheless, arbitrarily delineated stages provide a useful shorthand for discussing the diversity of music and of human societies, provided one bears in mind the above caveats. In that spirit, we shall use a simple classification based on just four categories— band, tribe, chiefdom, and state (see Table 14.1)—to understand societies.
Bands are the tiniest societies, consisting typically of 5 to 80 people, most or all of them close relatives by birth or by marriage. In effect, a band is an extended family or several related extended families. Today, bands still living autonomously are almost confined to the most remote parts of New Guinea and Amazonia, but within modern times there were many others that have only recently fallen under state control or been assimi-ated or exterminated. They include many or most African Pygmies, southern African San hunter-gatherers (so-called Bushmen), Aboriginal

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table 14.1 Types of Societies
Band Tribe Chiefdom State
Membership
Number of dozens hundreds thousands over 50,000
people
Settlement nomadic fixed: 1 fixed: 1 or more fixed: many
pattern village villages villages
and cities
Basis of relation– kin kin-based class and resi– class and
ships clans dence residence
Ethnicities and 1 1 1 1 or more
languages
Government
Decision making, "egalitarian" "egalitarian" centralized, centralized
leadership or hereditary
big-man
Bureaucracy none none none, or 1 or many levels
2 levels
Monopoly of no no yes yes
force and
information
Conflict resolu– informal informal centralized laws, judges
tion
Hierarchy of no no no-> para– capital
settlement mount village
Australians, Eskimos (Inuit), and Indians of some resource-poor areas of the Americas such as Tierra del Fuego and the northern boreal forests. All those modern bands are or were nomadic hunter-gatherers rather than settled food producers. Probably all humans lived in bands until at least 40,000 years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago.
Bands lack many institutions that we take for granted in our own society. They have no permanent single base of residence. The band's land is used jointly by the whole group, instead of being partitioned among subgroups or individuals. There is no regular economic specialization, except by age and sex: all able-bodied individuals forage for food. There are no formal institutions, such as laws, police, and treaties, to resolve conflicts within and between bands. Band organization is often described as

FROM EGAHTARIANISM TO KLEPTOCRACY • 169
Band Tribe Chtefdom State
Religion
Justifies kiepto– no no yes yes —no
cracy?
Economy
Food production no no-*yes yes-*intensive intensive
Division of labor no no no— yes yes
Exchange reciprocal reciprocal redistributive redistribu-
(" tribute") tive
("taxes")
Control of land band clan chief various
Society
Stratified no no yes, by kin yes. not
by kin
Slavery no no small-scale large-scale
Luxury goods no no yes yes
for elite
Public architec– no no no —yes yes
ture
Indigenous lit– no no no often
eracv
A horizontal arrow indicates rhat the attribute vanes between less and more complex societies of that type.
"egalitarian": there is no formalized social stratification into upper and lower classes, no formalized or hereditary leadership, and no formalized monopolies of information and decision making. However, the term egalitarian" should not be taken to mean that all band members are equal n prestige and contribute equally to decisions. Rather, the term merely means that any band "leadership" is informal and acquired through qualities such as personality, strength, intelligence, and fighting skills.
My own experience with bands comes from the swampy lowland area ew kumea where the Fayu live, a region known as the Lakes Plains. ere, I still encounter extended families of a few adults with their dependent children and elderly, living in crude temporary shelters along streams traveling by canoe and or. foot. Why do peoples of the Lakes Plains

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continue to live as nomadic bands, when most other New Guinea peoples and almost all other peoples elsewhere in the world, now live in settled larger groups? The explanation is that the region lacks dense local concentrations of resources that would permit many people to live together, and that (until the arrival of missionaries bringing crop plants) it also lacked native plants that could have permitted productive farming. The bands' food staple is the sago palm tree, whose core yields a starchy pith when the palm reaches maturity. The bands are nomadic, because they must move when they have cut the mature sago trees in an area. Band numbers are kept low by diseases (especially malaria), by the lack of raw materials in the swamp (even stone for tools must be obtained by trade), and by the limited amount of food that the swamp yields for humans. Similar limitations on the resources accessible to existing human technology prevail in the regions of the world recently occupied by other bands.
Our closest animal relatives, the gorillas and chimpanzees and bonobos of Africa, also live in bands. All humans presumably did so too, until improved technology for extracting food allowed some hunter-gatherers to settle in permanent dwellings in some resource-rich areas. The band is the political, economic, and social organization that we inherited from our millions of years of evolutionary history. Our developments beyond it all took place within the last few tens of thousands of years.
The first of those stages beyond the band is termed the tribe, which differs in being larger (typically comprising hundreds rather than dozens of people) and usually having fixed settlements. However, some tribes and even chiefdoms consist of herders who move seasonally.
Tribal organization is exemplified by New Guinea highlanders, whose political unit before the arrival of colonial government was a village or else a close-knit cluster of villages. This political definition of "tribe" is thus often much smaller than what linguists and cultural anthropologists would define as a tribe—namely, a group that shares language and culture. For example, in 1964 I began to work among a group of highlanders known as the Fore. By linguistic and cultural standards, there were then 12,000 Fore, speaking two mutually intelligible dialects and living in 65 villages of several hundred people each. But there was no political unity whatsoever among villages of the Fore language group. Each hamlet was involved in a kaleidoscopically changing pattern of war and shifting alu*