Bruce G. Trigger 'Understanding Early Civilizations'
Explaining functional institutional constants and regularities
Bruce G. Trigger wrote:
CHAPTER 13
Sociopolitical Constants and Variables
[extracts from first section]
The development of early civilizations appears inevitably to have produced monarchs; even in societies with patterns of dual leadership at lower levels there was a single preeminent ruler. The unity of the state seems to have been conceptualized by imagining the political, economic, legal, military, moral, and cosmological dimensions of society to be embodied in the person and will of a single human being. Kingship was viewed as inherited within kin groups; the Sumerians may have believed that it was conferred on individuals by the gods, but even for them kingship was hereditary in practice. The powers of kings, the roles they played, and the ways in which kingship was conceptualized varied considerably from one early civilization to another. In Egypt monarchs could exercise great personal influence, although doing so required considerable skill. Among the Yoruba, in contrast, kings had to share power with the leaders of important kin groups and sometimes were no more than figureheads. Kings were present in all early civilizations not so much because they were practically necessary as because kingship was a master concept in terms of which other, less comprehensible political relations could be understood and negotiated. The unity of states had to be achieved not only politically but also symbolically.
All early civilizations were based on the idea of social and economic inequality, which not only informed the understanding of society as a whole but also pervaded the family. As a consequence, ideas of inequality and obedience to authority were inculcated in everyone from earliest childhood. As children grew older, the concept of obedience was reinforced in schools, social life, and relations with government officials. In each early civilization a small number of privileged people were supported by a large number of taxpaying farmers. This upper class governed society and controlled much of its wealth and surplus labour. Beneath it were various groups of specialists ranked according to how much they resembled the upper classes in not having to engage in hard manual labour. Ordinary bureaucrats normally ranked above professional soldiers and they in turn above specialized craft workers and household servants. The highest grade of farmers possessed land, either individually or collectively; of lower status were farmers who had to rent land, farmers who were tied to land owned by others, and landless manual labourers. At the bottom of the class hierarchy in many early civilizations were slaves …
There was some vertical mobility in all early civilizations, but it varied considerably in degree … Commoners were encouraged to settle their own disputes, provided that this did not disadvantage the upper classes, but the legal system invariably had higher levels at which decisions were enforced by the punitive power of the king. …
The early civilizations in our sample exhibited only two varieties of political organization: city-states and territorial states. These types of states were differentiated on the basis of numerous organizational principles not only from each other but from later regional urbanized kingdoms, later city-states, and true empires. City-states in early civilizations controlled small territories and often had a single urban centre surrounded by farming villages, although the geographically largest of them and those with the most dispersed populations also had small towns that served as secondary administrative centres. These secondary centres caused the general arrangement of settlement units of those city-states to resemble superficially the arrangements of territorial states. Other aspects of their settlement patterns were, however, very different. …
Explaining Regularities
[extracts from final section]
There was considerable cross-cultural uniformity in the sociopolitical institutions of early civilizations. The similar general conceptualizations of kingship, similar class and legal systems, and the use of full-time police and soldiers to support the upper classes recurred in every early civilization for which there is adequate documentation. In addition, there were only two basic forms of political organization (city-states and territorial states) and only two systems for administering extensive territories (delegational and bureaucratic). Further, despite variation in family organization and gender roles from one early civilization to another, male dominance appears to have increased as a result of the development of early civilizations. These findings do not accord with the basic tenet of cultural relativism – that human behaviour is shaped primarily by cultural traditions that are not constrained to any significant degree by noncultural factors. They certainly do not confirm the argument that universals, if any, are insignificant.
It might be objected that the early civilizations examined in this study shared many sociopolitical features only because these traits are the ones I employed to assign societies to this general category. Yet the recurrent and correlated features are too numerous and complex for this objection to carry significant weight. The societies at this level of complexity that are alleged to have displayed radically different features are not well enough documented to be certain that these features are not the anthropologists’ own inventions. Increasing information about the Maya has made this early civilization, once believed to be radically different from any other, closely resemble other city-state systems. The principal challenge in terms of sociopolitical features is therefore to explain cross-cultural similarities and limited variation.
Many uniformities may reflect functional requirements. For societies to grow more complex they may have to evolve specific forms of organization … For complex societies to function, decision-makers must be able to determine courses of action for others without undue delay. This requires the setting of strict limits on the amount of consultation and explicit personal consent required to establish and implement public policy. Decision-making in early civilizations was inevitably associated with what people in small-scale, egalitarian societies would have regarded as unacceptably arbitrary power. …
… [Described here is] a functional explanation for the development of institutionalized systems of unequal political power. The repeated independent evolution of early civilizations that possessed class systems, administrative hierarchies, hierarchical legal systems, and military and police forces suggests not only that these features corresponded to functional needs but also that human beings can repeatedly transcend the intellectual constraints of traditional cultures to create structures that can satisfy new functional requirements. …
… [Others] have argued that, because arrangements at the preceding chiefdom level were already so similar, they facilitated the development of cross-culturally similar institutions in early civilizations. This argument, which reflects the neoevolutionist passion for unilinear change, diminishes the importance of the functionalist causality … It is also not a position that is supported by archaeological evidence, which indicates considerable variation in the types of societies that gave rise to early civilizations.
A functionalist or adaptationist argument does not, however, explain why in early civilizations the unity of the state was symbolically expressed by a monarch. Nor does the presence of a king in each early civilization correspond with the relativist-romanticist belief that peoples coping with similar problems have virtually limitless specific ways of conceptualizing solutions for these problems. It does, however, correspond with the nineteenth-century evolutionist assumption that people at a particular level of social complexity who face similar problems will tend to devise similar solutions for them.
This was a view to which Franz Boas subscribed, despite his commitment to cultural relativism, when he drew attention to the detailed and far-reaching cross-cultural similarities that characterized fundamental human ideas. Varied cross-cultural similarities, especially those of a cognitive variety, that cannot be explained simply by functional arguments suggest that certain ways of thinking and behaving may in some manner be ‘hard-wired’ into the human psyche even if they are not realized in the same way in societies at different levels of complexity. This embeddedness may also explain why social scientists habitually treat many regularities in sociopolitical organization as commonplaces, but the existence of these regularities requires explanation.
Limited variation, such as the differences between city-state systems and territorial states, appear to reflect functional alternatives that correspond equally well with human needs and perform equally as long as these two sorts of societies are not competing with each other or with any more complex societies. More idiosyncratic variations in family organization and gender roles, although still relatively limited, may partly reflect differing cultural heritages from an earlier stage of development. Even these differences seem to have been modified convergently in the context of early civilizations as families became internally more hierarchical and patriarchal and the public role of women was increasingly restricted.
In drawing attention to cross-cultural regularities in many major features of sociocultural organization in early civilizations and to the limited range of differences in other features, I am not seeking to impose undue uniformity on the data. Kingship had a different specific meaning in every early civilization, as did slavery and the concept of an upper class. Yet these differences cannot be allowed to obscure the great similarities in sociopolitical organization that early civilizations came to share as a result of convergent development. To ignore these similarities out of loyalty to hoary dogmas of cultural relativism or historical particularism would be as misleading as to ignore cultural differences in the name of unilinear evolutionism.
The Source:
Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study, Cambridge University Press 2003
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.