Among all the anthropological material I have read in search of straightforward non-moralistic empirical data on decision making (“decision” and “decide” seem to be the rarest words in anthropology) this chapter is, I currently think, the best single account and the one most in harmony with my ‘primitive’ intuitions about prehistory.
Political Discussion by Émile Friant, Paris 1889
ANTHROPOLOGICAL EXHIBIT
GEORGE SILBERBAUER ‘Political process in G/wi bands’, Chapter 1 in Eleanor Leacock, Richard Lee eds., Politics and History in Band Societies, Cambridge University Press (1982)
… Decisions affecting the band as a whole are arrived at through discussion in which all adult, and near-adult, members may participate. Discussion seldom takes the form of a single, set-piece public debate. Much of the groundwork before decision is covered in the course of ordinary conversation between friends, neighbours and hunting-partners. If only one, clear-cut course of action merits serious consideration, the casual exchanges routinely lead to a decision, and perhaps function more as announcements of concurrence than processes by which agreement is reached (i.e. agreement is automatic but nevertheless requires some form of declaration in order that it be the basis of action).
Where the matter is more contentious or confused, and factions emerge, protagonists will involve others by airing their views before a wider audience. The behaviour of the onlookers gives a more or less clear indication of the strength and inclination of sentiment in the band as a whole. This is both testing the wind and influencing opinion. There are many ways of doing it: a quiet, serious discussion with one or two key individuals in the hearing of a few band fellows, or a long campaign of persuasion in which the case is put together piece by piece, allowing time for each to settle before placing the next. Or else a public, but ostensibly private, harangue is contrived by loudly addressing a friend, making sure that the whole camp can hear, i.e. talking-at, rather than talking-to.
This ploy of the 'forced eavesdrop' avoids direct confrontation with the opposition who would be guilty of bad manners if they were to join in the conversation. However, opponents are free to resort to the same device. The band may then be treated to the occasionally comic spectacle of two sets of orators putting their conflicting arguments, each pointedly ignoring the other but striving desperately to avoid a breach of either logic or etiquette, trying to answer point with counter-point without being seen to attack directly.
The spectrum of audience responses to all of these preliminaries is equally broad. Some express their feelings tacitly, signalling assent, opposition or indifference to the speaker's argument by facial expression, bodily attitude or gesture. Others are more explicit and answer with murmurs and grunts, or echo the last phrase of the utterance to show support.
The time taken for discussion is naturally limited by the urgency of the matter under consideration; the need to arrive at conclusive agreement before the passage of time and events closes off an option is clearly recognized by the band. Less urgent matters can be debated for longer. Discussion is then intermittent with the subject cropping up from time to time until a satisfying solution to the problem is reached. …
… The pattern of the summer and autumn camps (i.e. as distinct from the isolated camps of single households during winter and early summer) is for groups of households to build their shelters next to each other, forming a pattern of clusters. The households making up such a cluster I have termed a clique. Cliques are nearly always unstable groups which are partially or wholly reconstituted whenever the band shifts to a new campsite, i.e. after three to six weeks. The only factor determining their composition appears to be a temporary preference among the constituent households for one another's close company. Interaction within a clique is significantly more intense than between cliques: most conversation is within, or between, clustered households; the women of a clique usually form a food-gathering gang: the men assist one another with tasks more often than they help men from other cliques, and the rate of exchange of goods and services is generally higher within the group. Cliques also function as a form of ephemeral segmentation of the band by becoming focuses of opinion and the level at which factionalization initially occurs. Progress towards decision is not, therefore, an even permeation of persuasion through the band.
As the diverse strands of argument are ordered and simplified the cliques further function as sub-units of agreement and the balance of opinion shifts in larger-than-individual increments towards one or other of the poles of proposal.
Leadership in the band is apparent at all phases of decision-making. The process of reaching a decision is initiated by somebody identifying and communicating a problem which calls for decision. Leadership may be measured as the extent to which an individual's suggestion or opinion attracts public support and is thus exercised at the initial stage as well as during the subsequent steps toward final decision.
In the main, leadership is authoritative, rather than authoritarian; knowledge, experience of the matter under discussion and firmness of personality are characteristics which win most support. In themselves these are prestigious qualities, and success in promoting a particular argument confers further prestige but never sufficient to occasion an ‘overflow' into habitual success. Expertise in one field of activity may be seen as not at all relevant to another field and, even in matters which are quite closely related, leadership shifts unpredictably among acknowledged experts with the occasional inclusion of a 'dark horse'.
The emotionally calm atmosphere of many discussions and the general lack of competitiveness partly explain the readiness to separate idea from identity. It often happens that the suggestion finally adopted is one which was initially voiced by somebody who has taken no further part in the proceedings, leaving it to others to take up, and 'push' his or her proposal.
This is not to say that passion is unknown: contentious matters do stir speakers to emotional oratory and a single dissenter can shift an apparently decided band to another way of thinking. But the band is reluctant to come to decision under the sway of strong feelings, if discussion becomes too angry or excited, debate is temporarily adjourned by the withdrawal of the attention of the calmer participants until things cool down.
Withdrawal is not usually physical — to get up and move away is too explicit a gesture of rejection. It is, rather, an auditory withdrawal. Members signal their lack of sympathy with the heated mood by affecting preoccupation with other matters. It must indeed be frustrating to find one's fine flow of rhetoric washing unheeded round a woman busying herself with an apparently well-ordered cooking-fire, or wasted on a man suddenly absorbed in microscopic examination of an invisible thorn embedded in the sole of his foot, but such inattentiveness is not overtly rude. One cannot castigate this sort of absent-mindedness. One must simply ‘chew the teeth inwardly’, or try a more winsome appeal to straying minds. Auditory withdrawal is also made from a speaker who persistently pursues an unacceptable argument, leaving the bore high and dry with neither support nor legitimate cause for complaint.
Public decisions cover a wide field. Such matters as the allocation of wintering-ranges among households about to retreat into isolation during the seasonal dispersal of the band, or the location of the next campsite are obvious inclusions.
A domestic dispute could perhaps be seen as properly concerning only the spouses and their close kin, yet the band as a whole may become involved over an issue of principle or if the other members feel themselves threatened or otherwise affected by the behaviour of one of the spouses. In a community as small and as intimate as the band, the parameter of affairs of public policy intrudes far into what a larger-scale society would regard as the domain of private, or personal decision.
That which is not public is permitted to be private by a public conspiracy not to proclaim cognizance. There can be little of any individual's doings which escapes the vigilance, close concern and profound insight of his band fellows. The field of band decisions therefore includes much that is not considered as public in more complex, clearly differentiated social systems.
Interpersonal conflicts and transgressions of norms commonly involve other band members in their settlement which is attained by judgement, arbitration and reconciliatory good offices preceded by discussion and decision. At the same time the scope for public decision-making is restricted in other directions by the narrow range of effective choice of action imposed on the band by the combination of environmental factors, rudimentary technology and the small scale of the social universe. …
… Band decisions are arrived at by consensus — a term in common use but without much common meaning. Consensus is not unanimity of opinion or decision. In much the same way as egalitarian does not mean equality, consensus is not a synonym of democracy. Democracy is about equality of opportunity of access to positions of legitimate authority and the limitations this imposes on the exercise of power. It is an organizational framework for the making and execution of decisions.
Consensus is arrived at after a series of judgements made by people who all have access to a common pool of information. As the etymology of the word suggests, it is arrived at when people consent to judgement and decision. They may not all actually possess the information and may choose not to make the judgements themselves, but the opportunity must always be available. The shared information includes the criteria of judgement — the values, the objectives and the differentials in weight and priority accorded these, plus a common knowledge (or belief) about the logical and causal relationships between items of information. …
… a consensus policy can only survive if a society is stable and free of the stress of radical internal conflict and that there is a need for other, widely extended areas of voluntary cooperation and agreement to buffer the specifically political aspects of the system from disruptive pressures. So, not only must there be access to a common pool of information but also there must be a shared set of standards of interpretation and evaluation of that information.
Consensus, can only operate as a mode of decision-making where there is general agreement about ‘the rules of the game' - about the way decisions are made, the bases for making them, and what the foreseeable extent and nature of the consequences of decisions shall be for which individuals. …
… Consensus is reached by a process of examination of the various proffered courses of action and rejection of all but one of them. It is a process of attrition of alternatives other than the one to which there remains no significant opposition. That one, then, is the one which is adopted. The fact that it is the band as a whole which decides (i.e. that each adult and near-adult member has the opportunity to participate in the process) is both necessary and sufficient to legitimize what is decided and to make the decision binding on all who are concerned with, and affected by, it.
This does not mean that consensus is arrived at by a mere sorting process which always identifies a single course of action among the proffered alternatives as being the correct one. If this were so then consensus would, indeed, be synonymous with unanimity. That it is not is because consensus is reached when there remains no significant opposition to the particular proposal. To explain what is meant by 'significant opposition' in this context it is necessary to consider the problems of coercion and of power. …
… As political means coercion and consensus are apparently antithetical: the element of consent in consensus negates coercion, and vice versa. Furthermore, the egalitarian nature of G/wi society makes improbable a political style in which an individual or faction coerces the rest of the band into withdrawing opposition to a proposal.
There is no means by which anybody could acceptably distinguish himself or herself from the others to rationalize the assumption of the differential needed to coerce them.
It must also be considered that the openness of the band as a social unit would eventually bring about the defeat of a forceful faction when the other members exercised their freedom to move to another band in much the same way as auditory withdrawal is used to adjourn debate when feelings run too high.
To move to another band would be to meet coercion with coercion. The loss of a substantial portion of the membership would be costly to those who decamp, but would prove ruinous to those remaining. It is also true that the band has the potential means of bringing a delinquent member or faction to heel by withdrawing the normal social facilities of cooperation, protection and fellowship. But, as I have indicated above, these threats make no sensewhile the conventions of consensus politics are adhered to.
My argument is that the threats to withdraw members from the band, or to withhold benefits of the band commonwealth from members, constitutes coercion to uphold and abide by those conventions — coercion not to coerce, if you will. In the circumstances of hunter-gatherers in the Central Kalahari such threats carry far greater danger than the mere use of physical force. So coercion, although never explicit, is present as a concept of the G/wi political system but functions as a deterrent in nascent form to ensure compliance with a style of political action from which force and ‘severe deprivations and indulgences’ are excluded.
The lack of general agreement among political scientists on the precise definition of power is perhaps a reflection of the diversity of styles of exercising power and the subtlety of some who wield it.
A Weberian concept of power as the capacity of an actor to impose his or her will on others is deficient in the context of a consensus polity and leads to the paradox that, as there is no locus of power, such a polity has no authority. This is, of course, nonsense for it is the very fact of consensus which lends authority to the decision. …
… Although a G/wi audience enjoys a bit of cut-and-thrust between orators this is no more than entertainment incidental to the progress of discussion. Scoring points may be fun for everybody but the victim, but is irrelevant to the decision … band decisions are not the spoils of victory of the member who devises the craftiest stratagems to discountenance opponents.
Power lies in what the band judges to be competent assessment of the gains and costs of following a particular course of action and the entries in that book-keeping include not only the material benefits but also the social balance-sheet.
Power lies in the ability to persuade a body of people privy to the same information as that possessed by the actor. It comes through perceiving the mood of the band and by finding an acceptable pathway to the goal of consensus.
Thus an individual or group may use political creativity by conceding an objective at one level in the interests of achieving some other object at another level — gaining power later by forgoing it now. …
[MGH: So the ‘power’ or ‘authority’ lies in the coercive will of whole society?]
Unanimity may not exist at the time of consensus but those who did not actively promote the adopted proposal will, in the interests of band solidarity, convenience or some other consideration, not press their opposition. ‘Significant opposition’, then, is the dissent of one or more band members to whom the proposal is not acceptable, who feel themselves unable to live with it, and who are not prepared to concede the decision.
The style of band politics is facilitative, rather than forceful, seeking ways of getting things done, means of accommodating dissent and transposing discord into harmony without drowning out the dissenter’s distinctive melody. Leadership is authoritative, rather than authoritarian and what an individual strives for is cooperation in the activities he or she wishes to undertake. There is available a variety of means of gaining that cooperation and the exercise of political power and leadership are only two among them, to be resorted to when circumstances make these means the most suitable choice. Power and leadership are sought neither as ends in themselves nor as habitual attributes.
[END]
Bio (segments) curtesy of Perplexity
George Silberbauer was a prominent anthropologist born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1931. He pursued his education at several institutions, including the University of Stellenbosch, University of London, Gray’s Inn, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of South Africa. He completed his Ph.D. at Monash University in Australia.
Silberbauer’s career included serving in the South African Air Force and working as a District Commissioner and Bushman Survey Officer in Botswana (formerly the Bechuanaland Protectorate) from 1958 to 1965. During this time, he studied the G/wi people of the Central Kalahari Desert. He later became a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University and served as Director at the Koorie Research Centre.
His academic contributions include significant publications such as Hunter and Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert (1981), which provides an in-depth study of the G/wi people. Silberbauer’s work extended to various fields, including socio-ecology, government and indigenous peoples, conservation, ethics, and disaster management. Beyond his academic pursuits, he was involved in community service as a firefighter and consultant for fire management systems in Victoria, Australia.
George Silberbauer’s military background had a significant impact on his academic career. His experience in the South African Air Force likely equipped him with skills in discipline, leadership, and strategic thinking, which were beneficial in his later roles as a District Commissioner and Bushman Survey Officer in Botswana. These positions involved complex administrative and ethnographic responsibilities, requiring a structured and methodical approach, traits often honed in military service.
Furthermore, his military background may have influenced his ability to conduct detailed ethnographic studies under challenging conditions, such as those he performed with the G/wi people of the Central Kalahari Desert from 1958 to 1966. His role involved not only research but also making recommendations for dealing with socio-political issues concerning the San people, tasks that would benefit from the organizational and problem-solving skills developed during his military service.
Social Science Files displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age