Niklas Luhmann wrote:
Segmentary Societies
We are insufficiently informed about primitive, archaic societies. Our knowledge about tribal (or segmentary) societies comes essentially from colonized territories or from areas that have in other ways been influenced by advanced civilizations. What is certain, however, is that segmentary differentiation need not necessarily have been the initial form of human community and has not dominated history to the exclusion of others as far as we know. It is an evolutionary advance of a particular type, namely, the effectuated primacy of a certain form of system differentiation.
Segmentary differentiation arises when society is divided into basically similar subsystems, which mutually constitute environments for one another. This presupposes family formation, in whatever form. The family constitutes an artificial entity through the natural differences of age and gender, and does so by incorporating these differences. There was society even before there were families. Rather than society being put together out of families, the family constitutes a form of social differentiation.
The simplest form requires a system with only two levels: families living apart from one another and society, which in this case we can also call a horde. Simple demographic processes suffice for genesis and reproduction. When population growth produces too many people, the system can reproduce itself by division and resettlement. [This naturally presupposes that ecological conditions can absorb multiplication, that enough land is hence available. However, this does not mean that ecological constraints are the only cause of larger systems coming into being, with the concomitant consequences (hierarchy formation, the separation of roles, ritualization). There are also likely to have been social structural grounds—e.g., better information gathering and risk distribution in hunter societies.] The reconstitution of such forms in the aftermath of disasters is also possible without difficulty, and this gives societies with little control over nature and low defensive capacities a sort of reproduction guarantee. Larger entities with a three-level structure of families, villages, and tribes can choose whether to define their unity primarily in terms of kinship or of the area inhabited. All attempts to reduce segmentation to one of these principles can be considered to have failed. We mostly find mixed forms with corresponding earth cults and ancestor cults, as well as greater spatial mobility of kinship groups, or kinship mobility, for instance, in the form of adoption and naming, depending on whether the territorial principal or the kinship principle dominates. Since kinship (in contrast to factual residence) is symbolically manipulable, combinations are easy to make, and the descendants of immigrants will be able to engineer their way into the kinship group after a time. The form of segmentary differentiation remains constant, and descent, as long as it goes beyond the family living together, is not much more than a symbolic construction of membership-nonmembership in the segments of society.
Segmentary differentiation presupposes that the position of individuals in the social order is fixed and cannot be changed by performance. This is the basis for a multiplication of social entities, which can no doubt always be translated into the individuals composing them. Within this framework, there are nevertheless differences in individual reputation and even changes in clan and family membership by adoption. What is excluded, however, is the integration of individuals in the course of a career. Permanently ascribed status is the precondition for all further elaborations, for symmetries and asymmetries, for dualistic oppositions, for ritual functions, and for all possible luxuriating supplements, which in this manner always have a fixed reference to individuals. Ascribed status is a rule for an order in which people know one another.
Segmentary differentiation is likely to have been a precondition for the transition to regularly practiced agriculture, the so-called Neolithic revolution. Probably the most important change in human history, this revolution took place “equifinally” in many places around the globe. The causes of this transition from a life of plenty to a life of travail and risk are unknown: it is very unlikely that the possibility of feeding more people served as an “attractor”. Even in societies without clear family formation, we find a sort of garden economy, but agriculture on a larger scale would have required the division of land and of labor to be able to rely on appropriate social structures. Only the politically enforced labor of later societies restored partial independence, but this required surplus production in agriculture.
The process of segmentary differentiation can be applied to its own result, and can thus be recursively repeated. Through families and settlements, tribes and possibly tribal confederations can then develop. However, this growth, which may ultimately reach hundreds of thousands of people, diminishes the communication density of the entity. Finally, it operates only on occasion, above all, in the event of conflict between subunits, and otherwise has an only symbolical presence. The smallest units continue to be responsible for meeting all the normal needs of daily life and maintaining cooperation with neighbors. The advantage is that even larger groupings can be described on the pattern of the difference between mini-units that can be experienced every day. They may have a name and an origin myth pointing to a country or ancestors; but any structural self-description of the societal system going beyond this is superfluous in view of the mere repetition of the differentiation principle. No change in ordering principle occurs for greater aggregates. The functions of amalgamations diminish with their increasing size. In borderline cases, even the “tribe” is no more than the overall area within which linguistic comprehension is possible. Ethnic denominations remain fuzzy and variable. [Fuzziness is a problem above all for ethnologists.] If need be, society can abandon comprehensive groupings and shrink to a smaller format without losing its ability to survive; and it can also cope with the loss of many segments through famine, war, or secession. The remnants still have the possibility of making an almost unconditional new start. [Remarkably, political anthropology, in particular, has taken an interest in this phenomenon, because it is in search of a predecessor of the modern state and cannot find any.] To distinguish it from hierarchies, Aidan Southall called this type of societal structure “pyramidal”. [Aidan W. Southall, Alur Society: A Study in Processes and Types of Domination (Cambridge, 1956)]
The main function of larger groupings is to organize support in the event of conflict — and to weaken it. Normative expectations are, after all, counterfactual expectations; they are expectations that, not adjusting to disappointments, are upheld. [Should be maintained, we could say, given that a normative expectation is normatively expected.] This is scarcely possible without the prospect of support in the event of conflict. However, tying the normativization of expectations to the prospects of support sets narrow limits to the specification of expectations (and thus to lawmaking). For how can others be expected to offer support for highly specific expectations and in correspondingly rare situations? This makes it necessary, first, to generalize the sense of expectations and, second, to develop motives for support among people not affected. This is done by appealing to group solidarity and by broadening it through the pyramidal nesting of society. [An alternative is the dichotomization of a tribe into halves whose difference structures the conflict.] But this again leads evolution into a dead end, to a normalization of the improbable that no longer suffices for further evolution. For this order of willingness to provide support is directed more toward arbitration than toward legal evolution; it is thus more concerned with the immediate consequences of conflict resolution than with long-term effects; and it then blocks the specification of normative expectations through self-interest and indifference on the part of those required to provide support. The only way out of this dead end is to organize political support for disappointed legal expectations.
It seems that this difficulty of establishing legal norms in the form of fixed decision rules has to do with the multifunctional use of existing institutions. For multifunctionality means participating in widely differing sorts of situation. This in turn prevents the universalization and specification of the properties that define situations. Experience and memory dominate the properties of situations. Cases then differ so much that no overall decision rules can be abstracted out. Not even the structures that control the differentiation of society (above all descent) can be translated into a fixed definition of legal positions. This is not due, for example, to the “inadequacy” of procedures directed primarily toward the opportunistic settlement of disputes. Indeed, these very procedures are adequate for a society that, because of such multifunctional contextualization, is unable to work out structurally adequate decision rules. The path to differentiating a legal system is blocked, and here as elsewhere any further evolution is improbable.
The difficulty of abstracting rules and distinguishing between rules and actions are elements of a far more general condition of communication. As long as writing is not available, all communication has to be face to face. It can rely on properties of the situation visible and known to those present, and that therefore do not have to be mentioned; indeed, they cannot even be specially mentioned, because doing so would provide no information and would thus be manifestly superfluous. Modes of expression are employed that are permeated with what linguists call indexical expressions. This saves and prevents generalizations. Situations experienced one after the other are as such collectively comprehensible. The schemata or scripts can change from situation to situation without this being felt to be inconsistent. [Notions like collective mind or collective consciousness, associated with Durkheim’s sociology, come up against their limits in this context. One is more likely to become involved with them the less it prejudices the next situation.]
Segmentary societies, too, show tendencies to increase their systemic complexity. But they point in another direction. The picture painted so far, which provides only for differences of size and foundation principle (kinship, territory), becomes much more complex as soon as we take ascribed differentiations into account. They can include marriage restrictions and their framework. Society tolerates no uncertainty about family formation in the next generation. Age groups, men’s houses, or other quasi-corporative organizations may also be differentiated, and forms of institutionalized conflict management developed, or roles differentiated, under certain circumstances with roles (priest, chief ) becoming hereditary in families for whom this is a distinction. Such additional differentiations change nothing in the basic structure of segmentary differentiation, but adapt it to the problems that arise. They still have to rely on compatibility with segmentary differentiation, but they make the overall pattern of tribal societies extraordinarily complex by comparison. The impression is that, regardless of demographic and other environmental conditions, experiments are being made with forms of which few will survive the transition to other forms of differentiation.
Since segmentary differentiation divides society into similar subsystems, their demarcation must have been a particularly difficult problem; for on the other side of the boundary, in other families or other villages, people do not basically live any differently. This could explain why special value was placed on symbolizing boundaries — partly by marking, partly by designating special places (e.g., for barter), partly through the symbolic design of transitions or through the recognition of special status for strangers as guests. Even after the advent of stratification or town-country differences, spatial and temporal localities were used to symbolize differences as long as the basic structure for all forms of differentiation lay in family economies (households). Even in more ancient Greek culture, we find elaborated boundary symbolism and a competent divinity, Hermes, who was at home on Olympus and in the underworld and called boundaries to mind by breaching them in his capacity as the god of merchants and thieves. The symbolism of sedentariness or boundary-crossing also defined the boundary of the sacred, and with its public visibility and social acceptance, it will have performed functions that were later assumed by the civil law institutions of property and contract.
Just as the subsystems of these societies were defined in terms of kinship relations and/or territoriality, societies themselves saw their own boundaries in terms of the people and the territories that belonged to them. In this sense, society consisted of people whose individual particularity was known and, as recent research has shown, was highly respected. [This also refutes the thesis of the growing individualization of the human being in the course of development.] Personality was accorded with name, responsiveness, and the capacity to assume obligations. It was a function of social relations, and increased in proportion to the contribution made by smaller segments.
[“A man is a member of a political group of any kind in virtue of his nonmembership of other groups of the same kind. He sees them as groups and their members see him as a member of a group, and his relations with them are controlled by the structural distance between the groups concerned. But a man does not see himself as a member of that same group in so far as he is a member of a segment of it, which stands outside of it and is opposed to other segments of it”, E.E. Evans-Pritchard writes in The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford, 1940).]
[In our terms, this is to say that a Roman is not an Italian qua Roman; an Italian is not a European qua Italian; a white man is not a human being qua white man. In segmentary societies, the individual does not belong to a comprehensive system because he belongs to a family that belongs to it but because he has to conduct relations with other families and groups to which he does not belong, and in these relations cannot be sustained by his own family alone. A clearer demonstration can scarcely be offered that the unity of society is constituted by differentiation and not primarily by external boundaries.]
We can recognize a Dinka without having an idea about the totality of all Dinkas, just as we can distinguish a red wine glass from a white wine glass without any notion of the totality of all red wine glasses. A being who could not be defined socially was not a person but an alien, presumably hostile, being, and there was no group concept of humanity that could absorb this. We still see the problem in the reasons for which later societies had to develop a sort of law of hospitality, an aliens law, finally, a ius gentium [law of nations]. Personality was apparently accorded where double contingency was perceived and had to be regulated. This largely means that personality correlated with possibilities for communication. On the one hand, however, there were strangers toward whom one could develop no expectations, and with whom one could accordingly not communicate. Then everything was possible and everything was allowed. And on the other hand, there were communication partners, hence relationships of double contingency, in areas that we would now exclude: gods and spirits, the dead (especially family members), certain plants and animals, indeed, even inanimate objects. Personality came into being wherever the behavior of others was imagined to be chosen and to be communicatively open to influence through one’s own behavior. Early societies seem to have experimented with the relationship between societal boundaries and communicatively manipulable contingency, and only modern society has made the two congruent.
[MGH there follow 5 pages on ‘magic’, ‘religion’, ‘reciprocity’, which are omitted here]
Segmentary societies with all their institutions, with their possibilities of expanding and shrinking, with the magic parallelization of causality, and with reciprocity as a form of resymmetrizing temporal and social asymmetries, are geared to remain the way they are. This holds true for their own semantics, but it becomes fully clear only when we observe them to discover what they cannot themselves observe. No other order is conceivable for them, and they must see any move to introduce one as wrong, as a deviation, as dangerous, to be avoided and combated. Thus any announcement of a claim to leadership (in the direction of political differentiation) meets with resistance or at least with latent hostility, which is easy to organize. Differences in wealth and rank between families cannot be prevented with certainty from developing; where they do so, they may give birth to patron-client relations, which prepare the ground for the political centralization of leadership roles. But even if this happens (and there is a great deal of evidence to this effect), it does not yet mean that leadership roles are vested with decision-making and sanctioning powers. Where this takes place in “chiefly societies”, we can perhaps speak of the evolutionary restabilization of a prepared differentiation. At any rate, there are not yet any large groups of equal rank such as we find in stratified societies.
In the terminology of systems theory, we call the relatively rapid transition of a system to another principle of stability a catastrophe. In precisely this sense, evolution, if it affects the form of differentiation, leads to a societal catastrophe. The development of societies that gives primacy to center-periphery differentiation and/or stratification is such a catastrophe, mitigated, however, by the fact that rural life continues under the conditions of segmentary differentiation and few functions are transferred to the city or to a ruling stratum. In such cases, we speak of “peasant societies”, and as regards country dwellers, there is even talk of one-class societies.
Given the present state of knowledge, it is difficult to find a satisfactory causal explanation for the development of stratification. There will presumably have been various, “equifinal” initial situations; and we would then have to ask where a given egalitarian, segmentarily differentiated social order is sensitive to radical change. Older theory had explained the transition from segmentary to stratified societies in terms of the demographic growth of the population. [And clearly under the influence of the economic theory of the division of labor, which requires a sufficient scale.] In the light of the empirical evidence, this cannot be upheld. And even if we take not the size of the population but its density into account, a connection between this factor and the development of stratification can be empirically disproved. Research is similarly uncertain about other supposedly decisive causes that had been considered, such as ecological diversity or agriculture. The importance of trade in externally produced prestige goods has recently been discussed as a possible cause and as a factor in stabilizing differences in rank. This view fits in well with the question of how the stabilization mechanisms of segmentary societies can be blocked. Prestige goods can neither be distributed egalitarianly nor destroyed as surplus in ritual celebrations. Moreover, they can only be acquired in long-distance trade, and access to this trade is easy to restrict. Finally, they can be used within society better than a larger amount of self-produced goods to symbolize higher status (that there is good archaeological evidence for them may also have played a practical role in research). This concept naturally presupposes that in a broader context there is already a sort of center-periphery differentiation even in segmentary societies that affects the production of and trade in prestige goods on the periphery. Renouncing a causal explanation, we turn to the structural problems of segmentary societies. This makes it easier to identify the points of departure for reversing the order, whatever the concrete causes for activating these possibilities might be.
Perhaps the most important starting point is the reversibility of situations, which is presupposed by the similarity principle of segmentation and by the reciprocity rule. It can be cancelled out by armed force superimposing one ethnic stratum on another. But autochthonous developments are also conceivable. Some families become much wealthier in terms of land, goods, and followers. Whoever expects help from them can no longer repay “like by like”. He pays with recognition of the difference in rank, as it were, by a perpetuated debt of gratitude, which then motivates him to accept commensurate duties and to pledge obedience. [Ethnology offers the special category of “rank societies”, which, although they have already known generations of enduring differences of rank and wealth between families, have nevertheless not yet consolidated the difference in the form of stratification into differences in way of life, of equality of birth, etc.] An increasing burden of information and decisions can be handled by established differences in rank, with activity in this field both giving expression to and restabilizing the difference in rank. The system crosses a threshold beyond which only positive but not negative feedback now functions. Given the relevant preadaptive advances, this can happen very fast. [Others, too, have noticed that the term “sudden” is often applied to the history of the genesis of civilizations.] Deviations from similarity are no longer felt to be disturbing and consequently eliminated (e.g., through “celebrations” with destruction of surpluses); their advantages are discovered and developed, and legitimized by interpolating a history between the mythical age and the present. Difference in rank itself takes on the nature of the unspecific debt of gratitude applicable to many opportunities. Precisely the “unnaturalness” of the similarity premise, which is constantly put to the test by a wide range of influences, makes such a reversal to the opposing principle probable if it is not prevented. The transition is achieved by disinhibition of the inhibition of a natural development, and it thus assumes the relatively drastic form of structural change.
Segmentary societies, too, have abundant differences in rank (e.g., on grounds of age or imbalances in reciprocity relations) and develop more or less stereotyped forms for giving expression to them in interaction. Differences in rank, for instance, between chiefly families and other families are in themselves, however, not stable evolutionary advances. They may be determined, for example, by control of trade in prestige goods or through production relations, and may be abandoned when these conditions change. At any rate, they do not constitute a step that would normally lead to a stratified society. They tend rather to prepare the differentiation of specifically political roles and functions. [This is the usual understanding of “chiefly societies”.] In any case, we can say that even tribal societies experiment with the recognition of differences in rank and a corresponding deformation of reciprocity relations. In stratified societies, such forms can be adopted and further developed as preadaptive advances. Initially incomprehensible behavior does not have to be reinvented. However, a transition to using rank as a form of system differentiation presupposes that an upper stratum differentiates out and a subsystem of society forms in which internal reactions are handled differently from interactions with the intrasocietal environment of the system. When this happens, no kinship relations are recognized any longer between upper and lower strata, not even distant ones. This makes it necessary to marry only within one’s own social stratum (endogamy). And then forms of deference, the recognition of superiority or precedence, can be further differentiated depending on whether they concern members of one’s own stratum or are to be handled across class boundaries (it can be extremely unsuitable for a peasant to treat the son of his lord the way this son treats his father).
In any case, the use of rank difference as a form for system differentiation revolutionizes society — even if the differentiation out of an upper stratum initially changes nothing in how the lower stratum lives. A number of occasions can be imagined that bring a segmentary society to the brink of such radical structural change. One is based on the redundancy of possible contacts to be found in even the smallest society. This produces sociometric patterns with corresponding dissimilarities. Some members are more popular, more capable, are more in demand as partners than others, and therefore have more chance than others to choose among their contacts and to demand something even for their willingness to make contact, for example: recognition of their opinions or unreciprocated cooperativeness. Leadership structures in very simple societies appear to be based on this “star mechanism”. This will normally be a short-term opportunity that is endangered simply by being taken. It is also conceivable for a chieftain to hold the position for life, and, more rarely for his son to be given preferential access to the role, up to and including heritability of the office in certain families. Sometimes the status of the chiefly family is established by its successfully claiming sole access to the hitherto unoccupied place that symbolizes the unity of the tribal society, for example, in the form of a common ancestor or founder. This has frequently led to chiefly societies vesting such an office with powers (but generally not with the power to make collectively binding decisions) without developing social stratification.
A second mechanism can be described as “parasitical”. Precisely the prevailing customs and practices can display the advantages of deviation. Every order is based on exclusion, and a symmetrical order is based on the exclusion of asymmetries. This offers an opportunity that could not arise at all without distinct exclusions, namely, the possibility of discovering and using ordering advantages in what is excluded. It is well-structured orders that show up the opposite — not similarity but dissimilarity — and offer, if put to the test, the opportunity for bifurcation, the chance to embark on a different path that, once taken, can make irreversible history. Parasites can thus develop that take advantage of such possibilities, quite in the sense proposed by Michel Serres [Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris, 1980)]. A parasitical order comes into being that, almost unnoticed, transmutes from exception or deviation into primary order — only to become parasitizable in its turn. “Evolution produces the parasite, which in turn produces evolution”.
All this merely names structure-dependent possibilities, a constant noise, as it were, on the margins of a societal order that is firmly held in the framework of segmentary differentiation. The transition to another differentiation form requires, first, preadaptive advances on this basis. But there must also be causes, such as those discussed in the (unfortunately misnamed) “theories on the origin of the state”. One of these circumstances could be the violence in late archaic societies that increased with productivity, which demonstrated the weakness of conflict management in segmentary societies, as well as their inferiority to societies already militarily organized. For further development or, more precisely, for the selection of societies amenable to evolution, there are then two fundamentally different possibilities: stratification can develop under the principle of kinship if higher strata manage to impose endogamy. Under the similarly widespread territoriality principle, dissimilarities in the spatial order can arise, differentiation into urban center and periphery. Setting very different priorities, all advanced civilizations use both principles, just as segmentary societies could not do without order on the basis of kinship connections or the spatio-territorial definition of their entities.
The Source:
Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Volume 2, translated by Rhodes Barrett, originally published in German under the title Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Band 2, Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1997, Stanford University Press 2013 [pp. 27-32, 38-42]
NB For ease of reading some notable narrative footnotes or references to authors are included directly alongside the corresponding text using the bracket format [ … ] in italics. The entire section on ‘Segmentary Society’ — above — is copiously referenced with well-known English-language anthropological literature of the twentieth century.
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.