On human socio-cultural evolution.
We just cannot base our characterisations of human society only on the specific configurations that Modern european (or derived) countries take. This modern "Western" social organisation is perhaps the most peculiar and "different" than any others known to exist or have existed. And yet it has important features in common with all the others, including the seemingly primitive hunters and gatherers. That is why sociologist emile Durkheim, and later sociologist Lloyd Warner, decided that many of the fundaments of human society must be studied in the social and religious organisation of Australian tribes. While Durkheim did it bibliographically, Warner actually went to live among the Murngin of North Australia like an anthropologist. But in no way can it be held that the Australian. Aborigines are anything like an "evolutionary frozen" society, it just take it as a society very different to the one we are generalising from (the western).
In anthropological thought in general, the metasystemic transition from predominantly biological evolutionary selection principles to predominantly socio-cultural evolution is subtle. The principles operating in this metasystemic transition have to take into account the emergence of language as the medium in which our humanity is acted out, and of the incest taboo. Together these constitute the first major MST giving rise to human history itself. Humberto Maturana has put together the properties of human society that emerged with language and brought forth a new world of interactions and consensual co-ordination. Human social evolution must be framed in terms of the properties that emerged with our humanity.
The other principle, the incest taboo, has been little considered outside of anthropological circles. The outstanding modern theorist on the incest taboo and concomitant social regulatory properties, is Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969 first published in French in 1949). This taboo is recognised in every known human society, including the modern capitalist, but is not known to operate systematically in any animal society. In its basic form it is an expression by consensual observers of a distinction between those with whom one can mate and with whom one cannot. Its emergence was intimately related to the emergence of language, and both interacted to trigger self-categorising in the interacting groups to construct social organisations based in kinship. It is not possible to empirically determine how or even when this occurred, Lévi-Strauss puts it at the "interface between nature and culture" – its universality suggests biological selection, but the variability of its expression across human society suggests cultural selection. It is a fundamental constraint for the emergence of a compound system which co-ordinates the co-ordination of recurrent events taking place in different locations by language expressed standardised patterns and rules. The incest taboo is an indicator of the distinction "I (we)/ you (and others)" and with a small number of additional contextual distinctions (sex (a biological distinction) child of, parent of, , and often residence (with me/ with others) give rise to quite complex organisational systems. But just the distinction of the sexes and the distinction between those of the other sex with whom one can and cannot have sexual relations, are sufficient to give rise to political organisation based in alliances between groups of different membership.
In other words, the incest taboo is a constraint, which constrains the biological sex and reproductive distinctions, that when expressed in language relations, give rise to a system of distributed control for the social group. The groups of people pertaining to the different kinship categories vary greatly from social group to social group. In modern european systems the term for "mother" (madre, mere, etc.) designates just the one person, who is or has the role of, one’s biological origin, and equally so for the eskimos. In anthropological slang most europeans, and especially so the english systems, are said to have an "eskimo kinship terminology" system. Other systems can group large numbers of women into the category of "mother", mother herself, mother’s sisters, mothers’ maternal ("matrilateral") cousins, and more distant matrilateral relatives of mother. The kinship distinctions are usually mapped into crosscutting categories which spell out alliance and residential criteria: these are known as "moieties", "sections", subsections", and others of symbolic ("totemic") filiation.
The above is very much oversimplified, as anthropologist readers will have quickly noticed, but it gives an idea of of distributed control in practice, I will give one example to allow the argument to be more easily followed. A "standard" case is that of the so called "Kariera" system. In this system all people, are associated with one of 4 non localised sections A1, A2, B1, B2, and these into 2 moieties (I don't want to say what the A, B and 1, 2 refer to -- they can be thought of as two sorts of social orderings, but all four are distinguished in language). From any individual's point of view (as a member of one of the sections) the 18 to 22 kin terms used are distributed unambiguously between the sections. Legitimate marriages are specified (A1 marries B2, etc.) as is the section of the next generation: a child of an A1 is an A2 and an A2’s child is an A1 again. The sections also incorporate residence rules. In this way, many distinct actions and relationships are co-ordinated over great distances. Not all Australian systems are "Kariera", many are quite different, but there are an underlying group of principles which are common to all and permit coherencies between groups thousands of km apart.
Different systems construct these categories in different ways, but most can be represented by semantic rules and/ or by mathematical formulations. The systems characterised by kinship formulated control that have attracted most anthropological attention are the Australian aboriginal societies. Mathematician Andre Weil first applied group theory for the analysis of Australian systems in an appendix to to the mentioned work of Lévi-Strauss. Later work by Kemeny, Snell and Thompson (1957) refining Weil’s formulation gave rise to the general field of mathematical anthropology. Some anthropologists, myself included, hold that kinship and social organisation constituted the medium for mathematical abstractive thought in Australia. They use a stick to draw models of their systems in the sand for anthropologists and other interested people.
Australian systems, as perceived and described by western colonists, whether missionaries or anthropologists, cannot in any way be said to express a "primitive and early" use of kinship. They are the result of some 50,000 years of evolution in Australia itself. But, because they conserved a hunter-and-gatherer subsistence system in such a concerted way and over an area so vast, they are generally conceived of as being "nearest" to human origins than other systems. Their cave painting art has all the appeal of the upper Palaeolithic european cave art. Their tools are broadly similar to those of the early europeans. But there is no justification for holding that the complexities of their social organisation are also characteristic of those europeans. However a case can be made that the bases of their social organisation has something in common with those early europeans. For one thing at the level of human organisation social hierarchy is completely absent. There are no institutionalised decision takers. The needs for rapid decision making in the high variety Australian environment are carried out heterarchically, often in collaboration with an impermanent "council of elders".
A control system formulated in kinship and residence is a distributed control system, correlations occur in the activities of classes of people distributed over large areas. While the systems vary a lot in detail over the continent there are mechanisms for translating the category of a person from one part into the categories of another group at a distant location. In fact it can be held that social organisation at a continental level functioned as a distributed parallel intelligence since knowledge was propagated throughout the continent in a number of ways that range from ritual pilgrimage cycles, to trade, to "law breakers" who had to flee (romances between two people of the "wrong" section are recorded).
However as social systems, these Australian systems do not express formal closure (in fact, no form of social system can be closed) and as such are not static. The structure of the distributed control is in constant change over the generations. What is observed now (i.e. recorded since the British invasion and colonisation) is the result of perhaps 50,000 years of evolution in Australia. The structure of the universes, or world views, distinguished by the participant-observers in these systems are extremely complex and varied, as are the distinctions made in the hunting and gathering action sequences or processes.
But most important here, is the demonstrated ability of the aborigines to preserve a system of distributed control over so many millennia, and thus to avoid any socio-political control hierarchy on a continental scale. A lot of social scientists conjecture that the aborigines deliberately self-steered themselves to avoid hierarchization. They knew of agricultural activity from their maritime visits to the Indonesian islands, New Guinea and the Phillipines, but made no systematic attempts to introduce it. They were also frequently visited by Chinese merchants from whom they could have obtained appropriate seeds, but they did not. This might have been due to an association made between the having agriculture and the losing of distributed regulation (their freedom) – farmers work longer hours than do hunters-and-gathers. But, if so, the decision making and self steering would have been due to a powerful parallel processing system with distributed intelligence and not to individuals. The latter can usually be corrupted. (Aborigines still detest agriculture although they do like herding stock).
Finally I will mention a third distinction that Lévi-Strauss (1970) associates with the transition to humanity. All human societies cook red meat (and many other foods) for eating. That is, they use fire, or other forms of heat, to produce physico-chemical transformations in "nature" to fit with the requirements of "culture".
Lévi-Strauss distinguished the Australian systems and the others scattered through the world that are organised by distributed kinship control, from another class of kinship regulated societies in which political and economic hierarchy can be constructed. Just how this transition can ocurr can be pieced together, and though it may have to do with environmental closing off of certain resources (Wolf 1982) this new MST should be studied case by case where it occurs. However, once it occurs in a particular group, distributed control is greatly reduced, hierarchical control emerges, and the Red Queen and related principles become primary instruments for an accelerated evolutionary cultural selection.
I hope that the present MST evolves in such a way that distributed intelligence and control can re-emerge by means of informational and other technologies in some way analogous to the kinship control of early human society.
Bibliography
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
The elementary Structures of Kinship. Beacon Press, Boston, 1969
The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology: I, Jonathan Cape, London 1970
Wolf, eric
europe and the People Without History, University of California, Berkeley 1982.
