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The Concept of Evolution and Early State Formation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Gebhard Geiger
Gebhard Geiger*
Affiliation:
Hohenzollernplatz 8, Munich 40, Federal Republic of Germany
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Extract

The emergence of the state and similar forms of large-scale, stratified society from the matrix of primitive egalitarian social relations poses a problem sui generis for political anthropology. On the one hand, since the Neolithic, hierarchical stratification and political domination have evolved in a relatively short time from the patterns of kinship bonds and ephemeral leadership characteristic of primitive society (Service, 1975; Carneiro, 1978). On the other hand, the extent of the division of labor and of hierarchical stratification in even the most primitive corporate political groups is significantly greater than that found in egalitarian bands and tribes. This difference lends support to very specific explanations such as the theories of cataclysmic sociocultural change of political anthropology (Service, 1975:15).

Type
Articles and Commentaries
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , February 1985 , pp. 163 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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References

Notes

1. The present work has been sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Bonn. A previous draft of this article was presented to the XIIth World Congress of the International Political Science Association held in Rio de Janeiro in August 1982. The author wishes to thank the participants in the biopolitics panel sessions at the congress as well as Mario A. di Gregorio, Darwin College, Cambridge. Their interest in his work, comments, and criticisms have been very helpful in preparing the final version of the article.Google Scholar

2. Concepts of hierarchical ranking, dominance aggression, and attention structure have been criticized vigorously because of this variability and occasional lack of stable observational coherence in dominance rankings (for critical review and discussion seeWittenberger, , 1981: 591) as well as lack of logical and empirical consistency in certain expositions of attention structure theory (Schubert, , 1983). Nonetheless, social dominance seems an almost indispensable analytic concept of theories of conventional intraspecific competition.Google Scholar