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Measurement of Cultural Complexity
... The "wide" sample ( Fig. 1a) is aimed to be maximally inclusive and thus excludes only societies with insu cient information, while the "conservative" sample ( Fig. 1b) excludes most questionable cases and should thus ensure a higher data quality. As a proxy measure for societal complexity, we used the number of distinct jurisdictional levels recognizable in the society, which classi es cultures on a scale from "acephalous", lacking any centralised political authority, to large "states'' organised into several administrative levels 22,23 . ...
... As a measure of the presence and intensity of agriculture (i.e. crop cultivation), we used the ve-scale ordinal variable "Agriculture" (SCCS151), de ned as "the degree of dependence upon agriculture for subsistence and the intensity with which it is practiced" 23 . For an alternative test, we binarized the variable to express the mere absence or presence of agriculture. ...
The size and complexity of human societies increased dramatically over the Holocene. Researchers have proposed a variety of potential drivers of this major transition 1–4 , including our predilection for alcoholic beverages 5–7 . This "drunk" hypothesis argues that drinking alcohol facilitated the rise of complex societies because it promotes social bonding and enhances human creativity ⁵ . However, systematic cross-cultural evidence for the claim is lacking. Here we test this hypothesis with a global sample of 186 largely non-industrial societies ⁸ . We find a positive (albeit modest) relationship between the presence of indigenous alcoholic beverages and the level of political complexity, even after controlling for several potential confounders, including common ancestry, spatial proximity, environmental productivity and agricultural intensity. Furthermore, we find that the largest effect of alcohol on political complexity is in less integrated societies, such as “acephalous” societies and “simple chiefdoms”. Our results support the idea that group-level social benefits of alcohol tended to outweigh its disruptive effects, at least in the case of traditional low-alcohol beverages, and thus positively contributed to the evolution of human societies.
... These configurations of practitioner types are strongly correlated with subsistence and socio-political conditions (Winkelman 1986a). A Religious Practitioner Configurations variable representing the four categories of practitioner configurations (1-4 Types) depicted in Figure 1 was screened against the SCCS Social Complexity variables (CosSci v149-v158, Murdock and Provost 1973), with the variables with significant correlations entered into an autocorrelation multiple regression analysis. The independently significant variables were: Agriculture (v151) as a major means of subsistence; Political Integration beyond the local community (v157d345); and Social Stratification (classes or castes, v158d345). ...
... The original research found Mediums significantly predicted only by Political Integration beyond the local community (d345, r=.51). This relationship is confirmed here (multiple R 2 =.46), but there were no significant additional contributions to the regression from the other social complexity measures (Murdock and Provost 1973). The new analyses discovered that a warfare measure, Plunder including Captives for Slaves and Adoption (v912) was also individually significant and in multiple regression with Political Integration (multiple R 2 = .52). ...
This paper provides a method- and theory-focused assessment of religious behavior based on cross-cultural research that provides an empirically derived model as a basis for making inferences about ritual practices in the past through an ethnological analogy. A review of previous research provides an etic typology of religious practitioners and identifies their characteristics, selection-function features, the societal configurations of practitioners, and the social complexity features of the societies where they are found. New analyses reported here identify social predictors of the individual practitioner types in their relationships to subsistence and sociopolitical conditions (foraging, intensive agriculture, political integration, warfare, and community integration). These relations reveal the factors contributing to social evolution through roles of religious organization in the operation of cultural institutions. The discussion expands on the previous findings identifying fundamental forms of religious life in the relations of the selection processes for religious practitioner positions to their principal professional functions. These relationships reveal three biogenetic structures of religious life involving (1) alterations of consciousness used in healing rituals, manifested in a cultural universal of shamanistic healers; (2) kin inheritance of leadership roles providing a hierarchical political organization of agricultural societies, manifested in priests who carry out collective rituals for agricultural abundance and propitiation of common deities; and (3) attribution of evil activities, manifested in witches who are persecuted and killed in subordinated groups of societies with political hierarchies and warfare. These systematic cross-cultural patterns of types of ritualists and their activities provide a basis for inferring biogenetic bases of religion and models for interpreting the activities, organization, and beliefs regarding religious activities of past societies. Cases are analyzed to illustrate the utility of the models presented.
... With these reservations in mind, there remain 'large-scale patterns of em pirical evidence' that have been investigated and characterized by Steward and White, and more quantitatively by Freeman (1957), Tatje and Naroll (1973), Carneiro (1973), Marsh (1967), and Murdock and Provost (1973). Their inves tigations have been aimed more at establishing that there is an underlying variable which may be used to rank cultures as more or less complex. ...
... Tatje and Naroll (1973) provides a review of this study and compares the results with those obtained by Freeman, finding a high degree of rank correlation --.893 between the nineteen cultures used in both studies (Tatje and Naroll 1973: 774). Murdock and Provost (1973) also provides a cultural complexity measure. Theirs is based on ten variables, each of which is measured in terms of a fivelevel scale. ...
Many linguists have believed that there is no connection between culture and language structures. This study reviews some of the literature supporting vocabulary connections, hypotheses for other connections, and critical views of this type of hypothesis. Precisely such a connection is developed employing a functional view of language and grammaticization principles. Using a world-wide probability sample of forty-nine languages, an association between culture and the grammatical coding of deictics is tested and statistically found to be corroborated to a very significant extent. Suggestions are included on how some of the concepts used and developed in this study might be extended.
... Three measures were included in our analysis to account for variation due to subsistence practices. We included fixity of [63]) because it may influence alloparenting through the positive effects of sedentism on fertility [64], as well as food storage (SCCS v20 [65]), which can reduce the probability of daily food sharing [66] and may, therefore, lead to general reductions in the benefits of cooperation. To account for any clustering in our data otherwise not accounted for by the effects of fixity of residence and food storage, we also included primary subsistence mode (SCCS v820 [67]; see electronic supplementary material, table S1). ...
... A Bayesian multilevel phylogenetic regression model was fitted to the Bernoulli response of low or high allomaternal care, controlling for paternal care [54]. We included fixed effects for pPC1-pPC3 to assess our primary hypotheses, and further controlled for fixity of residence [63], food storage [65], and pathogen stress [68]. All continuous covariates were standardized to z-scores to enhance interpretation and facilitate effect size comparison, with pPCs centred on inferred ancestral mean states rather than average sample values. ...
Alloparental care is central to human life history, which integrates exceptionally short interbirth intervals and large birth size with an extended period of juvenile dependency and increased longevity. Formal models, previous comparative research, and palaeoanthropological evidence suggest that humans evolved higher levels of cooperative childcare in response to increasingly harsh environments. Although this hypothesis remains difficult to test directly, the relative importance of alloparental care varies across human societies, providing an opportunity to assess how local social and ecological factors influence the expression of this behaviour. We therefore, investigated associations between alloparental infant care and socioecology across 141 non-industrialized societies. We predicted increased alloparental care in harsher environments, due to the fitness benefits of cooperation in response to shared ecological challenges. We also predicted that starvation would decrease alloparental care, due to prohibitive energetic costs. Using Bayesian phylogenetic multilevel models, we tested these predictions while accounting for potential confounds as well as for population history. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found increased alloparental infant care in regions characterized by both reduced climate predictability and relatively lower average temperatures and precipitation. We also observed reduced alloparental care under conditions of high starvation. These results provide evidence of plasticity in human alloparenting in response to ecological contexts, comparable to previously observed patterns across avian and mammalian cooperative breeders. This suggests convergent social evolutionary processes may underlie both inter- and intraspecific variation in alloparental care.
... Complexity across societies in the ethnographic record is often measured using a sum of 10 different indicators from Murdock & Provost [28]. These include writing and records, money, fixity of residence, agriculture, urbanization, technological specialization, land transport, population density, political integration, and social stratification. ...
... These include writing and records, money, fixity of residence, agriculture, urbanization, technological specialization, land transport, population density, political integration, and social stratification. The summed index is used in the present paper because the items were highly intercorrelated (α = 0.90), and previous work has suggested that these measures tap a single underlying construct [13,28,29]. We also summarize analyses of individual complexity indicators in our electronic supplementary material, analyses. ...
Human groups have long faced ecological threats such as resource stress and warfare, and must also overcome strains on coordination and cooperation that are imposed by growing social complexity. Tightness-looseness (TL) theory suggests that societies react to these challenges by becoming culturally tighter, with stronger norms and harsher punishment of deviant behavior. TL theory further predicts that tightening is associated with downstream effects on social, political, and religious institutions. Here we comprehensively test TL theory in a sample of non-industrial societies. Since previous studies of TL theory have sampled contemporary countries and American states, our analysis allows us to examine whether the theory generalizes to societies in the ethnographic record, and also to explore new correlates of tightness that vary more in non-industrial societies. We find that tightness covaries across domains of social norms (e.g. socialization, law, gender). We also show that tightness correlates with several theorized antecedents (ecological threat, complexity, residential homogeneity) and several theorized consequences (intergroup contact, political authoritarianism, moralizing religious beliefs). We integrate these findings into a holistic model of tightness in non-industrial societies, and provide metrics that can be used by future studies on cultural tightness in the ethnographic record.
... Although there is some flexibility in this relationship (e.g., Hewlett 1991), various comparative studies on the sexual division of labor and the status associated with particular activities in different societies consistently show that women are primarily responsible for daily culinary preparation and the socialization (or enculturation) of children. Perhaps the most well-known and widely referenced of these works is by Murdock and Provost (1973), who reviewed research on the sexual division of labor in 185 societies worldwide. They classified fifty technological activities based on the degree to which men or women were involved in carrying them out, showing that activities related to food preparation (such as meat or fish preservation; preparation of beverages, dairy products, and food of plant origin; water and firewood collection; and cooking) were overwhelmingly performed by women. ...
... band, tribe, chiefdom, state) [79]. A handful of efforts over the decades have also tried to measure social complexity in terms of interaction, differentiation, or simple scale (e.g. the size of the largest settlement) [63,15,22,30]. ...
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of investigating human history, just as advances in complex systems science and computer science saw the emergence of powerful new conceptions of complex systems, and in particular new methods of measuring complexity. We propose that these advances in our understanding of complex systems and computer science should be brought to bear on our investigations into human history. To that end, we present a new framework for modeling how human societies co-evolve with their biotic environments, recognizing that both a society and its environment are computers. This leads us to model the dynamics of each of those two systems using the same, new kind of computational machine, which we define here. For simplicity, we construe a society as a set of interacting occupations and technologies. Similarly, under such a model, a biotic environment is a set of interacting distinct ecological and climatic processes. This provides novel ways to characterize social complexity, which we hope will cast new light on the archaeological and historical records. Our framework also provides a natural way to formalize both the energetic (thermodynamic) costs required by a society as it runs, and the ways it can extract thermodynamic resources from the environment in order to pay for those costs -- and perhaps to grow with any left-over resources.
... One of the major cultural traits associated with societal complexity is the degree of urbanization (Murdock & Provost, 1973). Temporary settlements turn into permanent settlements, which in turn grow in size to become villages and then cities. ...
... Indeed, our results lend further support to the hypothesis that there is a nonlinear relationship between the complexity of familial structure and development (Nimkoff and Middleton, 1960;Blumberg and Winch, 1972). This observation in fact echoes the general trend observed by (Murdock and Provost, 1973) -that the most culturally sophisticated societies tend to lie at the middle spectrum of development, who go so far to say that "This essentially bimodal or curvilinear distribution is inconsistent with any unilinear interpretation of social development," (Murdock and Provost, 1973, p. 392) our model suggests why such a pattern might exist, at least in regards elderly treatment and coincident transmission of culture. 22 There are several possible avenues for further research. ...
We discuss the interrelationship between the treatment of the elderly, the nature of production, and the transmission of culture. Respect for the elderly is endogenous. Parents cultivate an interest in consuming culture in their children; when they are older, children compensate their elders proportional to the degree to which their interests were previously cultivated. We show that this model is functionally equivalent to one in which cultural goods are transferred across generations. We focus on the relative well-being of the elderly and use the model to explain patterns in their relative well-being across societies. An important theme is that the cultivation of culture and norms for the respect and support of the elderly bear a nonlinear relationship with many economic variables, such as capital and or land intensity in production. We also discuss the interaction of property rights with production, assets such as productive resources, and relative treatment of the elderly. Insecurity of some types of property rights, such as rights over output, may benefit the elderly, while secure rights over productive resources may also benefit the elderly. We discuss how the elderly could be affected by demographic, technological and policy changes in both developing and developed economies.
... Human societies are larger, denser, and more anonymous than ever before (Murdock & Provost, 1973;Turchin et al., 2022). The scaling up of human groups is visible across any number of metrics: capital cities are more populous, infrastructure is more developed, governments control more territory and larger populations, and societies include more ethnic groups (Turchin et al., 2018). ...
Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like “moral” and “immoral”? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent to which they perceive moral character as “localized” (varying along many contextually embedded dimensions) versus “generalized” (varying along a single dimension from morally bad to morally good). This variation might be partly the product of cultural evolutionary adaptations to different kinds of social networks. As networks grow larger, perceptions of generalized morality are increasingly valuable for predicting cooperation during partner selection, especially in novel contexts. Our studies show that social network size correlates with perceptions of generalized morality in United States and international samples (Study 1) and that East African hunter–gatherers with greater exposure outside their local region perceive morality as more generalized compared to those who have remained in their local region (Study 2). We support the adaptive value of generalized morality in large and unfamiliar social networks with an agent-based model (Study 3), and in experiments where we manipulate partner unfamiliarity (Study 4). Our final study shows that perceptions of morality have become more generalized over the last 200 years of English-language history, which suggests that it may be coevolving with rising social complexity and anonymity in the English-speaking world (Study 5). We discuss the implications of this theory for the cultural evolution of political systems, religion, and taxonomical theories of morality.
... Lastly, we test the relationship with social differentiation, i.e. the extent to which a society is segmented into different roles and classes, leading to discrepancies in wealth, power and prestige. We use a latent variable derived from SCCS variables which combines the following measures (coded as ordinal variables): levels of political organization, status distinctions and stratification, use of money, use of written records and technological specialization [23][24][25]. Societies low on this scale include modern hunter-gatherers such as the African Mbuti and Hadza, both well known for their egalitarian organization [26]. Societies high on this scale include the Japanese [27]. ...
Music is an interactive technology associated with religious and communal activities and was suggested to have evolved as a participatory activity supporting social bonding. In post-industrial societies, however, music's communal role was eclipsed by its relatively passive consumption by audiences disconnected from performers. It was suggested that as societies became larger and more differentiated, music became less participatory and more focused on solo singing. Here, we consider the prevalence of group singing and its relationship to social organization through the analysis of two global song corpora: 5776 coded audio recordings from 1024 societies, and 4709 coded ethnographic texts from 60 societies. In both corpora, we find that group singing is more common than solo singing, and that it is more likely in some social contexts (e.g. religious rituals, dance) than in others (e.g. healing, infant care). In contrast, relationships between group singing and social structure (community size or social differentiation) were not consistent within or between corpora. While we cannot exclude the possibility of sampling bias leading to systematic under-sampling of solo singing, our results from two large global corpora of different data types provide support for the interactive nature of music and its complex relationship with sociality.
... Posiblemente, por su relevancia y por constituir un campo de investigación prácticamente inédito que resulta del todo necesario incorporar al análisis de los procesos aquí explorados, la más relevante concierna al papel de las mujeres en el cambio alimentario experimentado durante los primeros siglos de al-Andalus. Si, tal y como ha quedado ampliamente demostrado, los saberes y los conocimientos asociados a las tradiciones culinarias constituyen una categoría de prácticas normalmente asociadas al ámbito doméstico y a las mujeres (Murdock y Provost, 1973;Montón, 2005), resulta preciso considerar la agencia femenina a la hora de evaluar la adopción de nuevos hábitos alimentarios como los introducidos por la islamización social. Historiar este campo esencial de la experiencia humana y ponderar el papel de las mujeres, bien como transmisoras de las tradiciones culinarias resistentes al cambio, bien como impulsoras del mismo, representa una línea de investigación que necesariamente habrá de ser transitada para configurar un conocimiento más rico, complejo e inclusivo de la formación de al-Andalus. ...
La alimentación representa un ámbito de la experiencia humana que históricamente ha desempeñado un papel trascendental en la conformación, el mantenimiento y la transformación de las fronteras culturales entre diversos grupos. Esta dimensión de la esfera alimentaria nos faculta para estudiar, a través del análisis arqueológico de sus restos materiales, el cambio social y cultural resultado de la interacción entre diferentes comunidades, dinámica que en sus rasgos más generales puede definir el periodo de emergencia de la entidad histórica que conocemos como al-Andalus.En este trabajo se presentan los fundamentos teóricos y metodológicos de una línea de investigación histórica que aspira a contribuir al estudio del temprano al-Andalus, atendiendo para ello a las implicaciones que el proceso de islamización social –un fenómeno central en su conformación– pudo traer aparejado sobre un campo de la acción humana tan profundamente social y cultural como es la alimentación. En concreto, la atención se centrará sobre algunas de las posibles repercusiones y manifestaciones materiales que el abandono de la cría y el consumo de porcino pudo comportar sobre dos planos diferentes: el de la economía doméstica de las poblaciones autóctonas y el de la identidad religiosa de esas mismas comunidades inferida a partir del examen de sus prácticas socioalimentarias. A fin de ilustrar el potencial analítico de este planteamiento de estudio, se presentan igualmente una serie de resultados derivados de su aplicación a partir del análisis zooarqueológico a fin de enfatizar la utilidad del examen de las formas de producción y consumo de los productos alimentarios de origen animal y su capacidad para generar conocimiento histórico de calidad sobre la formación de la sociedad andalusí.
... Human societies are larger, denser, and more anonymous than ever before (Murdock & Provost, 1973;Turchin et al., 2022). The scaling up of human groups is visible across any number of metrics: capital cities are more populous, infrastructure is more developed, governments control more territory and larger populations, and societies include more ethnic groups (Turchin et al., 2018). ...
Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like “moral” and “immoral”? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent that they perceive moral character as “localized” (varying along many contextually embedded dimensions) vs. “generalized” (varying along a single dimension from morally bad to morally good). This variation might be partly the product of cultural evolutionary adaptations to different kinds of social networks. As networks grow larger, perceptions of generalized morality are increasingly valuable for predicting cooperation during partner selection, especially in novel contexts. Our studies show that social network size correlates with perceptions of generalized morality in US and international samples (Study 1), and that East African hunter-gatherers with greater exposure outside their local region perceive morality as more generalized compared to those who have remained in their local region (Study 2). We support the adaptive value of generalized morality in large and unfamiliar social networks with an agent-based model (Study 3), and in experiments where we manipulate partner unfamiliarity (Study 4). Our final study shows that perceptions of morality have become more generalized over the last 200 years of English-language history, which suggests that it may be co-evolving with rising social complexity and anonymity in the English-speaking world (Study 5). We discuss the implications of this theory for the cultural evolution of political systems, religion, and taxonomical theories of morality.
... When investigating the relationship between the socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents and the emotions and feelings experienced in forests during the pandemic, the complexity of the interactions between people and nature emerges in a striking way. This relationship is influenced by the shift from a traditional to a modern society [62], and the presence of the COVID-19 pandemic is an additional element added to this intricate relationship. ...
Peri-urban forests are complex systems capable of providing amenity and scenic values as well as recreational opportunities for citizens. From early 2020, national governments have promulgated restrictions, requiring citizens to adopt a new lifestyle to counter the COVID-19 outbreak. This study aimed to understand if citizens’ behaviors and attitudes in the use of peri-urban forests are changing due to COVID-19 restrictions. Methodologically, a questionnaire survey was carried out, adopting a systematic sampling method. Two peri-urban forests were chosen as study areas: the first one was close to the town of Trento in the Alps (Monte Marzola), and the second one was in the proximity of the city of Florence (Monte Morello). At the end of data collection, 281 questionnaires were collected and processed. The results showed an increase in visits to peri-urban forests during the COVID-19 pandemic (36.4% of visitors in Monte Marzola and 17.1% in Monte Morello, respectively) with the aim of satisfying the need for relaxation and contact with nature. However, the use of peri-urban forests in times of crisis has been quite different in the two contexts: the visitors of Monte Marzola evidenced the role of a forest as a place where they can satisfy their need to play sports (mean value 4.53 in a five-point Likert scale), while Monte Morello forest was considered by visitors to be a place where the demand for companionship was fulfilled (mean value 4.27).
... This cognitive concept was put forth originally to help explain differences among individuals having different backgrounds and experiences [39,40]. Individualist cultures can often be formed or shaped by a multitude of smaller groups within a culture, which then induce more individualistic inclinations and less feelings of belonging among individuals [41,42]. An example of this type of culture would be the United States or Canada, in which both were formed by large influxes of various cultural groups. ...
Sensory perception is understood to be a complex area of research that requires investigations from a variety of different perspectives. Although researchers have tried to better understand consumers’ perception of food, one area that has been minimally explored is how psychological cognitive theories can help them explain consumer perceptions, behaviors, and decisions in food-related experiences. The concept of cognitive styles has existed for nearly a century, with the majority of cognitive style theories existing along a continuum with two bookends. Some of the more common theories such as individualist-collectivist, left-brain-right-brain, and convergent-divergent theories each offered their own unique insight into better understanding consumer behavior. However, these theories often focused only on niche applications or on specific aspects of cognition. More recently, the analytic-holistic cognitive style theory was developed to encompass many of these prior theoretical components and apply them to more general cognitive tendencies of individuals. Through applying the analytic-holistic theory and focusing on modern cultural psychology work, this review may allow researchers to be able to answer one of the paramount questions of sensory and consumer sciences: how and why do consumers perceive and respond to food stimuli the way that they do?
... Values is people's conceptions of the goals that serves as guiding principles in their lives [28] and value differ in importance, transcend specific situations, and express the interests of individuals and of collectivities [29].The effects of collectivism on the acceptance or rejection of reformist policies and practices among Chinese workers appears clearly to depend on the type of collectivism, vertical collectivism evidently facilitates reform sentiments, whereas horizontal collectivism works against them [3]. Horizontal collectivists have some common characteristics such as seeking for interdependence and democracy [11], while sacrificing and submitting are some of the more destructive features of vertical collectivists [25]. Horizontal collectivists perceive all the members of a group as equal and they consider the well-being of the group while not feeling subordinate to that group. ...
... For example, about 44% of societies in the anthropological record have no political organization beyond the local community, whereas about 17% have state-level organization (3-4 levels of political hierarchy beyond the community). 2 Degree of societal complexity is commonly related to many other aspects of social and cultural life and therefore it is important to test and control for its potential effects. To measure societal complexity, we use [75] summary score based on 10 different aspects of complexity such as political integration, writing and records, social stratification, intensity of agriculture, size of communities. The total scores range from 0 to 50 and were retrieved from Ref. [76]; variable 158.1. ...
There is a growing interest and urgency in understanding and incorporating local knowledge and strategies into sustainable climate change adaptation. This is particularly important because as populations age and new technologies come on the scene, much local knowledge is lost to newer generations. For this reason, we have systematically examined 90 societies from the ethnographic record to explore and document the strategies that people in the past have implemented in response to serious natural hazards. Our review reveals a rich diversity of coping mechanisms and contingency plans used by societies around the world in response to different hazards, particularly floods and droughts. We collect, classify, and compare different types of coping mechanisms, focusing on four major types: technological, subsistence, economic and religious. We find that most societies employ multiple types of coping mechanisms, although our data suggest that technological coping mechanisms are the most common coping mechanisms in response to fast-onset hazards, whereas religious coping mechanisms are the most common mechanism used in response to slow-onset hazards. We also find that religious and nonreligious coping strategies are not antithetical to each other. In fact, an increased number of religious coping mechanisms is associated with an increased number of “practical”, nonreligious coping mechanisms.
... They explained it by the facts that rice's production was very labor intensive and required farmers to coordinate water use and developed strong norms for labor exchange. Using data on small-scale societies, Jackson et al. (2020) showed the importance of two additional factors: cultural complexity (sensu Murdock and Provost 1973) and kinship heterogeneity. Less complex societies and patrilocal societies (in which wives settle near their husband's parents) are more tight. ...
Human decision-making is affected by a diversity of factors including material cost-benefit considerations, normative and cultural influences, learning, and conformity with peers and external authorities (e.g., cultural, religious, political, organizational). Also important are their dynamically changing personal perception of the situation and beliefs about actions and expectations of others as well as psychological phenomena such as cognitive dissonance, and social projection. To better understand these processes, I develop a unifying modeling framework describing the joint dynamics of actions and attitudes of individuals and their beliefs about actions and attitudes of their groupmates. I consider which norms get internalized and which factors control beliefs about others. I predict that the long-term average characteristics of groups are largely determined by a balance between material payoffs and the values promoted by the external authority. Variation around these averages largely reflects variation in individual costs and benefits mediated by individual psychological characteristics. The efforts of an external authority to change the group behavior in a certain direction can, counter-intuitively, have an opposite effect on individual behavior. I consider how various factors can affect differences between groups and societies in tightness/looseness of their social norms. I show that the most important factors are social heterogeneity, societal threat, effects of the authority, cultural variation in the degree of collectivism/individualism, the population size, and the subsistence style. My results can be useful for achieving a better understanding of human social behavior, historical and current social processes, and in developing more efficient policies aiming to modify social behavior.
... Measures of expected annual social change were calculated from two different datasets. The first employed Murdock and Provost's (1973) 10-item Index of Cultural Complexity to examine general patterns of cultural evolution over the last 14,000 years (Peregrine, 2003). The second employed a set of variables from the Seshat Databank created to explore factors underlying the evolution of cultural complexity over the past 12,000 years (Turchin et al., 2018). ...
The Late Antique Little Ice Age, spanning the period from 536 CE to roughly 560 CE, saw temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere drop by a degree C in less than a decade. This rapid cooling is thought to have caused widespread famine, epidemic disease, and social disruption. The relationship between cooling and social disruption is examined here using a set of high-resolution climate and historical data. A significant link between cooling and social disruption is demonstrated, but it is also demonstrated that the link is highly variable, with some societies experiencing dramatic cooling changing very little, and others experiencing only slight cooling changing dramatically. This points to variation in vulnerability, and serves to establish the Late Antique Little Ice Age as a context within which naturalistic quasi-experiments on vulnerability to climate change might be conducted.
... Measures of expected annual social change were calculated from two different datasets. The first employed Murdock and Provost's (1973) 10-item Index of Cultural Complexity to examine general patterns of cultural evolution over the last 14,000 years (Peregrine, 2003). The second employed a set of variables from the Seshat Databank created to explore factors underlying the evolution of cultural complexity over the past 12,000 years (Turchin et al., 2018). ...
... Peregrine's study analyzes a different dataset, the Atlas of Cultural evolution, and uses a different clusterrevealing methodology involving Guttman scaling and morphospace analysis. The Atlas encodes similar information to Seshat; to help reduce the data's dimensionality, Peregrine utilizes scale and technology factors derived from the Murdock-Provost scale of cultural complexity [28] by Chick [29]. From Peregrine's data, the Technology Factor is a composite of variables concerning writing, land transport, social stratification, political integration, technological specialization, and money; and the Scale Factor is a composite of variables concerning fixity of residence, agriculture, population density, and urbanization. ...
Comparative social science has a long history of attempts to classify societies and cultures in terms of shared characteristics. However, only recently has it become feasible to conduct quantitative analysis of large historical datasets to mathematically approach the study of social complexity and classify shared societal characteristics. Such methods have the potential to identify recurrent social formations in human societies and contribute to social evolutionary theory. However, in order to achieve this potential, repeated studies are needed to assess the robustness of results to changing methods and data sets. Using an improved derivative of the Seshat: Global History Databank, we perform a clustering analysis of 271 past societies from sampling points across the globe to study plausible categorizations inherent in the data. Analysis indicates that the best fit to Seshat data is five subclusters existing as part of two clearly delineated superclusters (that is, two broad “types” of society in terms of social-ecological configuration). Our results add weight to the idea that human societies form recurrent social formations by replicating previous studies with different methods and data. Our results also contribute nuance to previously established measures of social complexity, illustrate diverse trajectories of change, and shed further light on the finite bounds of human social diversity.
... To measure the degree of political integration, we will make use of a measure from the SCCS dataset that has also been used in a number of other recent studies. 45 The measure we will call political integration, which is reported in Murdock and Provost (1973), is a five-point scale that takes a value of 1 if there is no political integration above the level of individual families, 2 if there is authority only at the community level, 3 if there is integration to one level above the community, 4 if there is integration to two levels, and 5 if there is integration to three or more levels above the community. There is a strong pairwise correlation (of 0.31) between our any council variable and this measure. ...
The idea that rulers must seek consent before making policy is key to democracy. We suggest that this practice evolved independently in a large fraction of human societies where executives ruled jointly with councils. We argue that council governance was more likely to emerge when information asymmetries made it harder for rulers to extract revenue, and we illustrate this with a theoretical model. Giving the population a role in governance became one means of overcoming the information problem. We test this hypothesis by examining the correlation between localized variation in agricultural suitability and the presence of council governance in the Standard Cross Cultural Sample. As a further step, we suggest that executives facing substantial information asymmetries could also have an alternative route for resource extraction—develop a bureaucracy to measure variation in productivity. Further empirical results suggest that rule by bureaucracy could substitute for shared rule with a council.
... Political Hierarchy is a widely employed variable in cross-cultural research (in part because it needs to be controlled for in many analyses), and has been coded several ways. The version used here is taken from Murdock and Provost (1971) and was designed to measure 'the complexity of political organization in terms of the number of distinct jurisdictional levels recognizable in the society.'(p. 150). ...
Four hypotheses concerning the relationship between climaterelated
disasters and conflict are tested using archaeological data
in a controlled cross-cultural comparison. The four hypotheses are
(1) Conflict increases following climate-related disasters because
local economic conditions deprive polities of tax revenue so that
they can no longer suppress conflict; (2) Conflict increases
following climate-related disasters because existing social
inequalities lead to conflicts over differential access to resources;
(3) Conflict increases following climate-related disasters because
migration forces population into condensed settlements ripe for
conflict; and (4) Conflict increases following climate-related
disasters in polities where leaders tightly control access to political
authority because leaders may use violence to maintain control
over the resources they use to secure support from other elites.
Only the fourth hypothesis is supported. It is argued that
understanding pre-disaster political strategies is key to
understanding post-disaster conflict.
Foodways represent a sphere of social life profoundly determined by cultural dispositions, as it might be conceived as a medium to express identity that defines us in relation to other individuals and groups. As a consequence, from the analysis of the archaeological remains of consumption of animal‑based food products we can offer a glimpse into the foodways and the sociocultural identity of consumers. In this paper, we present some of the results obtained from a research project that dealt with the zooarchaeological analysis of a set of faunal assemblages recovered from two areas of the current city of Córdoba (Andalusia): the quarter of Šaqunda (8th‑9th centuries) and the Archaeological Area of Cercadilla (8th‑11th centuries). On the ground of the taxonomic analysis and the assessment of culinary techniques inferred from butchery and burning marks, the aim is to contribute to the study of the patterns of consumption and preparation of animal products in the capital of al‑Andalus during the formative period of the new Islamic society and to demonstrate the validity of these analytical techniques to shed light into the social change during this historical context.
Composite beings (“monsters”) are those mythical creatures composed of a mix of different anatomical forms. There are several scholarly claims for why these appear in the imagery and lore of many societies, including claims that they are found near-universally as well as those arguments that they co-occur with particular sociocultural arrangements. In order to evaluate these claims, we identify the presence of composite monsters cross-culturally in a global sample of societies, the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. We find that composite beings are not universal, and that their presence or absence co-varies most significantly with social stratification and transportation technology. This supports hypotheses that the cultural evolution of composite monsters is driven by human concerns with social distinctions within societies as well as increased contact with distant peoples.
Focusing on clothing and adornment (dress), this worldwide cross-cultural comparison asks why people in some societies appear to dress in uniform or standardized ways, whereas in other societies individuals display considerable variability in dress. The broader research question is why some societies have more within-group variation than others. Hypotheses are tested on 80 societies drawn from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). The central hypotheses consider the impact of general societal tightness or looseness, degree of egalitarianism as well as other aspects of societal complexity, and the role of resource stress on dress standardization. Exploratory methods identify four latent constructs of dress from newly coded variables, one latent construct for tightness/looseness, and one latent construct for resource stress. As expected, (1) increased societal tightness was positively related to increased standardization and rules regarding dress and (2) increased resource stress is generally related to more standardization of dress and rules regarding adornment. However, contrary to theoretical expectations, the predictors of tightness–looseness differ from the predictors of dress. Most importantly, resource stress negatively predicts tightness but positively predicts three of the latent dress constructs. The relationship between dress standardization and societal complexity may be curvilinear, with mid-range societies having more standardization. Although some of the theorized relationships are supported (including that standardization of dress is predicted by societal tightness and more resource stress), at the end of paper we discuss some puzzling findings, speculate about possible explanations, and suggest further lines of research.
Humans across the globe use supernatural beliefs to explain the world around them. This article explores whether cultural groups invoke the supernatural more to explain natural phenomena (for example, storms, disease outbreaks) or social phenomena (for example, murder, warfare). Quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 geographically and culturally diverse societies found that supernatural explanations are more prevalent for natural than for social phenomena, consistent with theories that ground the origin of religious belief in a human tendency to perceive intent and agency in the natural world. Despite the dominance of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, supernatural explanations of social phenomena were especially prevalent in urbanized societies with more socially complex and anonymous groups. Our results show how people use supernatural beliefs as explanatory tools in non-industrial societies, and how these applications vary across small-scale communities versus large and urbanized groups.
In this compelling book, leading scientists and historians explore the Drake Equation, which guides modern astrobiology's search for life beyond Earth. First used in 1961 as the organising framework for a conference in Green Bank, West Virginia, it uses seven factors to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilisations in our galaxy. Using the equation primarily as a heuristic device, this engaging text examines the astronomical, biological, and cultural factors that determine the abundance or rarity of life beyond Earth and provides a thematic history of the search for extraterrestrial life. Logically structured to analyse each of the factors in turn, and offering commentary and critique of the equation as a whole, contemporary astrobiological research is placed in a historical context. Each factor is explored over two chapters, discussing the pre-conference thinking and a modern analysis, to enable postgraduates and researchers to better assess the assumptions that guide their research.
During the Holocene, the scale and complexity of human societies increased markedly. Generations of scholars have proposed different theories explaining this expansion, which range from broadly functionalist explanations, focusing on the provision of public goods, to conflict theories, emphasizing the role of class struggle or warfare. To quantitatively test these theories, we develop a general dynamical model based on the theoretical framework of cultural macroevolution. Using this model and Seshat: Global History Databank, we test 17 potential predictor variables proxying mechanisms suggested by major theories of sociopolitical complexity (and >100,000 combinations of these predictors). The best-supported model indicates a strong causal role played by a combination of increasing agricultural productivity and invention/adoption of military technologies (most notably, iron weapons and cavalry in the first millennium BCE).
It has often been observed that the emergence of states in a region is typically preceded by an earlier transition to agricultural production. Using new data on the date of first state emergence within contemporary countries, we present a global scale analysis of the chronological relationship between the transition to agriculture and the subsequent emergence of states. We find statistically significant relationships between early reliance on agriculture and state age in all sub-samples and also when we use alternative sources of data at different levels of geographical aggregation. A one millennium earlier transition to agriculture among non-pristine states predicts a 317-430 year earlier state emergence. We uncover differences in cases where states were imposed from outside or when they emerged through internal origination. The agriculture-state lag is on average 3.1 millennia in internally originated (including pristine) states, and 2.7 millennia in externally originated states. We also explore some of the mechanisms through which agriculture is believed to have influenced the emergence of states. Our results indicate that the rise of social classes was often an intermediate step towards the presence of early states.
The differences between the female and male human development indicators are evidence that the general scenario (whole population) may present a blurred analytical viewpoint. Female schooling and life expectancy have advanced, but income is far from keeping pace. For women, legislation does not seem to be enough without the cultural legitimization; for men, the cultural dependency on psychopathologies derived from the subjective expectations of masculinity is more evident. Gender-disaggregated research related to cultural impacts is increasingly necessary. However, no study has apparently analyzed the influence of national culture (NC) on human development (HD), by comparing the General, Female, and Male scenarios. This research sought to fill this gap by applying univariate and multivariate techniques to the data from 59 countries, using the Hofstede model. The influence of culture is a reality in all scenarios, but differs according to the context of gender. For women, individualism appears to be a more powerful ally, and masculinity and uncertainty avoidance more harmful factors than for men. On the other hand, power distance and indulgence have a greater impact on men than on women. Considering HD as a whole, an autonomous thinking society that rejects inequalities seems to be the most important cultural enabler.
Despite decades of research, we still lack a clear explanation for the emergence and persistence of inequality. Here we propose and evaluate a marginal utility of inequality hypothesis that nominates circumscription and environmental heterogeneity as independent, necessary conditions for the emergence of intragroup material inequality. After coupling the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) with newly generated data from remote sensing, we test predictions derived from this hypothesis using a multivariate generalized additive model that accounts for spatial and historical dependence as well as subsistence mode. Our analyses show that the probability a society will be stratified increases significantly as a function of proxies of environmental heterogeneity and environmental circumscription. This supports the hypothesis that increasing environmental heterogeneity and circumscription drives the emergence and persistence of inequality among documented societies across the globe. We demonstrate how environmental heterogeneity and circumscription produce situations that limit individuals’ options so that some may find it in their best interest to give up some autonomy for material gain, while others may find it in their best interest to give up some material resources for another individual’s time or deference. These results support the marginal utility of inequality framework and enable future explorations of the ecological conditions that facilitate the emergence of intragroup inequality through time and across the globe.
Humans have believed in gods and spirits since the earliest days of the Holocene, and many people still believe in them today. Although the existence of religious belief has been a human constant, the nature and prevalence of religion has changed dramatically throughout human history. Here we describe the emerging science of religious change. We first outline a multilevel framework for studying religious change drawn from theories of socioecological psychology and cultural evolution. We illustrate this framework with four case studies featuring two ancient religious changes (the rise of punitive religions and doctrinal rituals) and two modern religious changes (the rise of atheism and nontraditional religions). We then review useful methods for examining religious change, including ethnographic coding, agent-based modeling, and time-series analysis. Next, we explore future directions, highlighting the need for predictive forecasts, nonlinear models, and non-Western samples. We also outline ten key questions that need to be answered for a fuller understanding of religious change.
Billions of people from around the world believe in vengeful gods who punish immoral behavior. These punitive religious beliefs may foster prosociality and contribute to large-scale cooperation, but little is known about how these beliefs emerge and why people adopt them in the first place. We present a cultural-psychological model suggesting that cultural tightness—the strictness of cultural norms and normative punishment—helps to catalyze punitive religious beliefs by increasing people’s motivation to punish norm violators. Our model also suggests that tightness mediates the impact of ecological threat on punitive belief, explaining why punitive religious beliefs are most common in regions with high levels of ecological threat. Five multi-method studies support these predictions. Studies 1-3 focus on the effect of cultural tightness on punitive religious beliefs. Historical increases in cultural tightness precede and predict historical increases in punitive beliefs (Study 1), and both manipulating people’s support for tightness (Study 2) and placing people in a simulated tight society (Study 3) increase punitive religious beliefs via the personal motivation to punish norm violators. Studies 4-5 focus on whether cultural tightness mediates the link between ecological threat and punitive religious beliefs. Cultural tightness helps explain why U.S. states with high ecological threat (e.g. natural hazards, scarcity) have the highest levels of punitive religious beliefs (Study 4), and why experimental manipulations of threat increase punitive religious beliefs (Study 5). Past research shows how religion impacts culture, but our studies show how culture can shape religion.
Empirical cross-cultural research provides a typology of magico-religious practitioners and identifies their relations to social complexity, their selection-function relationships, and reveals their biosocial bases. Different practitioner types and configurations are associated with specific ecological and political dynamics that indicate a cultural evolutionary development. Relations between practitioners’ selection processes and professional activities reveal three fundamental structures of religions: (1) selection and training involving alterations of consciousness used for healing, manifested in Shamans and other shamanistic healers; (2) social inheritance of leadership roles providing a hierarchical political organization of agricultural societies, manifested in Priests; and (3) attribution of a role involving inherently evil activities, and manifested in the Sorcerer/Witch. Shamans were transformed with foraging loss, agricultural intensification, warfare, and political integration into Healers and Mediums. Priests are predicted by agriculture and political integration beyond the local community, representing the emergence of a new stratum of magico-religious practice. Priests are also responsible for political and social conditions that significantly predict the presence of the Sorcerer/Witch. These findings suggest three distinctive biosocial structures of magico-religious activity related to alterations of consciousness and endogenous healing processes; hierarchically integrated social organization; and social persecution and incorporation.
This chapter deals with culture, which is defined, with mention of how race and culture might be conflated. Next follows various topics from aspects of culture to special cases of application. The analysis of cultures comes next As a case of importance, the McSally instance is mentioned. This is followed by the Mozart effect, the suggestions for cross-cultural socialising, and finding out more about HRAF. The chapter concludes with the observation that race and culture are often confounded, that one is free to choose some aspects of one’s life, but not others. Most importantly there are cultures that breach human rights, as set out by the UN and, as such, are to be deplored.
We have known for some time that complex societies are more likely to have land tenure systems based on private rights and less likely to have communal ownership. Less understood is why. More specifically, what are the mechanisms to explain why complex societies have more private property? What are the adaptive advantages of one system rather than the other? Conceptualizing and coding land tenure systems as a “bundle of rights,” this worldwide cross‐cultural study suggests that Acheson's (2015) economic defendability theory in conjunction with some environmental stressors, such as drought, may help us understand cross‐cultural variation in land tenure systems. Our results have evolutionary implications. They suggest that if property rights were claimed, communal property systems would have been the default system for any society having substantial degrees of hunting, gathering, or herdable animals. Agriculture by itself is not a strong predictor of private land rights, although irrigation agriculture is. [land tenure systems, defendability, resource stress, cross‐cultural]
Purpose: In this paper we examine and test alternative models for explaining the relationships between resource stress, beliefs that gods and spirits influence weather (to help or harm food supply or punish for norm violations), and customary beyond-household sharing behavior. Our model, the resource stress model, suggests that resource stress affects both sharing as well as conceptions of gods’ involvement with weather, but these supernatural beliefs play no role in explaining sharing. An alternative model, the moralizing high god model, suggests that the relationship between resource stress and sharing is at least partially mediated by religious beliefs in moralizing high gods.
Methods: We compared the models using a worldwide sample of 96 cultures from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), newly coded data on supernatural involvement with weather, and previously coded data on food and labor sharing. We conducted three types of analysis: multilevel and society-level regressions, and mediational path modeling using Monte Carlo simulations.
Results: Resource stress shows a robust effect on beliefs that high gods are associated with weather (either helping or hurting food supply), that superior gods help the food supply through weather, and that minor spirits hurt the food supply through weather. Resource stress also predicts greater belief in moralizing high gods. However, no form of high god belief that we test significantly predicts more sharing. Mediational models suggest the religious beliefs do not significantly explain why resource stress is associated with food and labor sharing.
Conclusion: Our findings generally accord with the view that resource stress changes religious belief and has a direct effect on sharing behavior unmediated by high god beliefs.
Social complexity requires people to create new ways of interacting with one another to counteract new social boundaries. Board games provide one avenue by which archaeologists may examine the ways in which people interacted. The act of play is liminoid, allowing for people to more easily overcome social boundaries to in- teraction, while also creating a shared experience for the process of grounding. Thus, games provide an op- portunity for people to build relationships and also to negotiate their identity. This research counters previous assertions that only complex societies play strategy games. In Bronze Age Cyprus, middle-range society became increasingly complex with the development of urbanism and differential access to wealth, while also producing a particularly large corpus of ancient board games. Determining where games were played, and then analyzing the social context of games in those spaces using multiple correspondence analysis, it was found that people were more likely to be playing in public during periods of greater complexity. This is likely due to the performative aspects of play, allowing for the communication of status in different ways when games are played in public spaces. The pattern found shows the variation in the ways people incorporated games into their social strategies during periods of different types of complexity.
Previous research has shown that honor culture and honor ideology enhance interpersonal and intergroup aggressiveness at the individual level. This study aimed to examine collective-level relationships among honor culture, social rewards for warriors, and intergroup conflict. To demonstrate these relationships, I used the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, which contains data on 186 mainly preindustrial societies from all over the world. The analysis demonstrated that honor culture, which values males’ toughness and aggression, has a positive relationship with frequency of intergroup conflicts. In addition, social rewards (praise, prestige, and status) for warriors mediated the relationship between honor culture and frequency of intergroup conflict. These results imply that the collective-level processes of honor culture enhance intergroup conflicts through the social reputations of warriors who participate in war.
Some human subsistence economies are characterized by extensive daily food sharing networks, which may buffer the risk of shortfalls and facilitate cooperative production and divisions of labor among households. Comparative studies of human food sharing can assess the generalizability of this theory across time, space, and diverse lifeways. Here we test several predictions about daily sharing norms-which presumably reflect realized cooperative behavior-in a globally representative sample of nonindustrial societies (the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample), while controlling for multiple sources of autocorrelation among societies using Bayesian multilevel models. Consistent with a risk-buffering function, we find that sharing is less likely in societies with alternative means of smoothing production and consumption such as animal husbandry, food storage, and external trade. Further, food sharing was tightly linked to labor sharing, indicating gains to cooperative production and perhaps divisions of labor. We found a small phylogenetic signal for food sharing (captured by a supertree of human populations based on genetic and linguistic data) that was mediated by food storage and social stratification. Food sharing norms reliably emerge as part of cooperative economies across time and space but are culled by innovations that facilitate self-reliant production.
The subject of this paper is the social structure and sociocultural evolution of Balkan Neolithic and Eneolithic societies between 6500 and 4200 BC. I draw on archaeological evidence from three major regions of the Balkans related to demography, settlement, economy, warfare, and differences in status and wealth between individuals and groups to evaluate the degree and kind of social complexity and inequality. The trend in these data is of increase in social complexity and inequality over two millennia following the introduction of agriculture to the Balkans, as the simple and small hamlets of the late seventh and early sixth millennia transformed into large villages and tell sites of the late sixth and fifth millennia, in parallel with the development of copper metallurgy and regional exchange networks. There is no evidence of social stratification or the formation of complex systems of regional integration such as (proto)states or urban centers. The Balkan communities of this period were essentially village communities with social inequalities, when present, limited to differences in prestige and potentially rank.
Over the past 2,000 years, Christianity has grown from a tiny Judaic sect to the world’s largest religious family¹. Historians and social scientists have long debated whether Christianity spread through a top-down process driven by political leaders or a bottom-up process that empowered social underclasses2–6. The Christianization of Austronesian populations is well-documented across societies with a diverse range of social and demographic conditions⁷. Here, we use this context to test whether political hierarchy, social inequality and population size predict the length of conversion time across 70 Austronesian cultures. We also account for the historical isolation of cultures and the year of missionary arrival, and use a phylogenetic generalized least squares method to estimate the effects of common ancestry and geographic proximity of cultures⁸. We find that conversion to Christianity typically took less than 30 years, and societies with political leadership and smaller populations were fastest to convert. In contrast, social inequality did not reliably affect conversion times, indicating that Christianity’s success in the Pacific is not due to its egalitarian doctrine empowering social underclasses. The importance of population size and structure in our study suggests that the rapid spread of Christianity can be explained by general dynamics of cultural transmission.
Examines the history of evolutionism in cultural anthropology, beginning with its roots in the 19th century, through the half-century of anti-evolutionism, to its reemergence in the 1950s, and the current perspectives on it today. No other book covers the subject so fully or over such a long period of time. Evolutionism and Cultural Anthropology traces the interaction of evolutionary thought and anthropological theory from Herbert Spencer to the twenty-first century. It is a focused examination of how the idea of evolution has continued to provide anthropology with a master principle around which a vast body of data can be organized and synthesized. Erudite and readable, and quoting extensively from early theorists (such as Edward Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, John McLennan, Henry Maine, and James Frazer) so that the reader might judge them on the basis of their own words, Evolutionism and Cultural Anthropology is useful reading for courses in anthropological theory and the history of anthropology. 0813337666 Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology : a Critical History.
Significance
Over the past 10,000 years, human societies have grown vastly more complex. How and why this occurred is still debated. One major point of contention is the relationship between two characteristic features of complex societies: intensive resource use and sociopolitical hierarchy. The “materialist” view is that intensification drives hierarchy, but the reverse view and intermediate views have also been proposed. Here we report the results of a phylogenetic study on the coevolution of landesque capital intensive agriculture and sociopolitical hierarchy in the Austronesian-speaking world. We find support for a reciprocal coevolutionary relationship between the two variables, challenging the materialist view and highlighting the importance of social as well as material factors as drivers of cultural evolution.
I972. Political Organization. Ethnology I I: 436-464
- A Tuden
- C Marshall
Tuden, A., and C. Marshall. I972. Political Organization. Ethnology I I: 436-464. This content downloaded from 62.122.79.21 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 03:13:59 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions