Intentional Levelling To Maintain Socio-Political Equality

Discussion

Christopher Boehm:

"Writing about the !Kung more than a decade ago, Lee (1979:457-61) ascribed causal importance to a previously neglected leveling mechanism, namely, the strong tendency of followers to restrict the development of personal ascendancy among adult males, including leaders. Howe's (1979) work on the sedentary modernizing Cuna suggested something rather similar. Several years later two attempts were made to generalize in the same direction. In one of these, discussing subsistence, Woodburn (1982) examined three African hunter-gatherer societies and suggested that their egalitarian political styles were attributable to the people's intentions (see also Ingold 1987:222-42; Woodburn 1988). In the other, in an evolutionary context I likewise emphasized the causal role of intentions (see Boehm 1982b), suggesting that egalitarian political styles developed only after the emergence of the human capacity for purposeful, moralistic sanctioning (see also Boehm 1984, 1986a, 1991). My general evolutionary interpretation was based on extant egalitarian societies and was not limited to foragers, and in a sense it reinterpreted "egalitarian society." In short, it suggested that an apparent absence of hierarchy was the result of followers' dominating their leaders rather than vice versa."

(https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf_