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The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State
By combining an original thesis and a representative body of ethnographic data, this ambitious work seeks to describe and explain the growth in complexity of human societies. Its emphasis is on the causes, mechanisms, and patterns of cultural evolution, which the authors explain in terms of a coherent theory of political economy―defined as the mobilization and exchange of goods and services between families. The authors show that the interconnected processes of technological change and population growth are the motor of social change, resulting in three related processes―intensification, integration, and stratification―that transform human societies over time. The validity of their theory rests on evidence drawn from 19 case studies that range widely over time and space. For this new edition, the authors have thoroughly rewritten the theoretical argument for greater clarity, updated the case materials to incorporate new research, and added a new chapter that applies their theoretical perspective to the problems of change since the industrial revolution and the globalization of trade and political influence. Reviews of the First Edition "In a book full of perceptive observations and persuasive arguments . . . Johnson and Earle show in masterly detail how societies articulate to their environments and . . . how they evolve." ― Ethnohistory "A major contribution. . . . The book is a marvelous synthesis of ethnographic and historical data." ― American Journal of Sociology "A large amount of research and thought has produced sensible and illuminating specific analyses of the mechanisms of evolutionary change. Another plus is that the writing is clear and the argument is neatly conceived." ― American Anthropologist
454 pages, Paperback
First published August 31, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 25, 2012
I was explicitly reading this book as part of an IS course investigating Derrick Jensen's anthropological assertions. The particular premises I was hoping this book would address are as follows:
“a civilization as a culture that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities, with cities being defined as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.” - Endgame Vol. 1, "Civilization"
and
There is an ecologically and culturally meaningful distinction to be drawn between “civilized” and “non-civilized” peoples.
Earle and Johnson's analysis was an eye-opening whirlwind tour of some real case studies with bearing on Jensen's assertions. They create a much more nuanced and serious analysis of the "evolution of human societies" from family level to local groups to chiefdoms to states. This transition is already much more nuanced that Jensen's civilization/not dichotomy! However, the truth of Jensen's argument stands in some sense. The poles he identified do more or less gel with the ideas presented in the book. Stratification, control, conflict, malnourishment, environmental degradation, etc, are much more pronounced in more integrated societies.
The strength of Earle and Johnson's evolution metaphor is to show that while these traits and their potentials are present in all societies, they are expressed differently in adaptive response to local conditions. While Jensen never questions why civilization should have emerged in the first place, Earle and Johnson deftly explain the logic of each sacrifice of family autonomy to group control.
Their argument, in brief, is that population growth forces the intensification of resource use, which requires one or more of four things:
risk mitigation - when societies are living at the edge of what their environment can provide, they risk starvation in particularly dry/wet/stormy/etc years, so they must develop social systems that store wealth and redistribute it in bad periods, which requires a leader to coordinate
warfare - when concentrated resources people depend on to live become scarce, communities sometimes find it advantageous to take them from neighbors by force, despite the high costs of war. Thus groups living at higher densities must provide for defense and offense, which requires the coordination of a leader.
technology - often resources are available only through substantial capital investment beyond what any individual family can muster. For instance, a whaling canoe costs many resources but brings back more than any family can eat. Leaders are required to accumulate resources and coordinate construction of these technologies. At higher levels these include irrigation works, etc.
trade - trade can provide food security, so a community can transform wealth accumulated in good years into food accumulated in bad ones, as well as non-locally available resources like stone, etc. Interestingly, Johnson and Earle never identify it as a mechanism to increase efficiency on its own.
This analysis is intuitive and has a great degree of explanatory power, at least it seems to me. For instance, it explains what Jensen and others refer to as "collapse" as a reversal of the cost/benefit conditions that justify higher integration, which in turn provides a handle for the investigation of that phenomenon.
Thus while Jensen's argument has elements of truth to it, it is shown to leave out many nuances and narratives that add substantially to discussion of the question. While it's true that hierarchy, repression, and domination increase with civilization, as do slavery, inequality, and environmental damage, Jensen never explores the trade-offs these negatives are a part of, the reasons why anyone ever agreed to them. In Endgame, Derrick discusses the idea that population is the variable that must come down for the planet to live, and concludes that population is more or less tangential, since technology and consumption are so much more important. Yet this ignores the strong likelihood that those latter are direct results of population growth, and don't exist in abstraction from high population densities.
However, the book also shows Derrick's specific claims are also more or less untrue. For instance, warfare is not "a relatively non-lethal and exhilarating form of play," but rather a very deadly means to secure scarce resources, often at the expense of the very existence of neighboring social and ethnic groups. Other claims, as in those about child abuse and other social values, are not addressed.
Throughout the book, I got an interesting sense of fatalism - if population growth is inevitable, and the negatives critiqued by Jensen are nigh inevitable adjustments to population growth, then the element of human choice seems negligible - a lack of free will I find intuitively satisfying. Moreover, it makes ideology seem superfluous, which I like. And it sort of presented things in an objective way, that gave me the amoral perspective that if civilization is inevitable, why bother trying to destroy it? Not that this is really an intellectual argument - I believe Jensen's contemporary activism advocacies stand apart from the validity of his historical analysis, and deserve to be critiqued on their own merits.
One small thing I felt the authors could/should have discussed more is the extent to which integration as an adaptation is effective or not. That is, while each level of integration is justified economically and ecologically through the arguments outlined, they may still involve negative tradeoffs well beyond the submission to dominance. They discuss near the end the fact that peasants live on a knife-edge between malnutrition and starvation, but they never discuss whether earlier transitions involved a similar shift - it seems like they would, since the very need for a social food security net implies higher risk of starvation, and that net isn't necessarily secure enough to completely prevent starvation/ensure complete nutrition.
Incidentally, based on what Professor Peregrine told me today, apparently anthropologists now think population growth isn't just something to be taken for granted, which puts a kink in the basic premise of Earle and Johnson's thinking. Apparently archaeologists have identified counter-examples to their model, in which population declines preceded (and seemed to cause) increased integration. Some modern thinkers apparently believe it is sudden change in population, rather than only growth and pressure, that causes these kinds of changes.
[Edit 12/25/12: The last revelation seems rather obvious in retrospect - the relevant variable is relationship of food production to consumers, and since labor is a key determinant of food production, a rapid reduction in labor availability could have some of the same consequences as a rise in consumer population. Insight from John Reader's ]Africa: A Biography of the Continent, in which the issues stemming from Africa's labor shortages are discussed frequently.]
“a civilization as a culture that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities, with cities being defined as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.” - Endgame Vol. 1, "Civilization"
and
There is an ecologically and culturally meaningful distinction to be drawn between “civilized” and “non-civilized” peoples.
Earle and Johnson's analysis was an eye-opening whirlwind tour of some real case studies with bearing on Jensen's assertions. They create a much more nuanced and serious analysis of the "evolution of human societies" from family level to local groups to chiefdoms to states. This transition is already much more nuanced that Jensen's civilization/not dichotomy! However, the truth of Jensen's argument stands in some sense. The poles he identified do more or less gel with the ideas presented in the book. Stratification, control, conflict, malnourishment, environmental degradation, etc, are much more pronounced in more integrated societies.
The strength of Earle and Johnson's evolution metaphor is to show that while these traits and their potentials are present in all societies, they are expressed differently in adaptive response to local conditions. While Jensen never questions why civilization should have emerged in the first place, Earle and Johnson deftly explain the logic of each sacrifice of family autonomy to group control.
Their argument, in brief, is that population growth forces the intensification of resource use, which requires one or more of four things:
risk mitigation - when societies are living at the edge of what their environment can provide, they risk starvation in particularly dry/wet/stormy/etc years, so they must develop social systems that store wealth and redistribute it in bad periods, which requires a leader to coordinate
warfare - when concentrated resources people depend on to live become scarce, communities sometimes find it advantageous to take them from neighbors by force, despite the high costs of war. Thus groups living at higher densities must provide for defense and offense, which requires the coordination of a leader.
technology - often resources are available only through substantial capital investment beyond what any individual family can muster. For instance, a whaling canoe costs many resources but brings back more than any family can eat. Leaders are required to accumulate resources and coordinate construction of these technologies. At higher levels these include irrigation works, etc.
trade - trade can provide food security, so a community can transform wealth accumulated in good years into food accumulated in bad ones, as well as non-locally available resources like stone, etc. Interestingly, Johnson and Earle never identify it as a mechanism to increase efficiency on its own.
This analysis is intuitive and has a great degree of explanatory power, at least it seems to me. For instance, it explains what Jensen and others refer to as "collapse" as a reversal of the cost/benefit conditions that justify higher integration, which in turn provides a handle for the investigation of that phenomenon.
Thus while Jensen's argument has elements of truth to it, it is shown to leave out many nuances and narratives that add substantially to discussion of the question. While it's true that hierarchy, repression, and domination increase with civilization, as do slavery, inequality, and environmental damage, Jensen never explores the trade-offs these negatives are a part of, the reasons why anyone ever agreed to them. In Endgame, Derrick discusses the idea that population is the variable that must come down for the planet to live, and concludes that population is more or less tangential, since technology and consumption are so much more important. Yet this ignores the strong likelihood that those latter are direct results of population growth, and don't exist in abstraction from high population densities.
However, the book also shows Derrick's specific claims are also more or less untrue. For instance, warfare is not "a relatively non-lethal and exhilarating form of play," but rather a very deadly means to secure scarce resources, often at the expense of the very existence of neighboring social and ethnic groups. Other claims, as in those about child abuse and other social values, are not addressed.
Throughout the book, I got an interesting sense of fatalism - if population growth is inevitable, and the negatives critiqued by Jensen are nigh inevitable adjustments to population growth, then the element of human choice seems negligible - a lack of free will I find intuitively satisfying. Moreover, it makes ideology seem superfluous, which I like. And it sort of presented things in an objective way, that gave me the amoral perspective that if civilization is inevitable, why bother trying to destroy it? Not that this is really an intellectual argument - I believe Jensen's contemporary activism advocacies stand apart from the validity of his historical analysis, and deserve to be critiqued on their own merits.
One small thing I felt the authors could/should have discussed more is the extent to which integration as an adaptation is effective or not. That is, while each level of integration is justified economically and ecologically through the arguments outlined, they may still involve negative tradeoffs well beyond the submission to dominance. They discuss near the end the fact that peasants live on a knife-edge between malnutrition and starvation, but they never discuss whether earlier transitions involved a similar shift - it seems like they would, since the very need for a social food security net implies higher risk of starvation, and that net isn't necessarily secure enough to completely prevent starvation/ensure complete nutrition.
Incidentally, based on what Professor Peregrine told me today, apparently anthropologists now think population growth isn't just something to be taken for granted, which puts a kink in the basic premise of Earle and Johnson's thinking. Apparently archaeologists have identified counter-examples to their model, in which population declines preceded (and seemed to cause) increased integration. Some modern thinkers apparently believe it is sudden change in population, rather than only growth and pressure, that causes these kinds of changes.
[Edit 12/25/12: The last revelation seems rather obvious in retrospect - the relevant variable is relationship of food production to consumers, and since labor is a key determinant of food production, a rapid reduction in labor availability could have some of the same consequences as a rise in consumer population. Insight from John Reader's ]Africa: A Biography of the Continent, in which the issues stemming from Africa's labor shortages are discussed frequently.]
March 30, 2021
Good read. These kind of anthropology books that cover all kinds of societies in different areas and different time periods give a really good big picture of how human society tends to develop. That big picture view is invaluable when thinking about our own society and our politics. Specifically, when the population increases, inequality increases (this is noted in the similar book The Creation of Inequality). The seeds of inequality and hierarchy can be traced back to the smaller more egalitarian societies. I think part of the answer for this comes from Robert Axelrod's game theory experiments on cooperation. However, even if inequality is required for societies to grow in number, that fact does not mean we shouldn't help each other but it does mean we should be aware of the constraints we're dealing with and try and be pragmatic in improving our society.
November 7, 2020
Excellent book overview of society at family level, local group level, big man economies, chiefdoms, and agrarian states, all the way up to modern free market states.
Best most peaceful one is family level one.
Best most peaceful one is family level one.
Read
June 2, 2025In a sense these societies have no law. The only thing holding them together is social norms.
June 24, 2025
Johnson and Earle trace the evolution of human societies from family-level groups (foragers, horticulturalists; relatively peaceful and egalitarian), through local groups (farmers, pastoralists, some hunting groups like Eskimos or Northwest fishermen; where war is endemic and social life revolves around clan and tribe), and finally to regional polities (simple and complex chiefdoms, agrarian states; where aristocracies develop). The book is a bit dry and academically oriented. The authors provide 19 case studies which provide concrete support to their analysis. Each case study is broken up into a part on Economy & Environment and another part on Social Organization. The focus is quite materialist (and less focused on ideology or non-material culture). Social evolution is driven by population growth, technology, the intensification of production, the fight over access to better resources, the need to reduce risk, or the desire to benefit from trade and alliances with other groups. This is a vitally important topic in anthropology and history. However, one possible major drawback to their approach is the claim that "family-level organization is an elemental form of human society" (p.41). They briefly acknowledge that there is little direct archaeological evidence of the first human societies and that we cannot find the past in primitive societies that survived into modern times (though this assumption is the entire basis for using the case studies), leaving them to rely on certain universalistic assumptions about humans (p.45). Universal assumptions are fine when considering human biology, but they really should have delved more deeply into how the institution of the family might have evolved over time (like Lewis Morgan, Elman Service, or Eleanor Leacock do) rather than pretty much assuming the universality of the nuclear family. Of course, acknowledging this would significantly (but unavoidably) complicate at least Part I of the book. It would probably be more enlightening (as well as easier) to read those authors who do not take the nuclear family as elemental, even if this requires more speculation, especially since some uncertainty here is unavoidable.
November 30, 2013
This is a serious anthropological text with hard data from dozens of societies around the world today and back thousands of years. Heavy going, but well worth it if you are trying to keep up with a wizard detective like Thaddeus Barlow who claims to already know it all through wizard lore and who complains that They Call Me Merlin Sherlock.
July 29, 2016
This book was actually really good when you consider it was a book for a class. They discuss a lot of different societies and Johnson and Earle use classifications that aren't 'anthropology' heavy. I think that's why I liked this book, I didn't feel bogged down in jargon and I got to read about a lot of interesting groups.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews