The Ecological-Evolutionary Typology of Human Societies and the Evolution of Social Inequality

8Summary and Conclusion

Gerhard Lenski (1966) originally developed his influential typology of human societies for the very purpose of illuminating the variation in the nature of distributive systems among societies. The analyses carried out in this paper show that the typology constitutes a powerful predictor (in a statistical as well as theoretical sense) of many aspects of stratification systems.

One generalization proposed by Lenski (Nolan and Lenski 1999:384, Figure 16.1) has to do with secular trends in human freedom for the average member of society over the course of socio-cultural evolution. Lenski reckons that freedom for the average person has declined monotonically along the sequence of social types HG, SH, AH, AG, to reach its nadir in agrarian societies (corresponding to a peak in inequality in the distribution of resources). Freedom resumes on an upward course only with the advent of industrialization.

While many dimensions of human inequality do indeed trace such a monotonic trajectory from the HG to the AG type, the analyses in this paper have shown that for other dimensions there appears to be a reversal in the trend at the agrarian stage. Such an "AG reversal" pattern suggests that human freedom started improving in AG societies, and that the nadir should therefore be located to correspond to the AH type of society. The evidence for such a scenario is discussed. If it exists, the AG reversal has several important implications for research and for the theoretical understanding of socio-cultural evolution.

In the course of the analysis, I have argued that sexual and reproductive inequality, as measured by the presence of polygyny versus socially imposed monogamy, or better still by a measure of the skewed distribution of wives among married men such as Betzig's (1986) maximum harem size, may provide one of the best comparative measure of inequality among societies that otherwise may differ widely in life-style and level of development. This realization has important implications for future research (e.g., obtaining measures of sexual and reproductive inequality for a larger batch of societies), for the need to examine shifts to socially imposed monogamy or limited polygyny in the theoretical context of social stratification (not only family systems), and for relating the study of human stratification systems to the study of dominance orders in the rest of the animal world (van den Berghe 1974; Lopreato and Crippen 1999).

9Appendix – Calculation of Type of Society

Variables used to calculate Type of Society are listed in the following table.

Appendix Table 1: Variables in the Ethnographic Atlas (EA) and the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SS) used to define Type of Society in Gerhard Lenski's typology
EA	SS	Description
V1	V203	Gathering, Dependence on
V2	V204	Hunting, Dependence on
V3	V205	Fishing, Dependence on
V4	V206	Animal Husbandry, Dependence on
V5	V207	Agriculture, Dependence on
V44	V248	Sex Differences: Metal Working (Category 9 - Absent or unimportant activity, n=516)
V55	[V249] V254	Age or Occupational Specialization: Metal Working (Category 9 - Task absent or age/occupational specialization absent, n=533) Note: in the current version of SS this variable is V254 (V249 now concerns Weaving, not Metal Working); V254, Category 9 is described in the SS simply as "Activity absent", n=533
V39	V243	Animals and Plow Cultivation (Category 2 - Not aboriginal but well established at period of observations, n=18; Category 3 - Aboriginal prior to contact, n=141)
V40	V244	Predominant Type of Animal Husbandry (Category 4 - Equine animals (horses, donkeys), n=64)

Type of Society (SOCTYP) is calculated with the following pseudo-code (shown for SS and omitting handling of missing values in the original variables; compare with Nolan and Lenski 1999:419-421):

Calculate HUNTGATH=V203+V204

Let DOMSUB = OTH

If either HUNTGATH, V205, V206, V207 is greater than or equal to 6, then assign to DOMSUB the value HG, FI, HE, or FA, respectively

If either HUNTGATH, V205, V206, V207 = 5 and the value of the other variables is less than 5, then assign to DOMSUB the value HG, FI, HE, or FA, respectively

If either HUNTGATH, V205, V206, V207 = 4 and the value of the other variables is less than 4, then assign to DOMSUB the value HG, FI, HE, or FA, respectively

If V243 = 1 then let PLOW = PRESENT, else let PLOW = ABSENT

If V248 = 9 or V254 = 9 then let METALS = ABSENT, else let METALS = PRESENT

Let SOCTYP= DOMSUB

If DOMSUB = FA then do

If PLOW = ABSENT then do

If METALS = ABSENT then let SOCTYP = SH

else let SOCTYP = AH

end

else if PLOW = PRESENT then let SOCTYP = AG

end

If DOMSUB = HG and V244 = 4 then let SOCTYP = OTH

Calculations for EA are similar after changing the names of variables.

The number of observations for each type of society are shown in the following table and compared to the numbers used in Human Societies 8e (Nolan and Lenski 1999:419-421). Discrepancies in the number of observations, especially for EA, are likely due to recent updates in the EA data.

Appendix Table 2: Cases with Identified Type of Society in Ethnographic Atlas (EA) and Standard Sample (SS) Used by Nolan & Lenski (N&L) and Nielsen (FN)
	EA - N&L	EA - FN	SS - N&L	SS - FN
HG	174	174	27	27
SH	155	162	35	35
AH	246	263	38	40
AG	103	135	32	31
FI	60	60	11	11
HE	78	77	16	16
	816	871	159	160