Hierarchy in Simple "Egalitarian" Societies

TLDR: In this article, the authors focus on the nature and types of social stratification and social mobility, but there is no corresponding treatment of equality and egalitarianism, due to the acceptance of a general evolutionary model that postulates a primeval egalitarian community.

Abstract: "If the broad problem in political anthropology is to understand the origin and variety of inequality, that in legal anthropology is to understand the maintenance of inequality" (3: 40). Both the Outline of Cultural Materials(1 14: 7478) and Notes and Queries (133: 93-97) devote considerable attention to the nature and types of social stratification and social mobility, but there is no corresponding treatment of equality and egalitarianism. This neglect of the structure of egalitarian systems is due, at least in part, to the acceptance of a general evolutionary model that postulates a primeval egalitarian community. Inequalities develop through evolutionary differentiation. Fried places the concept of equality at the very foundation of the transition from precultural hominid society (58: 106). The "reduction in the significance of individual dominance" (58: 106) became, not a cultural characteristic subject to variation, but rather a condition of humanity itself. Having naturalized equality, social science faced the problem of explaining the origin and maintenance of inequality (16, 55). The distinction between state and stateless societies (57, 109) has long provided the point of departure for anthropologists addressing the problem of egalitarianism (e.g. 56). Fortes & Evans-Pritchard, for example, divide African political systems into three types (57: 6) of which they describe only two. The first consists of societies that are unequivocally hierarchical and fall outside our present purview. However, they provide the negative case by which the concept of egalitarian society was defined (57, 109). The second consists of "societies which lack centralized authority," in which there are "no sharp divisions of rank, status, and wealth" (57: 5), and in which "distinctions