The development of social inequality is a vexatious social question, with its roots in the social sciences as a whole, but ultimately becoming the focus of social anthropology and archaeology. Many of the forefathers of social science (e. g., Marx, Weber, and Durkheim) speculated about the development of social inequality in society. Some earlier scholars, such as Thomas Hobbes, saw the history of preindustrial peoples as being of little interest, and epiphenom-enal to our understanding of the development of the modern world. Other scholars, such as Marx, saw the sum of human history as being vitally important for understanding modern history and the development of contemporary social relations.
Marx, and subsequent generations of Marxists and Marxian scholars, saw the development of social inequality as being a central problem in understanding social relations the world over. He saw the essential contradictions in the class structures of non-Western societies as being essential components of their social development and ultimate demise. Marx studied classical history widely and, along with Frederick Engels’ complementary work regarding the Iroquois social organization, wrote extensively about the hypothesized origins of inequality in antiquity. Of course, there were two primary problems with the approaches taken by these scholars: their analyses were somewhat teleological (they believed all social change would ultimately result in communism, and were looking for proof of this social evolution in their research) and lacked the data that would be brought about by the epigraphic and archaeological research that would be conducted in the twentieth century. That is not to say that Marxian questions about social evolution will not come back; we will return to them later.
As the discipline of archaeology began to develop, many scholars became acutely interested in the development of social inequality. Scholars working in the culture-historical school of archaeology did study the appearance of important socially defined artifactual, architectural, and artistic characteristics in assemblages in an attempt to classify the cultures that they were studying into developmental schema and typologies. In all three of the areas being considered in this article, these characteristics were considered important diagnostic fingerprints giving insight into the degree of inequality present, but very little was written about the social processes or developmental functions of the increasingly complex forms of social organization. Instead, priority was given to dating when each social phenomenon appeared in which society.
The functionalist school of archaeology sought to examine both the functions of various social institutions and formations and how societies functioned as a whole. Questions relating to the development of social hierarchy and inequality were central to these discussions, and it was at this time that the question of social relationships between elite and non-elite segments of society became increasingly important for archaeologists to study for reasons related more to social organization than relative chronology. Functionalism had a strong sociological aspect to it, and functionalist interests in how various social groups behaved in relation to one another resulted in an increasing amount of interest not just in the development of inequality but also in its machinations. In addition, the functionalists first became interested in how non-affluent or common peoples lived in past societies, in part in opposition to previous studies that privileged the perspectives of the elite (see Marxist Archaeology; Processual Archaeology).
Some functionalists became concerned with questions relating to social stability and equilibrium, the relationship between elites and commoners, and how this issue affected society at large became increasingly important. These questions became increasingly temporal, in order to link the development of social hierarchy to the notion of social process. This conceptual approach became known as processualism, and this became the most influential theoretical development of the mid-20th century.
This processual school of archaeology, as was mentioned before, portrayed social change, and for that matter social equilibrium, as being part of more abstract social processes that underscored and ran through the history of humanity. These processes were seen as being principles that guided the evolution of various societies, and as such, were approached with methodological rigor and an epistemological claim of using the scientific method in their analysis and investigation. With this in mind, the development of social inequality was seen as being a key rung on the ladder to social complexity, and as such, was seen to exemplify certain core cross-cultural values, important for comparative purposes. The development of inequality was seen as being both a cause and effect of social complexity and was portrayed as being essential for understanding social change over time.
The study of the elite was approached from a number of perspectives, including managerial ones, where they were seen as the managers of society through leadership and stewardship, and thermodynamic approaches, which saw them not only benefiting but also directing much energy expenditure in a given society. Various approaches, influenced by systems theory, were particularly fond of the notion of the elite as organizer and director, in a large part because elites were seen as being essential for keeping the overall system that was a given culture operating.
Commoner contexts were also increasingly being studied, in part to create a behavioral base line against which to compare the elite, but also to understand the relationship between people and the environment, a key concern of processualism. Interest in commoners was also spurred in part in reaction to what was seen as the antiquarian fixation that culture historians had with regards to the more elaborate, and more readily datable, components of elite material culture. Very few would now argue that this increasing importance that has been placed on nonelites by processual archaeologists is a negative thing: indeed, processualists opened scholars’ eyes to what was up until then an understudied component of most early civilizations.
Processualism had an even stronger behavioralist and empiricist component than its predecessors, and social processes were seen by some as containing social laws of a sort, that could be deciphered, distilled, and applied cross-culturally. In questions relating to social hierarchy some archaeologists began to look for what they perceived of as being unequivocal indicators of human activity and behavior, and as such, expected processes of social stratification to behave in specific and predictable ways. As will be discussed in the next section of this article, this simply was a misguided notion, but one that resulted in much wasted ink.
One of the principle problems seen with processu-alism, both by its proponents and detractors, was that by emphasizing process and behavior at the expense of analyzing individual events, many practitioners of this approach denied the importance of the individual and unique. Also, because of recognition of this deficiency, and partly because of dissatisfaction with the worst excesses of empiricism and law-generating on the part of the processualists, a series of post-processual archaeologies developed, spawned by critical theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and marxist social thought. While it is beyond the scope of this article to detail how all these various strains approach the question of hierarchy, it is worth offering a brief discussion.
It is important to note that there is not one post-processual archaeology, but instead many, inspired by the diversity of thought mentioned previously that was focused on redefining archaeology after proces-sualism. Many of these approaches to archaeology are intimately interested in the development of social stratification and hierarchy, and see these important social developments as being the products of specific historical trajectories as opposed to more general cultural processes. Archaeologists working in this tradition have often portrayed examples of increasing hierarchy as fundamental ruptures from earlier forms of social organization, emphasizing the messiness of the archaeological record as opposed to the much smoother theoretical approach of the processualists.
Many of these postprocessual approaches to examining past social phenomena, including the development of inequality and hierarchy emphasize the unique historical aspects of individual cultures, and downplay the importance of comparative studies. These scholars argue that the historical trajectories, cultural variables, and other unique attributes of any culture’s move towards a less egalitarian social system are historically unique enough so that cross-cultural comparison is not only uninformative, but downright misleading in some circumstances. This is because comparisons tend to muddy the unique nature of any of these cultural trajectories, eliminating important details in the quest to compare phenomena cross-culturally.
Many scholars working in the postprocessual tradition, in particular marxian variants of the approach, tend to view the development of hierarchy neither as an important step in the increasing complexity of society nor an organizational necessity, but instead emphasize the negative aspects of social complexity. This theoretical trend developed in part as a ‘backlash’ of sorts against many processual archaeologists who emphasized the managerial role of the elite, without emphasizing their exploitive tendencies in past and present societies. The adoption of critical perspectives emphasized that the elite operated in their best interests in a number of contexts, not placing the society’s interests at center stage as many earlier scholars had suggested. These archaeologists also saw many examples of resistance to incorporation into more complex societies on the part of less hierarchical societies in their own archaeological and ethnohistoric research. This gave an empirical base from which to critique the progress-driven metanarratives that generations of scholars trained in the functionalist and processualist believed drove society.
Instead, the question of domination and resistance in the formation and reformation of hierarchy became a central topic.
An important related area of research that scholars working in the postprocessual school have begun to examine is the notion of heterarchy and its application to the study of hierarchy in a number of social contexts. In its most general sense, the concept of heterarchy does not contradict or negate the idea of hierarchy; instead it argues that hierarchies are not fixed, and the relationship between various members of a given society are subject to multiple hierarchies, sometimes operating in contradictory ways. This approach takes the position that hierarchies are situational and somewhat transient, reconfiguring themselves in different ways in different contexts. This position does allow for more individual and small group agency, unlike the more systems-driven approaches of some of the processualists.
Perhaps the approach furthest removed from the systems-driven perspectives of the processualists is the agency approach to examining social hierarchy and stratification. This perspective, in theory, suggests that social structure is maintained and social change is brought about through individuals interacting with and redefining social structures. In practice, in many cases this became a rigidly individualistic approach to examining society. From the standpoint of the development and maintenance of social hierarchy, many scholars who embrace the agency approach have almost taken the position that social complexity and inequality is the result of a few Machiavellian people in the past manipulating and subverting social norms for their own ends. This approach is not inherently flawed, but its application is in many ways, largely because of it having become the ‘big man’ approach to social change and processes of stratification, almost denying larger social factors that operate on a level of abstraction and historical detachment and are not readily observable except in retrospect.
In recent years, a more moderate approach to understanding the past, including the important processes discussed in this article, has arisen. This approach is what Bruce Trigger has referred to as the holistic approach to understanding the past, insofar as it tries to approach the past from a perspective that recognizes both process and history, both the abstract and the concrete. This perspective tries to examine the abstract culture processes that are at work in a number of different cultures, but recognizes that these processes may be very different, or altogether absent in some cultural contexts. In addition, history is given a degree of importance that processual archaeologists long denied it. Part of this approach stems from the recognition that cross-cultural comparisons are interesting as much because of the differences that are found between cultural contexts as the similarities.
This holistic approach examines questions of hierarchy and social differentiation from this perspective, looking for similarities and differences in the development of social hierarchy in a number of cross-cultural contexts around the world and through time. It is important for a number of reasons, the main one being that it effectively tries to bridge the generalist and particularistic approaches to the discipline briefly outlined earlier, and develop a new approach to the past that recognizes the importance of both history and process in understanding the development of past social institutions. This holistic approach also does not seek to have all of the answers. A degree of messiness and uncertainty is recognized to be inherent in any culture, and this is, of course, only compounded in cross-cultural contexts.
World History
