Human beings do not chase one another around with hair raised and teeth bared. As other primates do. No, our means of persuasion are more subtle. And in addition to that — symbolic. But first, the subtlety. Margaret Powers has said this about the means of creation and maintenance of primate social organization:
“This infrastructure of social communication is revealed through posture, gesture, facial expression and vocal tone; and differently organized primate species should show differing patterns and social interaction.” (15)
Posture, gesture, facial expression and vocal tone . . . these are things human beings, too, can and do use to send signals to others. Sure beats having to chase and flee, but it is not as visible.
My suspicion is that coming from a large and informally stratified culture, we may perceive a hunter-gatherer culture to be more egalitarian than someone coming from a smaller, more egalitarian culture. In a sense, power relations can be like a poker game. There is so much more to it than the cards. But to someone unfamiliar with poker, little else seems significant. What’s in a mere glance? Sometimes a lot.
Writing about chimpanzee hierarchies, Robin Wright pointed out the relative difficulty of spotting the mechanics of hierarchical behavior:
“In fact, the female hierarchy is so subdued that it takes an experienced eye to discern it, whereas spotting a pompous, imperious alpha male is something a schoolchild can do.” (16)
What is subdued in chimpanzee social groups can be downright subliminal in human. What complicates the matter is that in addition to such things as posture, gesture, facial expression and vocal tone, human beings excel at symbolism. If we want to belittle a person, we don’t need to physically tower over them, or some distillation of that dynamic, we can instead flash a thumbs-down to them. We can say and write things about them. Bad things, in that they are belittling, and thus bad.
One of the strengths of symbolic behavior is that it can be less personal and more general. We can communicate messages about our status without needing to interact with others. We can be less personal. The corporate alpha male need not make impressive physical displays at a meeting or even intimidate and threaten other males. He may, instead, “innocently” draw attention to symbols of his relatively greater power, whether they be possessions, relationships, or signs of accomplishment. This is relatively innocent behavior due to the indirectness of it. The message is broadly broadcast so no other need take it too personally. But is it personal? Yes. For the messages are still about social standing. Where I am; where you are.
So, are humans by nature a peace-and-love species? The bonobo, close cousin to the chimpanzee, has been portrayed that way. But primatologist Allison Jolly, for one, is skeptical.
“When I look at a male bonobo, however, I see immensely powerful arms, with veins like weight-lifters’ snaking under the skin–a very different build from the females. That, and their powerful canines, suggest they are equipped to fight something, whether leopards or one another. I fear that, in Sarah Hrdy’s phrase, –the other shoe hasn’t dropped yet about bonobos.” Meanwhile, they offer a model of an exuberantly affiliative species.” (17)
Meanwhile. And humans? Are we one or the other? Are we egalitarian by nature or hierarchical by nature? Are we both? My interim answer: while we are certainly exuberantly affiliative, our nature is essentially hierarchical. We must, however, keep in mind the impressively variety of forms hierarchies can take, including the previously mentioned “inverse hierarchy” elucidated by Christopher Boehm.
Why do some groups of humans take on more formally hierarchical structures, others more seemingly egalitarian? We need look little further to the environments a social group functions within.
What about the environments? Stay tuned to my “Alpha” series of posts.
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(15) Power, M. The Egalitarians: Human and Chimpanzee, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1991, p.189
(16) Wright, R., The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, Vintage, NY, 1995, p.246
(17) Jolly, A. Lucy’s Legacy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999, p.177
Tags: evolutionary psychology, status
April 2nd, 2010 at 7:25 pm
We zero-sum gaming Westerners love our symbolic hierarchical signals; the more of those we have in place, the “cooler” our competitive efforts can be…until we reach that ideal of coolness, the totally relaxed face and body, the effortless domination, the pretense of egalitarianism. Whether those signals are stripes on a sleeve, an elegantly scripted name on a door, or the right to walk into a meeting late knowing no one can start without you, the fewer of those gross animal gestures we have to make, the better we like it. You might say that our adoration of status symbols brought our country to its knees.