Comments on the Emergence and Persistence of Inequality in Premodern Societies

This set of stimulating papers undertakes one of the central tasks of the human sciences: explaining the origins, evolution, and persistence of permanent inequality in human societies. The papers test the hypothesis that intergenerational wealth transmission is a key—if not the key—process in the persistence and evolution of inequality. Crucial to their test is how wealth is transmitted, the degree to which it accumulates or erodes across generations, and the forms it can take. They identify three broad categories of wealth: material, relational, and embodied. Material wealth equates with our common definition of wealth (e.g., land, livestock, jewelry, slaves); relational wealth refers to an individual’s “social value” but is essentially a person’s place in social networks, including the number of connections they have. Embodied wealth includes somatic wealth (health, strength) but is also knowledge and skills. The papers incorporate reproductive success as a measure of embodied wealth rather than as a consequence of it. These classes of wealth take different forms, occur in different proportions, and have different relationships in different societies, contributing to the variety and complexity of evolutionary trajectories and social forms. The authors of these papers investigate this variability by looking at case studies from four broad classes of food procurement economies: hunter-gatherer, horticultural, pastoralist, and intensive agriculturalist. Rather than relying on ethnographic narrative, their comparative work rests on quantifying intergenerational wealth differences with a measure they label b and wealth itself in the three wealth categories, using standard Gini indexes. The studies are far too rich in results to discuss them all here. I focus on a few directly relevant to the archaeology of inequality. Taken together, their most important results are the changes across the four production modes in the kinds of wealth present and how they are transmitted. Wealth among hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists is primarily embodied and relational, while among pastoralists and intensive agriculturalists, it is principally material, suggesting that contrasts across these production modes in the strength of wealth differences are the consequence of the predominant forms of wealth being transferred rather than, for example, the presence or absence of economic surpluses. Large surpluses are commonly invoked to explain why extreme levels of inequality seem correlated primarily, although not always, with intensive agriculture. In the absence of intensive agriculture, it becomes necessary to invoke environmental richness and/or stability to explain surplus production. These results appear to make that argument unnecessary, shifting the explanatory focus to the hows and whys of the evolution of material wealth. I am concerned here primarily with the hunter-gatherer study (Smith et al. 2010). The hunter-gatherer sample is small, including only five groups: the Ache, Hadza, Ju’hoansi, Lamalera, and Meriam. Despite this small sample, the authors are able to show that, even in classic “egalitarian” groups, the children of wealthy parents are themselves more likely to be wealthy, whatever form wealth takes, while the offspring of poorer parents will themselves be poorer. Smith et al.’s Gini coefficients, while not large, are not insubstantial, leading them to question the stereotype of foragers as egalitarian and little concerned with wealth. A study of dental wealth among the Efe, Aka, and Mbuti (Hewlett and Walker 1991; Walker and Hewlett 1990), who are generally epitomes of egalitarian organization, although not cited by Smith et al., lends independent support for their conclusions. Walker and Hewlett (1990) examined the dental health of members of all three groups as a proxy measure of overall health. Healthy dentition of course reflects a lifetime of health; bad teeth do not become good teeth. Walker and Hewlett found that dental health varied along two dimensions, gender and status. Women had