The American anthropologist Christopher Boehm (1931 to 2021) found that early human bands were not equal because people lacked the urge to dominate, but because the group actively stopped anyone who tried. He called this a ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’: the many combining to keep the would-be powerful down, through teasing, ridicule, disobedience, shunning, expulsion and, as a last resort, killing. Therapeutic Shamanism draws on his work for its picture of hunter-gatherer peoples as ‘fiercely egalitarian’.
Who was Christopher Boehm? #
A cultural anthropologist who also studied chimpanzees. After a doctorate at Harvard in 1972, he did fieldwork amongst the Navajo, amongst the tribes of Montenegro, herders and farmers whose blood feuds he wrote about in Blood Revenge (1984), and amongst wild chimpanzees. He went on to direct the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California, which gathers material on the social and moral life of hunter-gatherer societies. His thinking on equality was set out in a 1993 article in Current Anthropology and then in two books, Hierarchy in the Forest (1999) and Moral Origins (2012). He died in 2021, at the age of ninety.1
What did Boehm find? #
That equality was something early humans did, not something they simply had. In Hierarchy in the Forest he compared human hunter-gatherer societies with those of our closest relatives, bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas. All of those ape societies are far more hierarchical than hunter-gatherer bands were. That might mean humans are just more egalitarian by nature, but Boehm found little evidence for it. Many humans want power, and most dislike being dominated.2
In any ape society, humans included, some individuals want power over others, and when they reach for it a power struggle follows. There are two possible outcomes. One is what Boehm calls stable dominance, a lasting hierarchy in which only the name at the top changes. That is how chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla societies are organised, and how Taker society is organised today. The other, the one human hunter-gatherers practised, is the reverse dominance hierarchy, in which the members of the group come together to oppose any attempt by one person to impose themselves on the rest.2 In Boehm’s own words, egalitarian society is “a bizarre type of political hierarchy: the weak combine forces to actively dominate the strong.”3 See What is a reverse dominance hierarchy?
How did hunter-gatherers keep would-be leaders in check? #
With a ladder of sanctions, each step a little stronger. Usually the group began by teasing anyone who tried to dominate or grew too full of themselves. If that did not work, ridicule and shaming followed, then disobedience, with people simply refusing to cooperate, and finally ostracism or casting the person out of the group altogether.4 Boehm’s best-known example is the !Kung of the Kalahari, nomadic hunter-gatherers when they were studied, who made a point of insulting the meat a successful hunter brought home, calling it worthless, so that his heart would stay cool and he would not start thinking of himself as a big man.5
Leadership did not disappear; it changed shape. Amongst egalitarian foragers, leaders “are not allowed to bully, and they can lead only very subtly, through influence”.5 This fits the wider picture of hunter-gatherer life. For the vast majority of human history people got on fine without having leaders, and were better for it.6 See What did Richard Lee learn from the !Kung about sharing? and How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
Did they really kill people who tried to dominate? #
Sometimes, as a last resort. In Moral Origins Boehm surveyed fifty foraging societies of the kind he thought closest to the conditions of the late Pleistocene, and found capital punishment reported in about half of them, most often against someone who kept on intimidating or trying to dominate the group. As he put it, “The choice is between suffering a determined tyrant or taking him out.”7
He also suggested a further leveller, projectile weapons. Humans are physically puny beside most of the animals they hunted and beside their ape cousins, and weapons that work at a distance let them bring down animals far stronger than themselves. They also meant that a group could bring down a human bully stronger than any one of them, and knowing that might alone have kept people in check. How true this is, nobody can know for sure, but it is a reminder not to sanitise hunter-gatherer life. Although they were not warlike, hunter-gatherers were not pacifists either; they were hunters, and an attempt to dominate the tribe was itself an attack on the harmony and cooperation everyone’s lives depended on. So, once every other option was exhausted, someone who persisted in trying to dominate might be killed to protect the tribe.8
Nobody is suggesting that today. We now have sanctions they did not, such as prison, fines and restraining orders. The point is not the choice of sanction but how seriously our ancestors took dominance. They understood that tolerating it would be a disaster, and history has shown how right they were. Taker culture is built on dominance, and it has given us endless wars, the subjugation of women, slavery, gross inequality, the exploitation of animals and the land, and the Anthropocene extinction.8 See What is the Fall?
Is the urge to dominate part of human nature? #
On Boehm’s account, yes, and that is what makes the achievement so striking. In his account humans, like the other great apes, readily learn both domination and submission, so that egalitarian society was not a natural resting state but, in his phrase, “a cultural invention”, kept going by people who wanted to dominate each other quite as much as anyone does.9 Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that hunter-gatherers were people like us, and that there were bound to be tensions and conflicts within and between tribes.10 What made them fiercely egalitarian was that they did not tolerate dominance, and fiercely protected their equality. See Are humans a self-domesticated species?, where Richard Wrangham builds on Boehm’s work.
Boehm’s work also points at something uncomfortable for anyone who practises shamanism. Shamans were amongst the people a band sometimes had to keep in check; the Netsilik Inuit, seal-hunting hunter-gatherers of the Canadian Arctic, are reported to have executed a shaman who began to dominate them.11 Therapeutic Shamanism puts the same point from the inside. However good the intentions, practising shamanism, or most things, from a position of power-over is a Taker way of being, and healthy power is power-from-withinPower-from-within. Starhawk’s term for the healthy mode of power, as against power-over. Egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands held power this way; practising shamanism from power-over is ‘just more Fall’. More about this.12
Is Boehm’s picture disputed? #
Yes, in part. The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything (2021), call Boehm’s case that foragers consciously chose equality a brilliant and important argument, but say he seems “strangely reluctant to consider its full implications”. If humans are self-conscious political actors, they argue, they should have tried many different social arrangements over our long history, not lived one way for some two hundred thousand years until farming.13 Others question how far recent foragers can stand in for Pleistocene ones, and Boehm himself called his survey of sanctions qualitative, not statistical.
On the other side, the anthropologist Chris Knight, reviewing The Dawn of Everything, says that Graeber and Wengrow misread Boehm (“this isn’t what Boehm wrote”), and that Boehm pictured early humans developing a variety of political systems whilst gradually converging on one successful model, with egalitarian traditions spreading from band to band, not a long period in which nothing happened.14 And The Dawn of Everything itself, read closely, can be read as strengthening the egalitarian case, since it records hunter-gatherers sometimes building hierarchies and then dismantling them again. See Who was David Graeber, and what does The Dawn of Everything say about the Fall?
