A reverse dominance hierarchy is the anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s name for the way hunter-gatherer bands turned the usual primate pecking order upside down. Instead of the strongest individual ruling the group, the group as a whole kept down anyone who tried to rule, through a rising ladder of sanctions from teasing and ridicule to refusing to cooperate, casting out and, as a last resort, killing. It is a large part of how Therapeutic Shamanism understands hunter-gatherers to have stayed fiercely egalitarian for most of human history.
What does the term mean? #
A hierarchy turned upside down. In an ordinary dominance hierarchy a few individuals at the top dominate everyone below them. In a reverse dominance hierarchy the many dominate the few: the rank and file act together against anyone who reaches for power, so that, in Boehm’s words, the result is a society “with the subordinates firmly in charge.”1
Boehm first set the idea out in an article in Current Anthropology in 1993, and developed it in his book Hierarchy in the Forest (1999). He chose a provocative name on purpose. Some anthropologists held that humans have no inborn tendency to dominate one another. Boehm disagreed. Calling egalitarian bands reverse dominance hierarchies was his way of saying that the urge to dominate is still there in them, and that equality is what people do about it.2 See What did Christopher Boehm find about how early humans kept power in check?
How is it different from an ordinary pecking order? #
In what happens after a power struggle. Every ape society, the human one included, has individuals who want power over others, and when one of them reaches for it there is a struggle. One possible outcome is stable dominance: a lasting hierarchy in which the faces at the top change from time to time but the hierarchy itself stays. That is how chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla societies are organised, and how Taker culture is organised today. The other possible outcome, the one our hunter-gatherer ancestors practised, is the reverse dominance hierarchy, in which the members of the group come together to oppose anyone who tries to impose themselves on the rest.3
So the difference is not that hunter-gatherers lacked ambition, or that nobody among them ever wanted to be in charge. It is that the group refused to let it happen. Belonging to a healthy tribe meant living from equality and equanimity, and that was both one of its costs and one of its benefits.3
How did it work in practice? #
Through levelling, step by step, with leadership kept to influence. Anyone who started to get too big for their boots was teased; if that did not work, ridicule and shaming followed, then disobedience, with people simply refusing to cooperate, and finally casting out, which in hunter-gatherer times was sooner or later, in effect, a death sentence.45 Behind the whole ladder lay the knowledge that someone who persisted, once every other option was exhausted, could be killed to protect the tribe. Dominance was treated as an attack, because the harmony and cooperation that everyone’s lives depended on was what it threatened.5 The ladder itself is set out in How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal?
Leadership did not vanish. People with skill or good judgement led for a while, on a particular task, and then the lead passed to someone else. Lucas Bridges, a missionary’s son who grew up amongst the Ona of Tierra del Fuego, nomadic foragers, told a visiting scientist that they had no chiefs, and when the scientist did not believe him he called over an Ona man, Kankoat, to answer. Kankoat, too polite to contradict his guest, said: “Yes, señor, we, the Ona, have many chiefs. The men are all captains and all the women are sailors.”6
Why did hunter-gatherers need it? #
Because their lives depended on cooperation. A person might survive alone for a while by hunting and gathering, but the way of life as a whole depends on working together. The bands that did well were high-functioning ones, where people communicated, cooperated and looked out for each other; a band riven by strife was a band at risk. Psychopathic behaviour, with its aggression and lack of empathy, breeds division, fear and paranoia in a group, and so signs of it were nipped in the bud.7
Holding that wisdom was not left to chance. It was the role of the EldersElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this, alongside the shaman, to keep the wisdom of not tolerating dominance alive and to guide the tribe by it.8 See How does animism understand power and hierarchy? and What does fiercely egalitarian mean?
Why did it stop working? #
Because the conditions that kept it working went away. Levelling works best amongst people who move about and can walk away from a bully. Where wild food was so plentiful that people could settle, as with the complex hunter-gatherers of the Pacific North-West coast of America, hierarchy, chiefs, inequality and slavery appeared even without farming.9
For hundreds of thousands of years, as far as anyone can tell, psychopathic behaviour was generally not allowed to develop. Then, about six thousand years ago, with the rise of the first city-states, people for the first time not only handed power to the psychopaths but gave them free rein, and the warlords, kings and emperors followed.10 Stable dominance became the norm, and has been ever since. See What is the Fall? and Why did some peoples avoid the state?
Is “reverse dominance hierarchy” the right name? #
Not everyone thinks so. The anthropologist Paul Roscoe, writing about forager communities in New Guinea, accepts that egalitarian hunter-foragers there use shame, ostracism and, in the end, killing against anyone who oversteps the mark, but says that “To call these systems reverse dominance hierarchies (Boehm 1993) is to misunderstand what is going on.” In his reading the people levelling are not trying to dominate anyone; they are resisting behaviour that has become excessively dominant. He borrows David Erdal and the psychologist Andrew Whiten’s description of it as “counterdominant” behaviour, not a hierarchy turned over.11 He also sets those egalitarian hunter-foragers against fisher-foragers and trader-foragers in the same region who are much less equal, which makes the point that a foraging way of life alone does not guarantee equality.
On the other side, Boehm himself drew on Erdal and Whiten’s work, and his reason for the name was that he wanted to keep the urge to dominate in view: in egalitarian bands the rank and file have to act deliberately and together, as dominators would, to stop anyone rising above them.12 For Boehm, equality of this kind is a moral achievement, not a natural resting state: humans can never live in relaxed equality the way some monkeys do, and “It is our capacity for morality … that enables us to create egalitarianism out of what would otherwise be despotism.”12 The archaeologist Luc Moreau, introducing the same volume as Roscoe’s chapter, agrees that equality is not simply what is left when nobody ranks anyone, but “an active strategy which entails costs”.13 The wider debate, including Graeber and Wengrow’s reading of Boehm and Chris Knight’s reply, is in the Boehm answer above.
