Excerpt

Social formations with remarkable similarities in social, political, and economic structures have emerged repeatedly throughout history and in all areas of the globe. These recurrent social formations are thought to be the product of “general” evolutionary processes (sensu Sahlins 1960) that act upon human societies regardless of time or place, and have been the focus of anthropological research since the very beginning of the field (e.g., Tylor 1871:1–14). An unfortunate consequence of early anthropologists’ recognition of recurrent social forms was the linking of this observance with prevailing Eurocentric views of progress. Thus recurrent social formations were presented in the framework of a series of progressive “stages” through which all human societies progressed (or failed to progress) from, for example, “savagery” to “barbarism” to “civilization” (Morgan 1877).

The theory of recurrent social formations being the product of a steplike series of stages moving human societies toward an essentially European form was rejected by the turn of the twentieth century. Nothing replaced it until the 1960s, when anthropologists could no longer avoid the fact that an informal taxonomy of social types had emerged over the previous half-century which bore an uncanny resemblance to the stages proposed by earlier anthropologists (Sahlins 1960:40–44; Steward 1955:178–185). Concern shifted to creating a formal taxonomy of cultural types (Steward 1955:22– 26; 87–92). This taxonomy took two forms. One focused on political economy: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states (Service 1962); the other focused on social stratification: egalitarian, ranked, and stratified (Fried 1967). These two taxonomies are effectively identical if one removes tribes as a type (i.e., bands are egalitarian, chiefdoms are ranked, and states are stratified).

Problems with these taxonomies have been recognized from the time they were put forward (e.g., Service 1962:182), yet they have become embedded in anthropological thinking to the extent that scholars cannot seem to work without them (Bailey 1994:1). By way of example I present a quote, though in doing so I do not intend to demean the author’s work; the quote simply demonstrates how ingrained these cultural taxonomies have become:

It is certainly true that terms such as chiefdom can cause misunderstandings because they are associated with baggage acquired as their generally accepted use has changed over time. Despite the potential for confusion, the society centered on Cahokia is referred to here as a chiefdom, more precisely a complex chiefdom. (Milner 1990:3)

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