Flannery and Marcus go for the Big Picture

I’ve just finished reading the new book by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (2012, Harvard University Press, hardcover). The book covers an immense amount of archaeological and ethnographic territory in tracing human social evolution from the Paleolithic to the early empires, emphasizing the nature of inequality in different kinds of societies. This is truly “big history.” The topic is timely and big, the time depth is enormous, the cases reviewed are numerous, and even the endnotes are big (47 pages, out of a total of 631). I learned quite a bit, and I recommend the book to anyone who reads this blog (well, perhaps not the postmodernists, who just aren’t going to like the book, but they probably don’t like the blog, either).

With an epigraph of the famous quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“Man is born free, and yet we see him everywhere in chains”), who could dislike this book? Well, Randall McGuire for one. His book review, in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (23-1, 146-147), praises the eudition and diversity of the case studies, but he really doesn’t like this book at all. It “suffers from the same flaws as all universalizing, unilinear theories of cultural evolution” (p.147). The authors, in McGuire’s view, don’t recognize or acknowledge the superior work of Eric Wolf or Johannes Fabian, who identified those flaws (Hmmm, I didn’t think Fabian wrote about cultural evolution). Flannery and Marcus are said to “spatialize time,” depicting ethnographic societies as “frozen in time” (in fact these societies are so cold and frozen that they bounce around like billiard balls, a metaphor from Eric Wolf repeated by McGuire without attribution).

I was a bit puzzled with McGuire’s review. First of all, the book didn’t seem at all universalizing or unilinear to me. Second, I thought I had heard those criticisms before. After some checking, I found the critique of The Evolution of Human Societies, by Alan Johnson and Timothy Earle (1987, Stanford Univ. Pr), contained in McGuire’s book, A Marxist Archaeology (1992, Academic Press, pp.151-152). Here’s what he didn’t like about Johnson and Earle in 1992: Their model is universal and unilinear, and it conflates time and space (i.e., it spatializes time). So now, twenty years later, McGuire has dusted off his old criticisms of cultural evolution to throw at Flannery and Marcus.

McGuire would probably respond that the criticisms are the same because the problems with cultural evolution are the same. But to me, these critiques (in 1992 and 2012) apply more appropriately to work by Elman Service and others in the 1960s and 1970s and not to either Flannery and Marcus, or Johnson and Earle. I don’t want to get into a big debate about cultural evolution here, but the following passages from The Creation of Inequality are not consistent with McGuire’s charge of universal/unilinear ideas:

·         “One of the interesting facts of hereditary rank was that it could be created even by hunters and gatherers such as the Nootka. Neither slavery nor aristocracy, in other words, had to wait until agriculture had arisen.” (p.554)

·         “For all these reasons we should probably view clans or descent groups as one of several alternative social networking strategies rather than as an inevitable second stage of foraging society.” (p.550)

In fact, much of the book is devoted to exploring alternative arrangements of social organization, inequality, economic processes, and political dynamics. To me, Flannery and Marcus did an excellent job of producing a useful contemporary approach to cultural evolution that avoidsthe kinds of criticisms that were popular in the 1980s and 1990s. There are no layer-cake models here, there are no simple typological sequences (e.g., bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states; or egalitarian, ranked, stratified), and the authors do not assert (or assume) that social variation is somehow explained by assigning a group to an evolutionary category. I just re-read McGuire’s review, and realized that he is really obsessed with the issue of “unilinear” evolutionary models; the term “unilinear” is used three times in the review, and the term “unilineal” appears six times. I can’t tell whether is this is a subtle deliberate distinction, or just an error of writing and editing.

I am not claiming that the The Creation of Inequality is without flaws. I was disappointed by the authors’ refusal to weigh in on a number of current debates, and it seemed to me that their treatment of inequality was somewhat reduced in the final chapters (on states and empires) compared to earlier chapters. Inequality seemed to be swamped by issues of social and political dynamics in the chapters on states. But then the lack of systematic attention to inequality is one of the major failings of the archaeological study of complex societies, so Flannery and Marcus had less research to draw on. I also have a few minor quibbles on topics I specialize in, but these do not detract from the value of this important book.

If you are a postmodernist, you almost certainly won’t like any account of cultural evolution, and you just aren’t going to like this book. But for those of you with a more empirical and scientific bent: Read this book. You will learn a lot. And then let the passages where you disagree with the authors serve as starting points for more research and writing. Inequality is a tremendously important topic with a rather poor record of archaeological scholarship (due, in large part, to the influence of postmodernism, but don't get me started.....). Let's hope this book signals a new commitment to archaeological research on inequality. 

*** ADDED 20 MARCH 2013: Here is a link to Peter Turchin's review of the book. This is a preprint; the review just came out in the Times Literary Supplement. (Click here for the TLS version).  He evidently tried to post a comment, but Blogger was being cranky and rejected his comment.