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Cooperation and Collective Action in the Cultural Evolution of Complex Societies

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Abstract

Investigations of the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and collective action provide productive venues for theorizing social complexity, yet this multidisciplinary scholarship contains analytical and epistemological tensions that require reconciliation. We propose a course for integration of this diverse literature to investigate the emergence and developmental trajectories of complex societies. Greater attention to collective action problems, cultural mechanisms that promote cooperation, differentiation of human interests, and multiscalar research designs provide firmer conceptual underpinnings for a theoretically grounded cultural evolutionary framework. The case of agricultural intensification in pre-Hispanic highland Mexico is used to illustrate major points of the paper.

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Notes

  1. It is perhaps because they focus on small-groups that evolutionary approaches have overlooked the scalar problem in cooperation. The evidence does seem to indicate that in very small-scale society, a reproductive unit (family) quite often can serve as subsistence optimization unit and even a security group (Roscoe 2009). As social complexity increases, however, and especially as defensive concerns fuel “balance-of-power” races, collectivities dedicated to different types of cooperation cease to be isomorphic, with those dedicated to defense, in particular, transcending greatly the scale of groups dedicated to reproduction, subsistence optimization, etc.

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Acknowledgments

Many of the ideas discussed in this paper received critical feedback from the participants in two conference sessions: the first at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Atlanta, 2009, and the second at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, D.C., 2011. We thank all session participants and discussants from those conferences for lively exchanges and retain responsibility for all interpretive shortcomings. Thanks go also to Robert Hunt, Michael Smith, and the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions on earlier versions strengthened the paper; any lapses in logic or the details of the cases we discuss are of course solely ours.

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  1. Department of Archaeology, Boston University, 675 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    David M. Carballo

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA

    Paul Roscoe

  3. Department of Anthropology, The Field Museum, Chicago, IL, USA

    Gary M. Feinman

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  1. David M. Carballo
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Correspondence to David M. Carballo.

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Carballo, D.M., Roscoe, P. & Feinman, G.M. Cooperation and Collective Action in the Cultural Evolution of Complex Societies. J Archaeol Method Theory 21, 98–133 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9147-2

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