A contemporary model of social evolution: an ecological conception of change in the context of the political economy. Johnson and Earle (2000)

Human social arrangements run the gamut from those groups who live largely without the domestication of plants and animals, like the !Kung of the Kalihari Desert, to the global societies of today, heirs, for better or worse, to the consequences of the agricultural, urban and industrial revolutions.  In a previous post I outline an approach developed by Julian Steward to explaining factors driving social evolution and producing this variety of social arrangements.  Julian Steward’s approach to social evolution had the virtue, according to Johnson and Earle, of providing a bridge between social evolutionism and economic anthropology.[i]  The intention of Johnson and Earle's approach is to reconcile “the structural Marxist emphasis of power and the control of resources into a larger, more ecological conception of the political economy as a set of solutions to problems arising in the subsistence economy.”[ii]  Of course contradictions emerge for people between satisfying ecological needs and contribution to political economies.  From an evolutionary perspective social change occurs, say Johnson and Earle, if the benefits to individuals or families participating in new arrangements exceed the cost of participating (assuming, one must suppose, the absence of extreme forms of coercion).  As population density increases, cooperation and group action is inevitability required to solve problems associated with that increase.  Those groups that form “outliers” from the centre of power are those that are outside the “benefit structure” of the political economy.