7 Social Evolution: Alternatives and Variations (Introduction)*

* The first version of the present article was published in English in Social Evolution & History, June 2002, Vol. 1, № 1, pp. 54–79 under the title ‘Alternative Pathways of Social Evolution’. In Russian the article was published in 2006: Bondarenko D. M., Grinin L. E., Korotayev A. V. 2006. A'lternativy sotsial'noy evolutsii [Alternatives of Social Evolution]. In Grinin L. E., Bondarenko, D. M., Kradin, N. N., and Korotayev A. V. (eds.), Rannee gosudarstvo, ego al'ternativy i analogi [The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogues] (pp. 15–36). Volgograd: Uchitel'.
The present article is a significantly updated and expanded version of that publication.

1 See e.g., Hallpike 1986; Pomper and Shaw 2002; Mesoudi et al. 2006; Aunger 2006; Barkow 2006; Blackmore 2006; Mulder et al. 2006; Borsboom 2006; Bridgeman 2006; Cronk 2006; Dennett and McKay 2006; Fuentes 2006; Kelly et al. 2006; Kincaid 2006; Knudsen and Hodgson 2006; Lyman 2006; Mende and Wermke 2006; O'Brien 2006; Pagel 2006; Read 2006; Reader 2006; Sopher 2006; Tehrani 2006; Wimsatt 2006; on such comparisons, as well as our own ideas about similarities and differences between social and biological evolution, in more details see Grinin and Korotayev 2007а, 2009b; Grinin, Markov, and Korotayev 2008: 145–152; 2009. Note, however, that in fact frequently this was essentially Spencerian vision which was implied in such cases; that is the evolution was perceived as ‘a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity’ (Spencer 1972 [1862]: 71).

2 This can also be called the rule of suddicient variability (see Grinin, Markov, and Korotayev 2008: 68–71).

3 Throughout the present article the state is understood as ‘...a sufficiently stable political unit characterized by the organization of power and administration which is separated from the population, and claims a supreme right to govern certain territory and population, i.e. to demand from it certain actions irrespective of its agreement or disagreement to do this, and possessing resources and forces to achieve these claims’ (Grinin 1997: 20; see also Grinin 2000c: 190).

4 See also its fundamental criticism by Mann (1986), the most radically negative attitude to this scheme expressed in categories of social evolu­tion ‘trajectories alternativity’ by Yoffee (1993), several collective works of recent years (Patterson and Gailey 1987; Ehrenreich et al. 1995; Kradin and Lynsha 1995; Kradin et al. 2000; Bondarenko and Korotayev 2000a), proceedings of recent international conferences (Butovskaya et al. 1998; Bondareko and Sledzevski 2000).

5 James Woodburn and Olga Artemova deal almost exclusively with examples of ‘non-egalitarian’ Australian Aborigenes and ‘egalitarian’ peoples of Africa (the Hadza, San, Pygmies), analogous to them by the socio-cultural complexity level. However, the evidence from other continents' societies confirm that organization of cultures of the same complexity level along either heterarchic or homoarchic lines is characteristic of the humankind from the typologically earliest ones (Bondarenko 2006). The examples of the peoples leaving in the same cultural area and basing their subsistence on similar means, like fishers of the Far East – the ‘egalitarian’ Itelmens and ‘non-egalitarian’ Nanais, are especially instructive (Krasheninnikov 1949; Lopatin 1922; see also Sem 1959; Smolyak 1970; Кrushanov 1990; Shnirel'man 1993; 1994; Orlova 1999; Bulgakova 2001, 2002; Bereznitsky 2003; Volodin 2003).

6 It should be noted that contrary to the first and third authors of the present article, its second author regards the majority of Greek poleis and the Roman polity as early state of a specific type (see Bondarenko 1998b, 2000b, 2004b, 2006; Korotayev 1995b, 1995e, 1995f vs. Grinin 2004a, 2004b, 2006b, 2007g); however, we clearly deal with an alternative of social evolution in this case too: even if these polities are considered as early states, they definitely were early states of
a very specific type (see also, however, note 14). Bouzek (1990: 172) is right both in his irony about endless academic debates and in representation of the Greeks' own distinction between their polis and other peoples' states: ‘The Greeks had fewer problems than we have with the definition of the state. They saw kingdoms and kings in all parts of the world where they met one ruler, and not the council of a polis or ethnos’.

7 For our understanding of the World-System and the world-system approach see, e.g., Bondarenko 2009; Grinin and Korotayev 2009b.

8 As well as ‘world-ideologies’, ‘world-politics’ (see Grinin and Korotayev 2009b: 19) and similar formations that we have designated as ‘spatial-and-temporal societies groupings’ (Grinin 1997–2001, 1998; Grinin and Korotayev 2009b: 190).

9 It was furthermore so, as not only intercultural communication but also primitive economic specialization and exchange could be observed within it (see, e.g., Butinov 1960: 113, 119; Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999: 28–31; see also Christian 2004: 197).

10 This appears to be especially relevant for those societies where extended families are dominated not by groups of brothers, but by individual ‘fathers’ (see, e.g., Bromley 1981: 202–210).

11 Note that among not only humans but other primates too the role of kin relations is greater in homoarchically organized associations (Thierry 1990; Butovskaya and Feinberg 1993: 25–90; Butovskaya 1993, 2000; Butovskaya, Korotayev, and Kazankov 2000).

12 Such capacious notions as complex society, sociocultural complexity and so forth, however, do not solve the problem completely. The lack of such division is rather strange, as far as the notion of political system has firmly established itself in the English-language literature at least after publication of African Political Systems in 1940 (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1987 [1940]).
The very conception of political system and classification of political system types are well-elaborated (for details see Skalnik 1991). Probably it is explainable by the fact that, as Skalnik and others (see Ibid.) point out, basically the whole variety of political systems was rigidly, mechanically and non-dialectically divided into two major ideal types: stateless (acephalous) and state, what has resulted in complete ignorance of the possibility of distinguishing complex systems evolution without state formation.

13 However, such transformations could only happen when certain conditions were present.
For example, this could happen as a result of the influence of neighboring state systems.

14 Note, however, that even for those who recognize the polis socio-political model as a form of
the early state the attribution as states of these or those historical incarnations of the polis model remains discussable (see, e.g., Berent 2000c; Grinin 2007f: 67–118; Korotayev, Kradin, and Lynsha 2000; see also the discussion in Social Evolution & History journal in 2004–2006, vide stricto: van der Vliet 1987, 2005; Grinin 2004a, Berent 2006). See also note 6.

15 Probably this is just what happened to the Zulu who in a short time created (first under Dingiswayo and than under his successor Shaka) in the south of Africa in the early 19^th century
a very large power out of separate small chiefdoms. Note, by the way, that high degree of supracommunity institutions hierarchization and significant degree of the institutionalized hierarchy's stability were characteristic of this mighty polity (see, e.g., Gluckman 1987 [1940]; Ritter 1955).

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