Reverse Dominance Hierarchy

What it is

Boehm introduced the term in "Egalitarian behavior and reverse dominance hierarchy" in Current Anthropology in 1993, and expanded it in Hierarchy in the Forest in 1999.

The levelling devices are the substance of it: ridicule, gossip, refusal to cooperate, ostracism, and in the last resort coalitional sanction. What makes the hierarchy reversed rather than absent is that the coalition is doing the dominating, and it is doing it deliberately and with a target.

Paul Bingham's coalition enforcement theory, published in the Quarterly Review of Biology in 1999, supplies the enabling condition that Boehm's account needs. Without weapons that work at a distance, a coalition cannot punish a physically dominant individual at survivable risk, so strength decides. With them it can, and physical strength stops being the single most important thing about a hominid.

In effect

The argument as it reaches popular readers usually overreaches at one specific point. Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson present fierce forager egalitarianism as settled in The Elephant in the Brain, at pages 47 to 51, and adopt Boehm's position wholesale without recording that it is contested. Their Box 3 at page 50 states that without distance weapons close-quarters violence caps useful attackers at about three, that a fourth gets in the way, and that a three-against-one fight still risks serious injury, while with spears a coalition of five or seven could surround a dominant individual at much lower risk. Those numbers carry an endnote and no supporting data, and they are conjecture wearing the clothes of quantification.

The authors do supply an honest hedge at page 46 that is worth carrying: the forager portrait is drawn from perhaps twenty groups known to anthropologists, contaminated by contact with modernity and pushed into marginal environments. They name the sampling problem, the contamination and the inferential gap, and then proceed. At page 51 they add that theories about distant ancestors are necessarily somewhat speculative.

The dispute on the other side is substantive. Manvir Singh and Luke Glowacki argued in Evolution and Human Behavior in 2022, in a paper going beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model, for much greater variability in late Pleistocene social organisation, including hierarchy. Several other planks of the surrounding forager portrait, including the rarity of all-out war, patrilocality as the default, and forager leisure, are separately contested in anthropology.

What it does not say

It does not say that foragers had no hierarchy. The claim is that the hierarchy ran the other way, which is a different and more specific proposition.

It does not establish what late Pleistocene societies were generally like. That extension is disputed, and the variability argument is a serious one.

It does not supply the coalition-size numbers as evidence. They are conjecture and are not cited here as data.

It does not rest on a representative sample. The ethnographic base is a small number of groups, contacted, and living in marginal environments, and the authors who use it say so.

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