The multiple dimensions of male social status in an Amazonian society

Abstract

While social-status hierarchies are common to all human societies, status acquisition is relatively understudied in small-scale societies lacking significant material wealth or intergenerational inheritance. Among the Tsimane of Bolivia, a small-scale Amazonian society, we employ a photo-ranking methodology to determine the important predictors of four measures of male social status: success in dyadic physical confrontation, getting one's way in a group, community-wide influence, and respect. The predictors evaluated include age, physical size, skill in food production, level of acculturation, prosocial personality, and social support. We find that physical size best predicts rankings of dyadic fighting ability while social support best predicts getting one's way in a group, community-wide influence, and respect. Level of acculturation, furthermore, is an independent predictor of influence but not respect, and skill in food production is an independent predictor of respect but not influence. The lack of a linear relationship between age and the polyadic social-status measures is evaluated in light of the increasing exposure of the Tsimane to market economies and public education among recent age cohorts. To our knowledge, this study is the first multivariate analysis of social status that considers different determinants of status simultaneously.

Introduction

“Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.”

-Beowulf, a new verse translation by Seamus Heaney (2000, p. 5)

In all human societies, individuals differ in social status depending upon their age and personal ability (Sahlins, 1958, Service, 1971). In laboratory-based small group studies, status hierarchies emerge spontaneously (Bass, 1954, Campbell et al., 2002, Kalma, 1991). Even among “egalitarian” foragers, who are characterized by widespread resource sharing (Kaplan & Gurven, 2005, Winterhalder, 1986) and some degree of status leveling (Cashdan, 1980), certain individuals consume more resources, get the best pick of mates, and take a more central role in group decision making (Boehm, 1999, Trigger, 1985, Wiessner, 1996). Whether implicit or overt, classification by social status is a human universal. While women as well as men compete for status (Campbell, 2002, Hess & Hagen, 2006, Hrdy, 1999, Rucas et al., 2006), this article focuses exclusively on male-status hierarchies.

Social status can be defined as relative access to resources within a social group (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). A priority of resource access is granted to high-status individuals, we argue, due to a group-wide perception that these individuals have a greater relative ability to inflict costs (i.e., dominance) or confer benefits (i.e., prestige) on others. Group members acquiesce to higher-status individuals because they believe they will avoid harm or gain some benefit from their deference. Status hierarchies, therefore, are not necessarily pure zero-sum arrangements. In part, status hierarchies represent agreements, maintained by deference signals, to facilitate exchange or to avoid costs of repeated contest competition, as modeled by the war of attrition (Maynard Smith & Price, 1973).

Status hierarchies are not static, however. If an individual becomes less dependent upon the services of particular high-status group members, that individual is perhaps more likely to challenge power inequities between them (Emerson, 1962). Acquiescence to those of high status may also vary with subordinates' ability to migrate and their degree of relatedness with high-status individuals (Vehrencamp, 1983). Subordinates can also form coalitions against higher-status individuals. In many traditional human societies, exploitive leaders are often ridiculed, ostracized, or killed (Boehm, 1999).

Among nonhuman primates, male social status is in large part tantamount to the ability to inflict costs; physically dominant individuals usurp or maintain priority access to food and mates (Boesch et al., 2006, Cowlishaw & Dunbar, 1991, de Waal, 2000). While alliances can be important among nonhuman primates, they are largely to support the above uses of dominance (de Waal, 2000, Duffy et al., 2007, Nishida & Hosaka, 1996). Among humans, however, the cooperative sharing of food, information, labor, and other resources is extensive (Kaplan & Gurven, 2005). Priority access to resources is only sometimes obtained through dominance and is often mediated by voluntary transfers of inalienable commodities. Henrich and Gil-White (2001) contrast dominance with prestige, which they describe as the deference that accrues to individuals who possess or transmit publicly esteemed skills. Their discussion of prestige, however, is narrower than the potential range of non-agonistic social status. For example, a man may achieve high status in the market for mates by offering “good genes” or material goods in exchange for sexual access, or he may gain status in the market for influence by offering physical strength or coordinative leadership to potential allies.

Since humans have lived in hunter-gatherer societies for the majority of their existence, modern forager communities can help elucidate the selective forces responsible for human males' status-seeking behavior. Forager societies typically lack major wealth accumulation or formal political or legal institutions (Kelly, 1995). As a result, physical dominance may play a principal role in acquiring male status across social domains. Among foragers who practice some degree of horticulture and who engage in intergroup raiding, warriorship is a primary avenue to community-wide influence (Yanomami: Chagnon, 1988; Achuar: Patton, 2000; Waorani: Robarchek & Robarchek, 1998). On the other hand, status acquisition in forager societies has also been linked to attributes like hunting ability (Tsimane: Gurven & von Rueden, 2006; Ache: Kaplan & Hill, 1985; Hadza: Marlowe, 2000; Mbuti: Turnbull, 1965) and generosity (Achuar: Patton, 2005; Yuqui: Stearman, 1989). It is unclear whether male-status hierarchies in forager societies are truly multidimensional: do traits predictive of dyadic dispute outcomes, for example, contrast or even trade off with those traits predictive of polyadic influence? Understanding the pursuit of status in different social contexts is crucial precisely because the adaptiveness of this pursuit is often unclear and the rewards of pursuit may be delayed and vary with the form of status acquired.

This study explores male-status hierarchies among the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Bolivia. Since status is most palpable in the context of contest competition, we treat the following measures as manifestations of social status among Tsimane adult males: (a) success in dyadic physical confrontation, (b) getting one's way in the context of a conflict within a group, and (c) influence in the context of a community-wide dispute. We also investigate (d) respect because this term is cross-culturally associated with social status. These four measures of social status were chosen because they represent distinct assemblages of social costs and benefits within small-scale societies, assay relative resource access at different social scales, and lend themselves to empirical evaluation and cross-cultural comparison. None of these measures should be considered equivalent to dominance or prestige; in all likelihood, each of the status measures will reflect elements of both. Furthermore, our four measures are not meant to be exhaustive of the range of social status among the Tsimane.

While prior ethnographies have demonstrated a link between one particular trait and social status (e.g., Stearman, 1989), this study employs a multivariate approach to compare several traits as predictors of status in different social domains. If the predictors of one of our four status measures differ from those of the other status measures, we could conclude that status hierarchies among Tsimane are multidimensional. The predictors of male status we evaluate include age, physical size (e.g., flexed bicep circumference), skill in food production (e.g., hunting ability), level of acculturation (e.g., Spanish fluency), prosocial personality traits (e.g., generosity in meat sharing), and social support (e.g., number of allies). To quantify these variables as well as the social-status measures, a sample of Tsimane men photo-ranked their fellow villagers. We hypothesized that body size would best predict winning a dyadic physical fight while the other predictors of status, especially ratings of social support, would better predict the other social-status measures that involve n-person interactions.

The organization of this article is as follows: Section 2 discusses the socioecology of the Tsimane to further motivate our choice of the four status measures; Section 3 presents our hypotheses concerning the predictors of the four social-status measures; Section 4 describes our methods; Section 5 presents our results; Section 6 interprets the results and describes the status characteristics of two recent Tsimane leaders; and Section 7 concludes.