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299 Our breathtaking ability to cooperate is one of the main reasons we have managed to survive in every ecosystem on Earth, from scorched sun-baked deserts to the frozen wastes of Antarctica to the dark, crushing ocean depths. (Nowak 2011: xiv) Potential for cooperation is one of our most distinguishing features as a species . And yet, as the chapters in this collection illustrate, the nature of human cooperation is both variable and contingent across space and time. In concluding this volume, my comments are not intended to arbitrate between the diverse perspectives on cooperation offered here, nor do they summarize synthetically the specific analyses and arguments that have been presented. My aim instead is to place these studies of cooperation in a broader theoretical context, specifically within anthropological archaeology, by stressing how the approaches offered here, though internally diverse, collectively differ from the perspectives and tenets generally advanced by the key conceptual frameworks that have dominated our discipline since its inception. In a sense, I place our discussions of cooperation in a broader historical and paradigmatic context. Since the nature, scales, and degrees of cooperation underpin the variability and full extent of human social arrangements, an equally significant goal is to position our understanding of the diversity of human social formations and how they 13 The Dynamics of Cooperation in Context Concluding Thoughts Gary M. FeinMan 300 Gary M. FeinMan shift over time on firm theoretical ground, intellectual turf that facilitates and enhances our communication with scholars in the wide range of disciplines that share these thematic foci (e.g., Little 2000; Steckel 2007). The manifestation of human cooperation is not unique to any set of societies, cultures, or eras. Yet the degrees and nature of cooperation in different settings provide insight into why human societies differ and change. Consequently, unraveling the bases of cooperation , the different forms that it takes, and the ways that cooperative socioeconomic arrangements are constructed and deconstructed yields channels for systematically and comparatively studying the great variation in human social formations that has occurred across the human career. It forges theoretical paths away from both the pigeon-holing and idiosyncratic approaches that characterize a grand part of the academic enterprise today, as well as the universal or formalist generalizations that often neglect the significant contingencies of historical process. Describing the workings of high finance in New York in the 1980s, Michael Lewis, in Liar’s Poker (1989: 281), states: “If there is one thing I learned on Wall Street, it’s that when an investment banker starts talking about principles, he is usually also defending his interests and that he rarely stakes out the moral high ground unless he believes there is gold under his campsite” [emphasis added]. More than four centuries earlier, Alonso de Zorita (1994: 93) described the investiture of a new ruler of the Aztec empire. The high priest morally cautioned the incoming lord: “Consider the honor your vassals have done you. Now that you are confirmed as ruler you must take great care of them and regard them as your sons; you must see to it that they be not offended and that the greater do not mistreat the lesser . . . You must be very diligent in affairs of war.” When considering the breadth and scope of human institutions, past or present , we should not generalize too facilely or directly from any single account, be that the specific intrigues of Salomon Brothers or a bureaucrat’s decadesremoved recounting of the incarnation of the Aztec emperor. Yet Lewis’s observation and Zorita’s writings do capture a fundamental dialectical tension between self-serving and group-/institutional-re-enforcing motivations that characterize many, if not most, human social formations. Whether analyzing the inner workings of a large investment bank or human societal groupings (as discussed in all of the chapters in this volume), individuals, including those in leadership positions , navigate between the urges and desires that guide their behaviors and the aims and challenges that affect the persistence of the groups, networks, and institutions to which they belong. This dialectic or tension lies at the essence of human cooperation and also helps account for the diversity of social arrangements that characterize the human career. In a sense, the recurrent dichotomy between “voluntaristic” and “coercive” group organizational principles that Roscoe (chapter 3) discusses has turned out to be somewhat of a false one. Most human groupings, large and small, involve both certain imbalances in power as well as sharing and reciprocity , both self-interested...

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