Cooperation and Collective Action: Archaeological Perspectives

1: Cultural and Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation in Archaeological Perspective

3 Humans are excellent but strategically contingent cooperators. How we cooperate and the boundaries of our cooperative relations are two of the most important organizing principles for social groups. Not surprisingly, the cultural and evolutionary dynamics of cooperation represent a fertile topic of research in social and behavioral sciences such as anthropology, economics, political science , psychology, and sociology (Axelrod 1997; Bowles and Gintis 2011; Boyd and Richerson 1992, 2009; Dovido et al. 2006; Fehr and Schmidt 1999; Gintis et al. 2005; Gurven 2006; Hammerstein 2003; Henrich and Henrich 2007; Marshall 2010; Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker 2003; Patton 2009; Willer 2009). From a contemporary biological perspective, much of human uniqueness is said to rest in our abilities to cooperate at larger scales and in qualitatively different ways than all other animals, including nonhuman primates (Bingham 2000; Hill, Barton, and Hurtado 2009; Mitani 2009; Nowak 2006a, 2011; Sussman and Cloninger 2011; Tomasello 2009; Wilson, Timmel, and Miller 2004; cf. Kappeler and van Schaik 2006). Yet we can also be exceedingly competitive. These two sides of humanity are entwined, and may tragically converge in destructive forms of intergroup competition such as wars, which require high levels of intragroup cooperation and coordination. Disentangling the motivations and institutions that foster group cooperation among competitive individuals remains one of the few great conundrums within evolutionary theory. How, researchers ask, does cooperation evolve and thrive among individuals who strategically pursue 1 Cultural and Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation in Archaeological Perspective DaviD M. Carballo 4 DaviD M. Carballo self- or kin-interests despite all of the potential obstacles those interests present to group-oriented behaviors? What are the costs and benefits to individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum in participating in, or defecting from, cooperative endeavors? What suite of mechanisms for encouraging and maintaining cooperation exists within any particular society, and how does its composition evolve over time as a result of cumulative goal seeking by individuals and larger-scale environmental processes? Why does cooperation sometimes break down completely? Archaeologists have been investigating the developmental trajectories of cooperation and competition in past societies for decades, but have tended to emphasize the latter in seeking to explain those processes underlying cultural evolution. As a result, bottom-up possibilities for group cooperation (or “selforganization ”) have been undertheorized in favor of political models stressing top-down leadership, often invoking compliance through coercion. In the meantime , evidence from a range of disciplines has demonstrated humans effectively sustain cooperative undertakings through a number of social norms and institutions that are applicable to archaeology on multiple analytical scales, including reciprocal exchanges, monitoring the reputation of others, and the retribution or rewarding of transgression or compliance. This important axis of variability in the dynamics of past human societies has received scant attention in archaeological theory, with notable exceptions discussed later in this chapter. A focus on the interplay between cooperation and competition in past societies necessitates multiscalar approaches that consider the complete spectrum of human behavior, from the broad evolutionary processes instigated by aggregate individual actions, to the motivations for those actions at the level of households or individuals. Such approaches combine many of the strengths of existing theoretical paradigms in archaeology while offering productive means of reconciling entrenched divides between considerations of process and agency (compare Blanton and Fargher 2008; Boyd and Richerson 2008; Cowgill 2000; Feinman, Lightfoot, and Upham 2000; Flannery 1999; Pauketat 2001; Richerson and Boyd 1999; Shennan 2002; Spencer 1993). Contemporary models of cooperation are evolutionary, overlapping comfortably with traditional archaeological interests in elucidating the processes of diachronic social change. But they are also multiactor , envisioning all individuals as pursuing goals that can be simultaneously individualistic/competitive and collective/cooperative in a manner consistent with approaches that emphasize human agency and strategic action. In turn, the diachronic breadth and material focus of archaeology provide a much-needed complement to existing research on cooperation and collective action, which thus far has relied largely on game-theoretic modeling, surveys of college students from affluent countries, brief ethnographic experiments, and limited historic cases. Archaeological perspectives draw on a comparative record of long cultural evolutionary sequences (Marcus 2008), containing the physical correlates of past cooperation and competition, including the particular resources that were utilized through collective action and the symbols people manipulated to define themselves as cooperative or antagonistic. Cultural anD Evolutionary DynaMiCs of CoopEration 5 The contributions to this volume are not unified by a single paradigmatic approach to cooperation and collective action...