Abstract
Inequality is a somewhat slippery concept. As Price and Hayden stress in their contributions to this volume, any society is liable to contain potential aggrandizers; and the constraints that suppress these ambitious individuals altogether are imposed only by relatively few societies, all of them (in the ethnographic record, at least) operating in extremely harsh environments, where risk pooling is imperative, and individual accumulation is counterproductive. As a result, one can find some foreshadowing of the characteristics of fully developed “complexity” in almost any simple society. Within the household, as Blanton indicates in his contribution, inequality is pervasive, and households are the charters for society. “Marginalization,” the dimension of inequality emphasized in Arnold’s contribution, likewise occurs at all social scales: within households as well as between them, within settlements and between them, within polities and between them, and so on. The whole thrust of Boasian relativism was to stress these continuities in the social evolutionary scale: the similarities to be found in societies of vastly different scales suggested their essential parity as historical outcomes.
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Gilman, A. (1995). Prehistoric European Chiefdoms. In: Price, T.D., Feinman, G.M. (eds) Foundations of Social Inequality. Fundamental Issues in Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1289-3_9
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